Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love
Author: Andrew Shaffer
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062036610

Few people have failed at love as spectacularly as the great philosophers. Although we admire their wisdom, history is littered with the romantic failures of the most sensible men and women of every age, including: Friedrich Nietzsche: "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent." (Rejected by everyone he proposed to, even when he kept asking and asking.) Jean-Paul Sartre: "There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty." (Adopted his mistress as his daughter.) Louis Althusser: "The trouble is there are bodies and, worse still, sexual organs." (Accidentally strangled his wife to death.) And dozens of other great thinkers whose words we revere—but whose romantic decisions we should avoid at all costs. Includes an excerpt from Andrew Shaffer's new book Literary Rogues.

Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love
Author: Andrew Shaffer
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780061969812

Few people have failed at love as spectacularly as the great philosophers. Although we admire their wisdom, history is littered with the romantic failures of the most sensible men and women of every age, including: Friedrich Nietzsche: "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent." (Rejected by everyone he proposed to, even when he kept asking and asking.) Jean-Paul Sartre: "There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty." (Adopted his mistress as his daughter.) Louis Althusser: "The trouble is there are bodies and, worse still, sexual organs." (Accidentally strangled his wife to death.) And dozens of other great thinkers whose words we revere—but whose romantic decisions we should avoid at all costs.

Love As Human Freedom

Love As Human Freedom
Author: Paul A. Kottman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2017-05-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 150360232X

Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.

Thinking About Love

Thinking About Love
Author: Diane Enns
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2015-11-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 027107616X

Does love command an ineffability that remains inaccessible to the philosopher? Thinking About Love considers the nature and experience of love through the writing of well-known Continental philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Evolving forms of social organization, rapid developments in the field of psychology, and novel variations on relationships demand new approaches to and ways of talking about love. Rather than offering prescriptive claims, this volume explores how one might think about the concept philosophically, without attempting to resolve or alleviate its ambiguities, paradoxes, and limitations. The essays focus on the contradictions and limits of love, manifested in such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, violence, politics, and desire. An erudite examination of the many facets of love, this book fills a lacuna in the philosophy of this richly complicated topic. Along with the editors, the contributors are Sophie Bourgault, John Caruana, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Marguerite La Caze, Alphonso Lingis, Christian Lotz, Todd May, Dawne McCance, Dorothea Olkowski, Felix Ó Murchadha, Fiona Utley, and Mélanie Walton.

Socrates in Love

Socrates in Love
Author: Armand D’Angour
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1408883902

An innovative and insightful exploration of the passionate early life of Socrates and the influences that led him to become the first and greatest of philosophers Socrates: the philosopher whose questioning gave birth to the ideas of Western thought, and whose execution marked the end of the Athenian Golden Age. Yet despite his pre-eminence among the great thinkers of history, little of his life story is known. What we know tends to begin in his middle age and end with his trial and death. Our conception of Socrates has relied upon Plato and Xenophon – men who met him when he was in his fifties and a well-known figure in war-torn Athens. There is mystery at the heart of Socrates' story: what turned the young Socrates into a philosopher? What drove him to pursue with such persistence, at the cost of social acceptance and ultimately of his life, a whole new way of thinking about the meaning of existence? In this revisionist biography, Armand D'Angour draws on neglected sources to explore the passions and motivations of young Socrates, showing how love transformed him into the philosopher he was to become. What emerges is the figure of Socrates as never previously portrayed: a heroic warrior, an athletic wrestler and dancer – and a passionate lover. Socrates in Love sheds new light on the formative journey of the philosopher, finally revealing the identity of the woman who Socrates claimed inspired him to develop ideas that have captivated thinkers for 2,500 years.

Nietzsche on Love

Nietzsche on Love
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-01-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9781734452570

Friedrich Nietzsche presented many of his greatest insights in pithy, well-turned short phrases that do not follow any philosophical dogma. Instead, his chastening but ultimately life-affirming philosophy puts forth true love and friendship as our best hope in dark times. Here are Nietzsche's key sayings about love from the vast body of his philosophical writings, which have influenced politics, philosophy, art and culture like few other works of world literature. As the first edition of its kind, this collection presents Nietzsche's thoughts on love not as academic philosophy but as a guide to life. At turns delightful and astute-and always wise-Nietzsche on Love offers an original and startling glimpse into what one of the world's foremost thinkers says about the fundamental experience of our lives.

