Philosophy Of Love Research Articles

Apparizione e visione: vita e opere di Anna Maria Ortese by Luca Clerici (review)

806 Reviews work of writers such as Gabriella Gribaudi, John Dickie, and Jane Schneider, who have investigated the emergence of particular constructs of Southern identity in the nineteenth century during and after the period of unification. In many ways, there? fore, the ambition of the book is both its strength and its weakness. It opens up fresh debate in the cross-cultural connections itoffers;the author gives due consideration to the social, political, and historical context of the topics she selects. However, the scope of such an undertaking reveals itselfat times as quite simply over-ambitious, and this may well explain why errors emerge. Given the list of distinguished colleagues cited in the acknowledgements on p. xxi, this is surely disappointing. Queen Mary, University of London Pauline Small Apparizione e visione: vita e opere di Anna Maria Ortese. By Luca Clerici. Milan: Mondadori. 2002. 732 pp. ?32. ISBN 88-04-48937-5. Anna Maria Ortese's firstbook, Angelici dolori, was published by Bompiani of Milan in 1937, under the auspices of Massimo Bontempelli, who praised the book in a meet? ing of the ltalian Academy and awarded it a prize of 5,000 lire?the firstof a series of officialsubsidies given to the near-destitute Ortese through her long life. In 1944 she received a loan from the RSI Ministero della Cultura Popolare. And in 1986 she was awarded a pension for life. Her amicable relations with governments as different as Mussolini's and Craxi's, and the championing of her by intellectuals of all political persuasions, are two of the strange facts about Anna Maria Ortese, perhaps the most puzzling of major twentieth-century ltalian writers. Since she lived a solitary life and never married, the facts about Ortese were hard to come by unless one happened to know her associates and could piece together the mosaic of their views. Now Luca Clerici, of the University of Milan, has written a definitive critical biography, only four years after Ortese was 'called back'. I use Emily Dickinson's phrase about death, because Ortese can be described as a Neapoli? tan Dickinson?as eccentric, secretive, and outspoken as the poet of Amherst. Very few people were invited into her house, and those who were hardly believed what they saw. Anna and her sister Maria were in the habit of sleeping in their armchairs, their feet on stools and the lights blazing. In one of her houses, terrorized by the noise, Anna Maria had carpenters build a wooden cabin within the sitting room, and here she hid and wrote. She tells us about this in her moving autobiographical notes, Corpo celeste (1997), which is her intellectual testament and expresses a philosophy of love, mystery,and pity for all living things, especially animals. But Ortese had littlepatience with mankind, which she was quick to perceive as evil, vengeful, and destructive. I heard her once dismiss all things ltalian, while extolling a quite imaginary England, where she spent a few days in 1953 (p. 289). Her blanket condemnations and admirations antagonized acquaintances, like the fellow Neapoli? tan who called her 'una donna spaventata e piena di rancore verso la vita' (p. 62). But if one learnt to take her on her terms and saw her statements for the metaphors they were, one discovered a true original and a writer with a vision. Even her little-known poems are notable statements in the Romantic tradition. Ortese loved Poe but belonged to the intellectual climate of Bontempelli's 'realismo magico' and of the 1930s, when writers like Tommaso Landolfi and Karen Blixen created dream worlds. Luca Clerici follows closely Ortese's career from Rome to Libya to Naples, where she matured intellectually and where we find her visiting Benedetto Croce's household , to Milan, Rome, and her final harbour, Rapallo. Quite uneducated, she read voraciously, created her style, and suffered the miseries of her large family (a sailor brother, Manuele, died at sea at twenty-one and was commemorated in prose and MLR, 99.3, 2004 807 verse, her twin Antonio (1914-40) was killed in Greece in obscure circumstances). II porto di Toledo, perhaps Ortese's masterpiece, is based on the story of her family...

