How to Talk about Love
eBook - ePub

How to Talk about Love

An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers

  1. 208 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

How to Talk about Love

An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers

About this book

Explore the nature of love in this charming new translation of selections from Plato’s great dramatic work, the Symposium

What is love? In poetry, songs, fiction, movies, psychology, and philosophy, love has been described, admired, lamented, and dissected in endless ways. Is love based on physical attraction? Does it bring out our better selves? How does it relate to sex? Is love divine? Plato’s Symposium is one of the oldest, most influential, and most profound explorations of such questions—it is even the source of the idea of “Platonic love.” How to Talk about Love introduces and presents the key passages and central ideas of Plato’s philosophical dialogue in a lively and highly readable new translation, which also features the original Greek on facing pages.

The Symposium is set at a fictional drinking party during which prominent Athenians engage in a friendly competition by delivering improvised speeches in praise of Eros, the Greek god of love and sex. The aristocrat Phaedrus, the legal expert Pausanias, the physician Eryximachus, the comic playwright Aristophanes, and the tragic poet Agathon—each by turn celebrates different aspects of love before Socrates proposes not to praise love but to tell the truth about it. In the final speech, the politician and libertine Alcibiades argues that Socrates himself is the epitome of love.

Deftly capturing the essence and spirit of Plato’s masterpiece, How to Talk about Love makes the Symposium more accessible and enjoyable than ever before.

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Yes, you can access How to Talk about Love by Plato, Armand D'Angour in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Filosofía & Filosofía antigua y clásica. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Series Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Contents
  6. Introduction: Talking of Love
  7. 1. The Inspirer of Noble Deeds: Phaedrus
  8. 2. A Virtuous and Lasting Union: Pausanias
  9. 3. A Universal Principle of Harmony: Eryximachus
  10. 4. Finding One’s Other Half: Aristophanes
  11. 5. A Stimulus to Creation: Agathon
  12. 6. The Ladder to Transcendence: Socrates
  13. 7. Love Is Who You Love: Alcibiades
  14. Further Reading
  15. Concordance to Passages Selected