Sexual Desire: A Philosophical InvestigationA&C Black, 5. märts 2006 - 448 pages A dazzling treatise, as erudite and eloquent as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and considerably more sound in its conclusion - TLS "He is an eloquent and practised writer" - The Independent (UK) When John desires Mary or Mary desires John, what does either of them want? What is meant by innocence, passion, love and arousal, desire, perversion and shame? These are just a few of the questions Roger Scruton addresses in this thought-provoking intellectual adventure. Beginning from purely philosophical premises, and ranging over human life, art and institutions, he surveys the entire field of sexuality; equally dissatisfied with puritanism and permissiveness, he argues for a radical break with recent theories. Upholding traditional morality - though in terms that may shock many of its practitioners - his argument gravitates to that which is candid, serene and consoling in the experience of sexual love. |
From inside the book
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... distinction that has caused considerable confusion in subsequent debate : the distinction between erotic love and sexual desire . Plato is the intellectual ancestor of a view which persists to this day and which conditions much of our ...
... distinctions that sexual desire is primarily ' physical ' , while love always has a ' spiritual ' side . It survives ... distinction as crucial to the understanding of our condition ) , but against the moral and philosophical impulse ...
... distinctions — between reason and cause , intention and desire , action and passion , esteem and affection - we find ... distinction between person and thing . Only a person has rights , duties and obligations ; only a person acts for ...
... distinction in what follows between ' phenomenological ' and ' analytical ' conclusions . Two idioms are equally available to me , and neither need be thought to have a monopoly of the truth , since , as soon as we have accepted the ...
... to be enormous . In addition to the basic phenomena , there is the condition from which they derive : the condition of sexual existence , with its associated distinction between man and woman . There is also what 14 SEXUAL DESIRE.
Contents
1 | |
16 | |
36 | |
4 Desire | 59 |
5 The individual object | 94 |
6 Sexual phenomena | 138 |
7 The science of sex | 180 |
8 Love | 213 |
11 Sexual morality | 322 |
12 The politics of sex | 348 |
Epilogue | 362 |
Appendix 1 The first person | 364 |
Appendix 2 Intentionality | 377 |
Notes | 392 |
Index of Names | 419 |
Index of Subjects | 424 |