Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up

摘要

By all indications, this is a work about love wrought with love. Even the publisher seems to have been inspired, as readers are offered an attractive cloth volume at an equally attractive price. Although slim and written for the general reader, this is the kind of book one wants to read by an eminent philosopher who has devoted his philosophical career to the study of love. It is an intriguing and open “apologia pro mente sua … an illustrated miniature of [Singer’s] life as a thinker or would-be philosopher” (p. xviii).nThis work, then, as observed by Alan Soble in the foreward, is “as much an intellectual autobiography as it is an exploration of love and sex” (p. xii). Intellectually, Singer identifies himself as “a modern-day existentialist, or pragmatistic humanist and pluralist” (p. 14), and in a prefatory note he explains why this work is “a partial summing-up” in two senses. First, Singer is selective in his consideration of ideas that have occurred throughout his numerous published works on love, although any criteria for his selections go unidentified. Nevertheless, there is a mixture of ideas both old and new, colloquially presented in an “occasionally amorphous framework” (p. xv). Second, Singer suggests that given the nature of the philosophical enterprise, all such works are partial and fall short of providing a final comprehensive look at the questions raised.nA great benefit of this work is the accessible historical overview of the subject presented by Singer, one which makes this an ideal opening text for a course on the philosophy of love. Within this framework one finds several key distinctions — and Singer basically considers himself to be “a maker of distinctions” (p. 15) — that will prove useful to any careful investigation of the subject. For example, from the beginning we are asked to consider Romantic love, which is later distinguished from Courtly love, and whether this is a relatively recent idea. Singer’s view is that “the claim that Romantic love is an invention of the latter period [nineteenth-century romanticism] is therefore of limited value, and, on the face of it, mistaken” (p. 2), a view that highlights the insightful way Singer understands the history of ideas as part of a continuous development — one that begins with Plato