Love: A Very Short Introduction
Ronald De Sousa
Nov 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Paul Heitsch
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4 hr 23 min
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About this audiobook
Although there are many kinds of love, erotic love has been celebrated in art and poetry as life's most rewarding and exalting experience, worth living and dying for and bringing out the best in ourselves. And yet it has excused, and even been thought to justify, the most reprehensible crimes. Why should this be? This Very Short Introduction explores this and other puzzling questions. Do we love someone for their virtue, their beauty, or their moral or other qualities? Are love's characteristic desires altruistic or selfish? Are there duties of love? What do the sciences-neuroscience, evolutionary and social psychology, and anthropology-tell us about love? Many of the answers we give to such questions are determined not so much by the facts of human nature as by the ideology of love. Ronald de Sousa considers some of the many paradoxes raised by love, looking at the different kinds of love-affections, affiliation, philia, storage, agape, but focusses on eros, or romantic love. He considers whether our conventional beliefs about love and sex are deeply irrational and argues that alternative conceptions of love and sex, although hard to formulate and live by, may be worth striving for.
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Samuel Bird
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June 11, 2023
I wish I could write an essay about how much this let me down. This book couldn't seem to see out of sociological conflict theory and post modern thought. It started by being skeptical about social norms and that things should be a certain way, which I loved. It then asserted that the world should he like how the sexual revolution has made it. But, I thought there was no way the world should be? I am a very open minded person and ready to hear out ideas, but when they start talking about pedophilia and back it with the argument that a few cultures did it in the past therefore it is okay, I get annoyed at the logical inconsistency and the moral precedence. I was really hoping this book would explain and delve into the philosophy of what it meant to care for others, but instead I feel like I just got the fevered notes of Foucolt.
About the author
Ronald de Sousa is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has taught at University of Toronto, Canada since 1966. He is the author of The Rationality of Emotion, Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind, and Emotional Truth.
Paul Heitsch has been narrating audiobooks since 2011, after having worked as a pianist, composer, recording engineer, producer, and sound designer for many years. His work is often cited for the authenticity he brings to the narrative and characters he portrays, as well as his versatility, and clear, smooth delivery.
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