Reviews

Books reviewed:P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Mind and Will, Vol 4 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical InvestigationsC.J. McCracken and I.C. Tipton (eds), Berkeley’s Principles and Dialogues: Background Source MaterialsRonald Hall, The Human Embrace: The Love of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Love

Plato and the Love of Individuals

A perennial problem in the philosophy of love has centred around what it is to love persons qua persons. Plato has usually been interpreted as believing that when we love we are attaching ourselves to qualities that inhere in the objects of our love and that these qualities transcend the objects. Vlastos has argued, along with Nussbaum, Price and many others that such an account tells against a true love of persons as unique and irreplaceable individuals. I argue that Plato’s account of love as presented in the Lysis and Symposium is not so easily rejected. My concern is both to show that Plato can meet the objections and that his theory can still offer helpful insights into the understanding of love in our own lives. In particular I will identify two manners of loving persons; one which is context and individual specific, and another which might be termed metaphysical, thereby preserving aspects of the Platonic ascent of love. I will further argue that the two aspects are often non–controversially linked, and that such linking helps explain something of the mysterious nature of love.

"He and I": Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Other Man

Toward the largely despondent close of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The House of Life stands "He and I": a "representation," as David G. Riede observes, "of some sort of self-division and self-alienation" that appears rather "enigmatic." 1 Composed in 1870, this intriguing sonnet--which results in a distressing physical encounter between the male poetic voice and his masculine other--may well look puzzling in a long two-part series whose reflections on heterosexual manhood have in any case seemed obscure to many scholars. "Biographers and critics alike," writes William E. Fredeman, "have been tantalized by Rossetti's poem; it challenges their imaginations and taxes their ingenuities." 2 Try as they might, most readers cannot make these one hundred and one sonnets--several of which express feverish eroticism--fit neatly within a framework that either allegorizes Rossetti's turbulent love affairs with Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal or expounds a systematic philosophy of love. 3 Even the subtitle, "A Sonnet-Sequence," sits oddly in a work that offers comparatively little narrative cohesion. Instead, Algernon Charles Swinburne's comment that The House of Life aims to "embrace and express all sorrow and all joy of passion in union, of outer love and inner, triumphant or dejected or piteous or at peace" 4 remains one of the most accurate--because open-ended--descriptions of the work. The only (seemingly obvious) qualification to be made to Swinburne's statement is that the expression of such joy and sorrow belongs to a man who remains, according to C. M. Bowra, "a ready victim to the beauty of women." 5 Here femininity allures the frequently tormented poetic voice in a variety of ethereal and fiendish guises. On the one hand, the poet-speaker remains in awe of female "Beauty enthroned." 6 On the other hand, he bears terrified witness to how a figure such as Lilith (with her "enchanted hair") "left . . . / One strangling golden hair" around the "heart" of a young man exhausted with passion ("Body's Beauty," p. 314). What, then, might "He and I"--where "some sort of self-division" involves one man's body momentarily touching that of another male figure--disclose about the enduring struggle of this sequence, in its desperate closing moments, to celebrate how "Life" is truly [End Page 365] "the lady of all bliss" ("Newborn Death," p. 325)? Might this haunting sonnet elucidate why the insistent heteroeroticism of The House of Life grows more and more bleak in "Change and Fate": the apt subtitle for the sequence's disconsolate second part?

Introduction to “The Philosophy of Love and Sex”

Abstract Love and sex provide a fertile ground for philosophical inquiry, both conceptual analysis of the nature of loveand sex and discussion of the many ethical issues that they raise. Moral issues arising from love include thepermissibility of romantically loving more than one person at the same time (assuming that this is evenpossible) and the moral value of romantic love and friendship. Moral issues arising from sex vary from themost fundamental question—the one addressed by Alan Soble in his paper in this issue—of whether sex canbe reconciled with respect for persons, to questions about the permissibility of sex in particular circumstances.Much current work in philosophy of love and sex concerns precisely such issues in applied ethics, for instancethe topics addressed by the authors of four more papers in this collection—homosexuality, prostitution,relationships that cross power lines in academia, and the wrongness of rape and other sexual misdeeds. Otherethical issues about sex include the morality of casual sex, adultery and open marriage, sadomasochism, andpornography.

Towards sustainability in village health care in rural Cameroon

SUMMARY The Life Abundant Programme (LAP), a churchsponsored primary health care project in rural Cameroon, was founded on the principles of community participation and self-reliance. Beginning in 1980 in four villages, the project is now active in 40 Primary Health Centres and 14 Integrated Health Centres. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the sustainability of the first 16 LAP-associated Primary Health Centres after 17 years of field practice, and to share lessons learned from that experience. After 9 years, 13 (81%) communities were active; and after 17 years, 14 (87.5%) were active. Village factors contributing to sustainability include community management of their own health programs, community financial self-reliance, village integrity in money management, annual continuing education for all health workers, and continuing support by Project staff. Factors contributing to sustainability at the Integrated Health Centre level are: receipt of adequate fees from patient curative services; the clinical expertise of health workers as well as their positive relationships with the community people; and continuing medical and LAP support. At the Project Administrative level, factors include adequate staffing, a close working relationship with government health authorities, and financial support from within the country as well as continuing donor agency support from outside. At all levels of LAP activity, commitment to the Biblical philosophy of love, compassion and integrity contribute to sustainability.