Wake Up and Live

Wake Up and Live
Author: Dorothea Brande
Publisher: BEYOND BOOKS HUB
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2024-10-21
Genre:
ISBN: 2110202432

Wake Up and Live (Illustrated) by Dorothea Brande is a transformative guide to living a more vibrant and fulfilling life. Authored by Dorothea Brande, this illustrated edition offers practical insights and actionable advice for overcoming obstacles and seizing opportunities for growth and success. In this enlightening book, Brande's wisdom is complemented by captivating illustrations that deepen the reader's understanding and appreciation of her teachings. Through clear explanations and vivid imagery, she empowers readers to break free from limitations and live life to the fullest. From conquering fear and self-doubt to embracing change and taking decisive action, each page of Wake Up and Live is a source of inspiration and motivation. Brande's compassionate guidance encourages readers to awaken to their true potential and create the life they desire. Whether you're seeking to pursue your passions, achieve your goals, or simply live with greater purpose and joy, this book serves as your trusted companion on the journey to self-discovery and empowerment. Let its illustrated pages inspire you to wake up to your inner greatness and live a life of fulfillment and abundance. Embark on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment with Wake Up and Live by Dorothea Brande. Let its illustrated pages guide you towards a life of courage, resilience, and unlimited possibility.

In Praise of Love

In Praise of Love
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: New Press/ORIM
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2012-11-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1595588892

The renowned French philosopher’s “ode to love’s power to unite in the face of eternity, and its optimism in the face of pain” (Publishers Weekly). In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating promises risk-free romance and love is all too often seen as a mere variant of desire and hedonism, Alain Badiou believes that love is under threat. Taking to heart Rimbaud’s famous line “love needs reinventing,” In Praise of Love is the celebrated French intellectual’s passionate treatise in defense of love. For Badiou, love is an existential project, a constantly unfolding quest for truth. This quest begins with the chance encounter, an event that forever changes two individuals, challenging them “to see the world from the point of view of two rather than one.” This, Badiou believes, is love’s most essential transforming power. Through thought-provoking dialogue edited from a conversation between Badiou and Truong, a vibrant cast of thinkers are invoked: Kierkegaard, Plato, de Beauvoir, Proust, and more, create a new narrative of love in the face of twenty-first-century modernity. Moving, zealous, and wise, Badiou’s “paean to the anticapitalist, antiessentialist, unifying power of love” urges us not to fear it but to see it as a magnificent undertaking that compels us to explore others and to move away from an obsession with ourselves (Publishers Weekly). “Finally, the cure for the pornographic, utilitarian exchange of favors to which love has been reduced in America. Alain Badiou is our philosopher of love.” —Simon Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless

Love's Work

Love's Work
Author: Gillian Rose
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 31
Release: 2011-05-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590173651

Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.

New Philosophies of Sex and Love

New Philosophies of Sex and Love
Author: Sarah LaChance Adams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2016-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786602237

Our amorous and erotic experiences do not simply bring us pleasure; they shape our very identities, our ways of relating to ourselves, each other and our shared world. This volume challenges some of our most prevalent assumptions relating to identity, the body, monogamy, libido, sexual identity, seduction, fidelity, orgasm, and more. In twelve original and philosophically thought-provoking essays, the authors reflect on the broader meanings of love and sex: what their shifting historical meanings entail for us in the present; how they are constrained by social conventions; the ambiguous juxtaposition of agency and passivity that they reveal; how they shape and are formed by political institutions; the opportunities they present to resist the confines of gender and sexual orientation; how cultural artefacts can become incorporated into the body; and how love and sex both form and justify our ethical world views. Ideal for students both in philosophy and gender studies, this highly readable book takes us to the very heart of two of the most important dimensions of human experience and meaning-making: to the seductive and alluring, confusing and frustrating, realms of love and sex.