Love, Loving, and Loss

PHIL 151. Philosophical Dimensions of Personal Decisions

Fall Term 2023

Course Description:
This course will examine the core human experiences of love, loving, and loss. Our focus will particularly be on romantic love, or eros. We will first examine the nature of love and loving by asking and attempting to provide satisfactory answers to the questions ‘What is love?’ and ‘What is it to love?’ Then, we will turn to discuss the phenomenon of falling in love. Here we will ask whether there really can be love at first sight and will consider the relationship between love and hope. We will also think about how much falling in love depends on idealizations and illusions. Next, we will discuss being in love and ask questions such as ‘Is the preferential partiality we show our beloveds morally acceptable?’, ‘Is unrequited love really love?’, ‘Can we choose who we love?’, ‘Are there reasons for loving?’, ‘Do we need to love freely in order to love? If not, what’s wrong with love potions?’, and, ultimately, ‘Can love last forever?’ Having considered love and loving, we will then turn to loss. We will examine what it is to fall out of love, when this might happen, and whether it is ever rational to end relationships. Lastly, we will discuss heartbreak, the end of relationships, and losing the one you love.
Throughout the semester, we will read the work of contemporary scholars (such as Simone de Beauvoir and Harry Frankfurt) as well as the writings of historical thinkers (such as Émilie du Châtelet, Kierkegaard, and Stendhal), poets (such as Neruda, Petrarch, Platt, and Yeats), and authors of fiction (such as selections from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet).

The Self

PHIL 152. Philosophy of Human Nature.

Summer Term 2023

Course Description:
The aim of this course is to grapple with a question that lies at the heart of our existence: ‘What am I?’ That is, ‘What is it that makes me, me?’ Or, ‘What is the thing that I call my ‘self’? Throughout this term, we will explore the answers to these questions that philosophers, from antiquity to today, have argued for as we endeavour to become clear on what exactly the self is.
We shall examine, critically evaluate, and sincerely grapple with philosophical positions about the self that range as widely from the belief that the self is a robust entity – a soul, as Plato claims, or a living animal as Aristotle and Olson do – to views that the self is merely a bundle of perceptions (as Hume argues), is transient (as Strawson does), and even the position that the self is non-existent (as Theravāda Buddhists and Dennett hold).