Class schedule and topics
Week 1: Thursday: What is love?
Week 2: Friendship Personal loves
Tuesday: Friendship as self-disclosure
Thursday: How friends change us
Week 3: Romantic love
Tuesday: True love?
Thursday: Commitment and love drugs
Week 4: Sex
Tuesday: Erotic love vs. plain sex
Thursday: ‘Hooking up’ and problems of objectification
Week 5: Families
Tuesday: Licensing parents
Thursday: Should children love their parents?
Week 6: Review and preparation of first assignment
Week 7: Classical theories Theories
Tuesday: Plato and the love of beauty
Thursday: Aristotle on ‘mirroring’
Week 8: Tuesday: Augustine’s love of God
Contemporary doubts
Thursday: Dawkins and the evolution of altruism
Week 9: Tuesday: Love as oppressive of women
Thursday: Žižek on the imaginary gaze
Week 10: Review and preparation of second assignment
Week 11: Love for strangers? Extensions
Tuesday: Maximizing happiness
Thursday: Respect and rationality
Week 11: Love for nature?
Tuesday: Deep ecology vs. materialism
Thursday: Animal equality
Week 13: Love without God?
Tuesday: Trust and forgiveness
Thursday: To play God, or love a God?
Weeks 14-15: Review and preparation of third assignment
Bibliography
Below are the primary texts that we will study, arranged by week. These and other materials will be provided on the class Moodle site.
2. Laurence Thomas, ‘Friendship’, in D. Callahan, P. Singer, and R. Chadwick (eds.), Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, 4 vols., San Diego: Academic Press, 1997, v. 2, pp. 323-333
Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett, ‘Friendship and the Self’, Ethics 108, 1998, pp. 502-527 (extracts, pp. 503-510 and 514-522)
3. Angelika Krebs, ‘Between I and Thou: On the Dialogical Nature of Love’, in C. Maurer, T. Milligan, and K. Pacovská (eds.), Love and its Objects, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 7-24
Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg, ‘Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals between Us’, Neuroethics 1:1, 2008, pp. 31-44 (extract, pp. 35-42)
4. Guy Pinku, ‘Exploring the Association Between Love and Sex’, in M. Bruce and R. M. Stewart (eds.), College Sex: Philosophy for Everyone, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 158-168
Martha Nussbaum, ‘Objectification’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 24:4, 1995, pp. 249-291 (extracts)
5. Hugh LaFollette, ‘Licensing Parents Revisited’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 27:4, 2010, pp. 327-343
Christina Hoff Sommers, ‘Philosophers Against the Family’, repr. in D. Boonin and G. Oddie (eds.), What’s Wrong? Applied Ethicists and their Critics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 310-321 (extract, pp. 310-317)
7. Plato, The Symposium, trans. M. C. Howatson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 37-50 (201d-212c)
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. R. Crisp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, bk. 8, chs. 1-4 and 12, and bk. 9, ch. 4
8. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin, London: Penguin, 1961, bk. 2, §§ 1-2 and 4-5, bk. 9, §§ 4, 8-10 and 12, and bk. 10, § 27
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, chs. 8-9 (extracts)
9. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Bantam, 1971, pp. 126-135 and 146-152
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 2nd ed., New York: Verso, 2008, pp. 1-11, 43-47, and 81-87
11. William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference, London: Guardian Faber, 2015, ch. 9
Jürgen Habermas, ‘On the Pragmatic, the Ethical and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason’, in Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 1-17
12. Freya Mathews, ‘Beyond Modernity and Tradition: A Third Way for Development’, in Ethics and the Environment 11:2, 2006, pp. 85-113
Peter Singer, ‘Equality for Animals?’, ch. 2 of Practical Ethics, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (extract, pp. 55-75)
13. Annette C. Baier, ‘Trust and its Vulnerabilities’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 1991, pp. 109-136 (extract, pp. 109-124)
Charles L. Griswold, ‘Forgiveness and Apology: What, When, Why?’ Tikkun 23:2, March/April 2008, pp. 21-26
Simon May, Love: A History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 1-13, 235-241, and 249-256