Philosophical Writings , and: Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings (review)

Goethe Yearbook 429 Thus Pugh's claim throughout his book that he knows what was on Schiller's mind fails to convince. The author's main point with regard to the "Theosophie" is that it transmits a philosophy of love that further shapes the poetry and philosophy written during the first decade of Schiller's career. While this is certainly an important point, it is ironic that, given his thesis that Schiller was not a proponent of the Enlightenment, he would feel compelled to come to terms with the influences of several of Schiller's contemporaries while, to be sure, reaching back to Ficino and Renaissance Platonism. Ironically, when considering Schiller's "Theosophie des Julius" and openly discussing the themes of the immortality of the soul, love and gravity, love and friendship, and even self-sacrifice, Pugh fails to consult Plato's Phaedrus. Finally, the love of God and Julius's understanding of self-love is not simply "egoistic," as Pugh contends (179), since Julius attributes Creation to God and states explicitly that beings like himself are not equal to the Creator. Perhaps Schiller also had Goethe's Werther in mind when he wrote: "Egoismus errichtet seinen Mittelpunkt in sich selber; Liebe pflanzt ihn außerhalb ihrer in die Achse des ewigen Ganzen. Liebe zielt nach Einheit; Egoismus ist Einsamkeit. Liebe ist die mitherrschende Bürgerin eines blühenden Freistaats, Egoismus ein Despot in einer verwüsteten Schöpfung." In any case, the political analogies of the last comparison are well -worth noting. In sum, Pugh insists that Schiller was a Platonist (see also his article of 1991 on this very topic in Colloquia Germanica), even in the absence of explicit statements, which he admits time and again, and to the exclusion of other pressing considerations, such as the main current of Schiller scholarship today. Because the author exhibits an admirable command of the Platonic tradition, the Schiller expert will wish to come to terms with this book. University of Arizona Steven D. Martinson Novalis, Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. 194 pp. Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings. Edited and translated by Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 479 pp. In recent years several major English-language studies have underscored the importance of early German Romanticism and its for- 430 Book Reviews mative influence on modern literary theory. While a fair number of these early Romantic texts have been published in English translation in various fora, these two new translations make a wide selection of seminal Romantic writings available in a convenient, accessible form, and would make a welcome addition to any library . Stoljar's masterful translation, which provides the first extensive selection of Novalis's philosophical writings available in English, is exemplary in its precision, accuracy, and readability. Focusing on those manuscripts written between 1797 and 1799, Stoljar presents lucid, engaging translations of the Miscellaneous Observations [Blüthenstaub], Monologue, Faith and Love, and Christendom or Europe in their entirety, and extensive selections from the Logological Fragments, the Teplitz Fragments, the essay on Goethe as scientist, the General Draft [Das Allgemeine Brouillon], and the Last Fragments .Where she does not include complete translations of the original texts, Stoljar's choice of fragments is judicious . Her introduction and notes to the translation are clearly and intelligently written, succinctly outlining and analyzing major issues raised in Novalis's writings. The resultant volume provides a reasonably comprehensive picture of Novalis's wide-ranging interests and contributions to the critical discourse of his era. Throughout her flowing translation Stoljar remains faithful to the original German, and her English is a pleasure to read. To be sure, on occasion dimensions of the original text are lost in the English rendition, as is inevitably the case in any translation. For example, the first fragment of Blüthenstaub, "Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge" (emphasis mine), becomes "We seek the absolute everywhere, and only ever find things" (23), eliding the word play between das Unbedingte and Dinge that informs the original German. While the translation itself is otherwise impeccable, two shortcomings are evident...

