Irving Singer

#2

"This book explores elemental principles in the study of sex for trained philosophers and lay readers alike. Singer locates sex within a spectrum that also includes love and compassion, and claims that fundamental mistakes have persistently occurred because numerous theorists relegate sex, love, and compassion to separate and distinct compartments. Discussing sex as both an appetite and an interpersonal drive. Singer argues that much philosophical confusion has resulted from the doctrines of those who constrain sexuality within either of these to the detriment of the other. What is sexual for human beings is normally, and perhaps always in some degree, a composite of the appetitive and the interpersonal. In us, sex is generically a function of each. This unified conception of sexuality as a coming together of the appetitive and interpersonal drives then becomes the basis for his remarks about the relative value of individual sex acts, as well as their place within the aesthetic and moral dimension of human nature."--BOOK JACKET.

#3

"Begins by studying love as appraisal and bestowal as well as imagination and idealization. Then examines the contrasting views of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Ovid, Lucretius, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. After having described the nature of erotic idealization, Singer analyzes the religious idealization in Judeo-Christian concepts of eros, philia, nomos, and agapē. Medieval Catholicism sought to combine these four ideas of love in the "caritas synthesis." Luther repudiated that attempt on the grounds that love exists only in God's agapastic bestowal of unlimited goodness upon humanity and all of nature. In relation to the different modes of theorizing, Singer explores the humanistic implications of each"-- Publishers website.