Eros, Agape and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love

Rating:
Summary: A Look at Important Love Essays
Review: Soble provides this collection of primary writings dealing with the subject of love as a companion volume to an earlier volume of readings on the philosophy of sex. He does so believing that love is "such a rich phenomenon provoking questions in ontology, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, theology and philosophy of religion, and that to restrict the investigation of its many forms and dimensions to the ties between love and sexuality is to commit a painful, conceptual truncation" (ix).

The contents of the book are broken into four main sections: "Where We Are;" "Classical Sources;" "Exploring the Classics;" and a contemporary analysis of love. Throughout the book, Soble often relates the word "love" to its various romantic implications.

Soble's method in putting the book together is to provide three or four primary writings prefaced by a summary of the reason these writings are important. He introduces the entire book, however, by asking, "What is love?" "The complexity of this question - compare it to, What is a chair? - is reflected in the fact that so many different answers to it exists and debates about the nature of genuine love seem impossible to resolve" (xix). Love can be compared to art, for each is equally a difficult domain to describe.

One of the reasons love is so difficult to explain is that the word refers to many different things. Often, however, the attempt to conceptualize love is framed with regard to the Greek love words - eros, philia, and agape. Soble believes that the general characterization of `eros-style' love arises in this way: x loves y because y has attractive or valuable qualities. `Agape-style' love is understood as x loving y independently of y's merit. This book offers original formulations of the theories of eros, agape and phileo and then attempts to explain more generally what these love types might mean for contemporary thinking.

Thomas Jay Oord