Thinking about Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 027107096X ISBN 13: 9780271070964

Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Does love command an ineffability that remains inaccessible to the philosopher?The essays collected in Thinking About Love take up the nature and experience of love with reference to some of our best-known Continental philosophers. The writings here focus on the contradictions and limits of love, manifested in such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, violence, politics, and desire. Thinking About Love does not offer prescriptive claims about authentic love. Rather, the book explores how one might think about love philosophically with recourse to the writings of Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others without attempting to resolve or alleviate its ambiguities, paradoxes, and limitations.New forms of social organization, rapid developments in the field of psychology, and novel variations on relationships demand a new approach to thinking about love. This book fills a lacuna in the philosophy of a 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 O Murchadha, Fiona Utley, and Melanie Walton."

About this title

Review:

"The contributors--scholars from Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US--offer insightful examinations of love, in its romantic/erotic, kenotic, friendship, and agapic forms. . . . A worthy foray into a topic of universal human experience, this collection will awaken readers to the value of what philosophy today says about love."

--S. Young, Choice

"By bringing together a variety of critical approaches in contemporary Continental philosophy, ranging from phenomenology and psychoanalysis to neuroscience and Marxism, this comprehensive collection explores in depth the complexity, complicity, and possibility of love in its multiple manifestations: erotic, political, religious, and social. Through the undertheorized prism of love, the book addresses key contemporary philosophers--Arendt, Beauvoir, Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard, Marx, Merleau-Ponty--and offers compelling rethinking of crucial philosophical themes, such as vulnerability, finitude, alterity, passions, nature, and materialism, as well as philosophy itself."

--Ewa Ziarek, author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism

"This collection opens up an overdue discussion of the intersections of love and thinking within the continental tradition."

--Helen A. Fielding, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"The editors of this inspiring new collection rightly contend that the question of love is woefully under-treated in contemporary Continental philosophy. This failure has impoverished both philosophy and contemporary life, making this volume a timely and much-needed intervention as well as a cause for gratitude."

--Jason M. Wirth, author of Commiserating with Devastated Things: Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking

About the Author:

Diane Enns is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University and the author of Speaking of Freedom and The Violence of Victimhood, the last also published by Penn State. Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King's University College at Western University. His most recent book is Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 027107096X
• ISBN 13: 9780271070964
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Enns Diane, Calcagno Antonio