Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion Simon May 0190884851 9780190884857

This completed downloadable of Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion Simon May

Instant downloaded Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion Simon May pdf docx epub after payment.

Product details:

• ISBN 10: 0190884851
• ISBN 13: 9780190884857
• Author: Simon May

What is love’s real intent? Why can love be so ruthlessly selective? How is it related to sex, beauty, and goodness? And is the child now the supreme object of love?In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life–as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of “ontological rootedness,” rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today’s dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham’s call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty–and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful).

Table of contents:

Part I } Dead Ends: Why We Need a New Understanding of Love

1. The Neglected Question: What Is Love’s Specific Aim?

2. Back to the Future: Secularizing Divine Agape

3. The Six Major Conceptions of Love in Western History: A Summary

4. Why We Need a New Conception of Love

Part II } Love: Toward a New Understanding

5. Love and the Promise of Rootedness

6. What Is Ontological Rootedness?

7. God as Paradigm of a Loved One—But Not of a Lover

8. Love as Recognition of Lineage

9. Love as Recognition of an Ethical Home

10. Love as Recognition of Power

11. Love and the Call to Existence

12. Relationship

13. Fear: The Price of Love

14. Destructiveness

15. Why Love Isn’t the Same as Benevolence

16. What Divine Violence Teaches Us about Love

17. Self-Interest as a Source of Self-Giving

18. Exile as Love’s Inspiration

19. Why Some Epochs (and People) Value Love More Than Others

20. The Languages of Love

21. The Primacy of Loving over Being Loved

22. Attentiveness: Love’s Supreme Virtue

23. Love and Death

24. “Overshooting” the Loved One: Love’s Impersonal Dimension

25. Can We Love Ourselves?

Part III } Narratives of Love as Rootedness

26. The Bible: Love as a Discovery of Home

27. The Odyssey: Love as a Recovery of Home

Part IV } How Is Love Related to Beauty, Sex, and Goodness?

28. Why Beauty Is Not the Ground of Love

29. How Important Is Sex to Love?

30. The Real Relation between Love and Beauty

31. Can We Love the Ugly?

32. Can We Love Evil?

Part V } The Child as the New Supreme Object of Love

33. Why Parental Love Is Coming to Trump Romantic Love

34. The Conservatism of Romantic Love

35. Why Isn’t Friendship the New Archetypal Love?

36. Conclusion: The Child as the First Truly Modern Archetypal Object of Love

People also search:

ancient love meaning

ancient love poetry ending explained

book of love and creation

understanding love book

love is an action never simply a feeling