He discusses usage of the word ‘love’ across history, including the four loves of Ancient Greece generally, and Aristotle’s love as friendship specifically. Similar to Lewis he takes great pains to avoid reductionism culminating in the argument that the fact we have used the word love so differently across history, indeed even within the same historical eras, shows just how nuanced even something as fundamental to human life as love can be.
There are tens of thousands of books out there discussing love, so odds are any particular one, I'm not going to have read it.
It's nice that he avoids reductionism, but frankly the "four loves of ancient Greece" idea isn't supported well by the classic literature when you spend time with it, so that's unlikely to get me to check his work out
That’s fair, there has been quite a bit written on love! May is a Fellow at King’s College London whose work centers on the philosophy of love (and also 19/20th century German thought) so I thought perhaps you would have heard of him. But I know academia is a big world.
I’m definitely not trying to sell you on the book (I know how much professors have to read as it is!) but I also don’t want to do May an injustice and misrepresent him. He does not endorse the idea that those four words for love were distinct categories the ancient Greeks would have used, but rather that they had many ways of distinguishing love. He spends most of his time with ‘philia’ and how even that word doesn’t have consistent usage even by the same author.
In truth the project of the book spans much further out than Ancient Greece which get a few chapters toward the beginning, your reflection on how a word we all use gets misused (or reduced) simply reminded me of his book so I made the connection.
Dr. Sadler are you familiar with Simon May’s work Love: A History?
What's the relevance here?
He discusses usage of the word ‘love’ across history, including the four loves of Ancient Greece generally, and Aristotle’s love as friendship specifically. Similar to Lewis he takes great pains to avoid reductionism culminating in the argument that the fact we have used the word love so differently across history, indeed even within the same historical eras, shows just how nuanced even something as fundamental to human life as love can be.
There are tens of thousands of books out there discussing love, so odds are any particular one, I'm not going to have read it.
It's nice that he avoids reductionism, but frankly the "four loves of ancient Greece" idea isn't supported well by the classic literature when you spend time with it, so that's unlikely to get me to check his work out
That’s fair, there has been quite a bit written on love! May is a Fellow at King’s College London whose work centers on the philosophy of love (and also 19/20th century German thought) so I thought perhaps you would have heard of him. But I know academia is a big world.
I’m definitely not trying to sell you on the book (I know how much professors have to read as it is!) but I also don’t want to do May an injustice and misrepresent him. He does not endorse the idea that those four words for love were distinct categories the ancient Greeks would have used, but rather that they had many ways of distinguishing love. He spends most of his time with ‘philia’ and how even that word doesn’t have consistent usage even by the same author.
In truth the project of the book spans much further out than Ancient Greece which get a few chapters toward the beginning, your reflection on how a word we all use gets misused (or reduced) simply reminded me of his book so I made the connection.