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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... interpersonal emotion . The point is a general one : the scientific attempt to penetrate to ' the depths ' of human things is accompanied almost universally by a loss of response to the ' surface ' . Yet it is on the surface that we ...
... interpersonal . It involves an intention to communicate , and also an intention that this first intention be efficacious in revealing the content of what is said . It involves , in short , an elaborate design upon the consciousness of ...
... interpersonal attitudes . She conceives her lover conceiving her conceiving him . . . . ( Sartre argued that such infinite chains of response show sexual desire to be impossible . However , the regress is indefinite , not infinite , and ...
... interpersonal demands of the creature who is mounting her . This is a refined case of true bestiality , in which the other both is , and is thought of as , an animal . True bestiality is perverted . ' Perverted ' means turned from some ...
... interpersonal intentionality ; from that epistemic ' directedness ' that is contained within sexual arousal . But the divorce is effected by a peculiar shift of attention . In obscenity , attention is taken away from embodiment towards ...
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 |