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
Results 1-5 of 88
... human sexuality are now habitually presented . Freud described the aim of sexual desire as : union of the genitals in the act known as copulation , which leads to a release of the sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual ...
... human experience from the world of scientific observation . In the first we exist as agents , taking command of our destiny and relating to each other through conceptions that have no place in the scientific view of the universe . In ...
... human face which covers it . Thomas Hardy awakens us to much sadness when he writes , of young drummer Hodge , killed in the Boer war , that he ' never knew ... / The meaning of the broad karoo ' : to die in surroundings that are opaque ...
... human consciousness : the quality of pointing to , and delineating , an object of thought . The ' awareness of the world ' that lies at the heart of my experience , and which seems constantly to project my thoughts outwards on to a ...
... human action . ( Such is indeed the case , I shall argue , with the crucial phenomenon of human sexual desire . ) As agents we belong to the surface of the world , and enter into immediate relation with it . The concepts through which ...
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 |