Chapter 17 Further Reading: Love and Relationships

Primary Texts

Plato, Symposium (c. 385–370 BCE) The essential primary text for this chapter. Read the speeches of Phaedrus, Aristophanes, Agathon, and Socrates (Diotima). The Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff translation (Hackett) is accessible and philosophically careful. Pay attention to how each speech responds to and corrects the one before it — Plato is showing you philosophy in motion.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX (c. 350 BCE) The foundational treatment of friendship (philia) in Western philosophy. Books VIII and IX are largely self-contained and readable without the full context of the Ethics. The Ross translation (Oxford World's Classics) is widely available. The central question to bring to the text: does Aristotle's taxonomy feel accurate to your own experience of friendship?

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Part II, Chapter 5: "The Woman in Love" (1949) De Beauvoir's analysis of how love has been structured as a form of self-loss for women. Dense but rewarding. The Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier translation (Vintage) is the authoritative English edition.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000) Highly accessible and often moving. hooks writes philosophy through memoir, cultural criticism, and direct engagement with the reader's experience. Essential for this chapter's argument about love as practice.

Contemporary Philosophy

Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (2004) A short, clear book expanding his account of love as caring. Chapter 1 ("On Caring") and Chapter 2 ("The Dear Self") are most relevant. Frankfurt writes with unusual clarity for a professional philosopher.

Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) Essays on how literature illuminates things about love and the emotions that pure argument cannot. The essays on Henry James and Proust are particularly valuable. Nussbaum argues that philosophical arguments about love need to be tested against the rich particularity of actual experience — which is why literature is philosophically important.

Robert Nozick, The Examined Life, Chapter 5: "Love's Bond" (1989) Nozick's account of the "we" in romantic love. The whole book is readable; this chapter is the relevant one. Nozick writes accessibly and draws on personal experience in a way unusual for analytical philosophy.

Gregory Vlastos, "The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato" (1981) The influential critical paper on Plato's account of love — the source of the argument that Diotima cannot explain why we love particular people. Available in Vlastos's Platonic Studies (Princeton University Press). Requires some philosophical background but is not technical.

Non-Western Perspectives

Tu Weiming, Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (1979) An accessible introduction to Confucian ethics by one of its most important contemporary interpreters. Tu focuses on ren and its implications for how we understand personal relationships.

Bryan Van Norden, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (2011) A clear, comprehensive introduction covering Confucius, Mencius, Mozi, and Zhuangzi. The chapter on Confucius is directly relevant; Mozi's universal love (jian ai) offers an interesting contrast to the structured reciprocity of Confucian relationships.

Augustine Shutte, Ubuntu: An Ethic for a New South Africa (2001) The most philosophically rigorous treatment of Ubuntu in English. Shutte examines Ubuntu as a comprehensive ethical framework and its implications for how we understand persons, relationships, and community.

Mogobe Ramose, African Philosophy Through Ubuntu (1999) A more demanding but important treatment. Ramose argues for Ubuntu as a foundational philosophical concept, not just an ethical principle.

Philosophy and Psychology Together

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956) The book bell hooks builds on. Fromm's central argument — that love is a skill that requires practice, knowledge, and discipline — is stated here with great clarity. Short and still widely read.

Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (2008) Not philosophy, but a clinical psychologist applying attachment theory to adult romantic relationships. Useful companion to the philosophical frameworks. Johnson shows what secure attachment looks like in practice.

Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love (2012) Another accessible attachment-theory treatment of romantic relationships. More practically oriented than Johnson's book.

Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985) For the more technical reader interested in how attachment and relational knowing develop. Stern's account of "intersubjectivity" — the way infants and caregivers share subjective states — has philosophical as well as psychological implications.

Literary and Cultural Perspectives

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977) A remarkable and strange book — a philosophical meditation on the experience of being in love, written as a series of fragments exploring the characteristic thoughts, anxieties, and moods of the lover. Not systematic philosophy, but philosophically serious.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960) Lewis's analysis of four types of love — affection (storge), friendship (philia), romantic love (eros), and charity (agape). Written from a Christian perspective but widely accessible and often insightful regardless of religious orientation. A useful comparison to Aristotle's taxonomy.

bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) A companion volume to All About Love, focusing on women's experience of love and the ways in which cultural narratives about romantic love can work against women's actual flourishing.

A Note on Approach

The philosophy of love is one area where academic philosophy and lived experience are particularly close together. The arguments in the primary texts are not just theoretical — they are about things you have experienced, are experiencing, or will experience. The most useful way to read these texts is to bring your own experience into conversation with them: not to ask "is this argument valid?" in the abstract, but to ask "does this account match what I know about how love actually works?" The texts that survive this test most fully are the ones worth returning to.