T'ang Chun-i's Philosophy of Love

T'ang Chun-i's Philosophy of Love

The meanings of love: an introduction to philosophy of love

Preface Introduction Erotic Love: Plato: Symposium and Phaedrus Christian Love: Genesis 1 to I Corinthians 13 Romantic Love: Tristan and Iseult and Heloise and Abelard Moral Love: Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard Love as Power: Hobbes, Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre Mutual Love: Aristotle and Luce Irigaray Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index

Guardian of Dialogue: Max Scheler's Phenomenology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Philosophy of Love, by Michael D. Barber

<b>Guardian of Dialogue: Max Scheler's Phenomenology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Philosophy of Love</b>, by Michael D. Barber

The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature

The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature

Millenarianism and Mahdism in Lebanon

The image of the Ayatollah Khomeini is inextricably bound up with the popular conception of Islam today. This view of Islam as a religion of fanaticism and violence ignores the existence of a powerful mystical strand in the form of Sufism in which a philosophy of love is central. Between 1980 and 1981, as part of my doctoral research, I spent six months in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, living with the pupils of a Sufi sheik. This group had millenarian beliefs which acted, not as a means of violent insurrection, but rather as a means of reconciling the contradictory and often violent forces to which they were subjected.

The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature 1480-1680

The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature 1480-1680

Lectures in Love's Philosophy: A. A. Parker on Human and Divine Love in Golden-Age Literature

Lectures in Love's Philosophy: A. A. Parker on Human and Divine Love in Golden-Age Literature

Lectures in Love's Philosophy: A.A. Parker on Human and Divine Love in Golden Age Literature

In the introduction to his book,1 Professor Parker quotes a memorable sentence from George Santayana's The Life of Reason: ‘There can be no philosophical interest in disguising the animal basis of ...

The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature: 1480-1680

The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature: 1480-1680

Martin Luther King: The Theology of Social Action

getting results, the ideas which largely define his public career are apt to be undervalued. This is particularly true for Martin Luther King. He is famous for his leadership in the civil rights movement. Moreover, he is personally attractive. His character and calm restraint contrast tellingly with an age peculiarly prone to violence. For many, Martin Luther King stands as the happy standard of what courageous, nonbelligerent enterprise might achieve. But these same people seldom realize that King has a philosophical turn of mind which persistently seeks speculative ground for his civil rights activities. The origin, evolution and expression of King's ideas readily fit into intellectual contexts. Aside from those beliefs which issue from his social and ministerial heritage, King's convictions are nurtured by four major intellectual movements. These are the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, presently undergoing a resurgence because of some theologians associated with the God is Dead movement; Protestant Neo-Orthodoxy as it has been domesticated by Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich; the Personalism taught at Boston University while King worked on his doctoral program; and the nonviolent philosophy of love fashioned by Gandhi. By virtue of his reading in such heady and tightly organized systems of thought, King has been singularly successful in carrying out a critical analysis of his religious beliefs that has culminated in a synthesis capable of supporting his civil rights activities. That synthesis is remarkably coherent. It is also intellectually firm and ardently held.

The Poetry of the Stilnovisti and Love's Labour's Lost

wise jovial play. At the turn of the century, Friedrich Schult gave attention to the various theatrical versions of the play, and Frances Yates in the 1930s concentrated on the topical allusions more or less external to it.1 More recently, G. B. Harrison and Granville-Barker have emphasized the play's obvious lightheartedness and metrical dexterity.2 Only Charles J. Sisson has suggested the sober aspect of Love's Labour's Lost by calling attention to the sudden death that suspends love's happiness until the lovers learn through suffering.3 None of these critics, however, has sought to concentrate sufficiently on the Renaissance philosophy of love which underlies both the lyrical dexterity and the dramaturgy of the work. Love's Labour's Lost, as Granville-Barker rightly points out, is the work of a wit and a sonneteer, and of one who is in the movement.4 But it is the special movement to which Shakespeare belongs that

Reviews and Comment

Take A Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis Richard Eberhart: Collected Poems 1930‐1960 Shakespeare and the Rose of Love: A Study of the Early Plays in Relation to the Medieval Philosophy of Love by John Vyvyan Shakespeare's Comedies, by Bertrand Evans Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy, by Irving Ribner The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare, by John Lawlor Shakespeare as Collaborator, by Kenneth Muir The First fart of King Henry IV, edited by A. R. Humphreys The Poem, edited by F. T. Prince The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme, by A. R. Jones

Ugo Spirito's Philosophy of Love

Ugo Spirito's Philosophy of Love