This is an introductory textbook in the philosophy of sex and love by one of America’s best known authors on the topic. It is a critical overview of the nature, and the ethics, of sex and love. Most of the book focuses how 20th-century thinkers in various intellectual traditions have conceived of sexuality and love. Throughout, the book’s approach to the philosophy of sex and love is analytic, historical, and social.
Topics addressed include the nature of sexual pleasure, sexual desire, and sexual activity; the relationship between judgments about the biological, psychological, and social natures of human beings and judgments that certain sexual behaviors or desires are sexually perverted; the possibility of constructing plausible and comprehensive principles of sexual ethics; the moral and social issues of rape, Pornography, prostitution, adultery, promiscuity, masturbation, abortion, and contraception; the varieties and forms of love; the connections, logical and psychological, among sexuality, love, friendship, and marriage; and how issues within the philosophy of sex and love look different once gender is taken into account.
Authors discussed include, from the history of philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hume, Kierkegaard, and Russell; and, from among our contemporaries, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Michel Foucault, Carol Gilligan, Martha Nussbaum, Lillian Rubin, and Roger Scruton.
