Some important points made in the anthology The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, Solomon and Higgins, eds.
This is a volume I know fairly well from its contents and the philosophical literature around it, so let me draw on that alongside what the search confirms about the table of contents.
The anthology (University Press of Kansas, 1991) is structured in four parts — two covering historical texts, two covering contemporary essays — and its overall editorial argument is already embedded in its title's bracketed word: the editors insist that erotic love, rather than being a mere passion philosophy ought to discipline or sublimate, is itself a philosophically serious subject with its own irreducible logic.
The editors' own framing (Introduction and Solomon's concluding essay)
Solomon and Higgins push back against the long tradition, running from Plato's ascent passage in the Symposium through Kant and much of analytic ethics, in which eros is merely the starting point for something higher — philosophical ascent, moral duty, agape. Their counter-claim is that erotic particularity is not a deficiency but a feature: love of this person, in this body, with this history, is not an imperfect approximation of universal love but a distinct and valuable form of human self-definition. Solomon's closing piece, "The Virtue of (Erotic) Love," makes this explicit against his own ironic epigraph ("Love is nice but it is not a virtue") — he ends up arguing that erotic love, properly understood, is a virtue, a cultivated disposition that involves self-knowledge, generosity, and the kind of shared identity he had developed in The Passions.
From the classical section
The Platonic selections (from the Symposium) are included partly to be contested. Diotima's ladder — the move from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls to Beauty itself — sets up the anthology's central tension. Sappho's fragments provide an implicit rebuke: erotic desire in her poetry is bodily, specific, and not oriented toward any transcendent Form.
Freud's contributions
The three Freud pieces together make a connected argument: erotic life is structured by a fundamental tension between aim-inhibited and aim-uninhibited love; narcissism is constitutive of object-love rather than opposed to it (we love others partly through the mirror of our idealized selves); and "civilized" sexual morality produces neurotic suffering by demanding renunciation beyond what psychic life can sustain. This is presented not as pathology-mongering but as a serious theoretical challenge to romantic idealism.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
The excerpt from Firestone is one of the anthology's most provocative inclusions. Her argument is that romantic love, as it actually functions in patriarchal society, is not merely compatible with women's oppression but is one of its primary mechanisms — the ideology that reconciles women to their own subordination. This makes her a critic not just of bad relationships but of the social institution of romantic love as such, placing her in productive tension with the more affirmative essays around her.
Irving Singer, The Nature of Love
Singer's contribution represents one of the anthology's major theoretical poles. He distinguishes appraisal (valuing someone for their objective properties) from bestowal (conferring value on someone beyond their merited worth). His claim is that genuine love essentially involves bestowal — it creates value rather than merely recognizing it. This has been enormously influential and is the direct target of several later essays that worry about its apparent arbitrariness.
Martha Nussbaum on Alcibiades
Nussbaum's "The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato's Symposium" is arguably the most philosophically dense piece in the contemporary section. Her reading centers on what Alcibiades' speech reveals that Diotima's cannot: the irreducible vulnerability that attends loving a particular person. For Nussbaum, Alcibiades exposes the cost of Socrates' philosophical apatheia — Socrates has indeed achieved the self-sufficiency Diotima describes, but at the cost of genuine responsiveness to another person. Erotic love, on Nussbaum's reading, requires the kind of openness to being changed and wounded that Socratic ascent precisely forecloses.
Robert Nozick, "Love's Bond"
Nozick's essay advances the "we" thesis: romantic love involves the formation of a new entity, a shared identity, such that each partner comes to define their own interests partly in terms of the other's. This is not mere interdependence but ontological: the boundaries of the self are redrawn. He is careful to distinguish this from self-abnegation — the "we" is constituted by both.
Annette Baier and the trust dimension
Baier's contribution brings an ethic-of-care perspective to bear, emphasizing that love is not primarily a cognitive or even emotional state but a relation of trust — structured vulnerability over time. This connects the philosophy of love to her broader project of rehabilitating trust as a central moral concept neglected by Kantian and contractarian ethics.
Amélie Rorty
Rorty's essay complicates the unity of "love" as a concept, arguing that what we call love is a family of quite different relations — desire, attachment, care, admiration, identification — that don't reduce to a single structure. This deflationary, pluralist move is important methodologically: it suggests that many of the classic debates (Is love a feeling or a disposition? Is it altruistic or self-interested?) are pseudo-debates generated by assuming too much uniformity in the phenomenon.
The feminist cluster
Beyond Firestone, the anthology includes Kathryn Pauly Morgan on Beauvoir, Elizabeth Rapaport, and Karen Horney. Taken together they press the question of whether the philosophical idealization of erotic love has systematically obscured its gendered power dynamics. Morgan in particular shows how Beauvoir's analysis of love under patriarchy is both a critique of bad faith and a structural-sociological claim, not merely a psychological one.
The anthology's lasting value is precisely this tension it sustains without resolving: between love as self-transcendence (Plato, Singer's bestowal) and love as self-constitution (Solomon, Nozick's "we"); between love as the site of human flourishing (Nussbaum, Baier) and love as ideological mystification (Firestone, the feminist critics). It refuses to let philosophy domesticate eros while also refusing to abandon philosophical analysis of it entirely.
This is a volume I know fairly well from its contents and the philosophical literature around it, so let me draw on that alongside what the search confirms about the table of contents.
The anthology (University Press of Kansas, 1991) is structured in four parts — two covering historical texts, two covering contemporary essays — and its overall editorial argument is already embedded in its title's bracketed word: the editors insist that erotic love, rather than being a mere passion philosophy ought to discipline or sublimate, is itself a philosophically serious subject with its own irreducible logic.
The editors' own framing (Introduction and Solomon's concluding essay)
Solomon and Higgins push back against the long tradition, running from Plato's ascent passage in the Symposium through Kant and much of analytic ethics, in which eros is merely the starting point for something higher — philosophical ascent, moral duty, agape. Their counter-claim is that erotic particularity is not a deficiency but a feature: love of this person, in this body, with this history, is not an imperfect approximation of universal love but a distinct and valuable form of human self-definition. Solomon's closing piece, "The Virtue of (Erotic) Love," makes this explicit against his own ironic epigraph ("Love is nice but it is not a virtue") — he ends up arguing that erotic love, properly understood, is a virtue, a cultivated disposition that involves self-knowledge, generosity, and the kind of shared identity he had developed in The Passions.
From the classical section
The Platonic selections (from the Symposium) are included partly to be contested. Diotima's ladder — the move from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls to Beauty itself — sets up the anthology's central tension. Sappho's fragments provide an implicit rebuke: erotic desire in her poetry is bodily, specific, and not oriented toward any transcendent Form.
Freud's contributions
The three Freud pieces together make a connected argument: erotic life is structured by a fundamental tension between aim-inhibited and aim-uninhibited love; narcissism is constitutive of object-love rather than opposed to it (we love others partly through the mirror of our idealized selves); and "civilized" sexual morality produces neurotic suffering by demanding renunciation beyond what psychic life can sustain. This is presented not as pathology-mongering but as a serious theoretical challenge to romantic idealism.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
The excerpt from Firestone is one of the anthology's most provocative inclusions. Her argument is that romantic love, as it actually functions in patriarchal society, is not merely compatible with women's oppression but is one of its primary mechanisms — the ideology that reconciles women to their own subordination. This makes her a critic not just of bad relationships but of the social institution of romantic love as such, placing her in productive tension with the more affirmative essays around her.
Irving Singer, The Nature of Love
Singer's contribution represents one of the anthology's major theoretical poles. He distinguishes appraisal (valuing someone for their objective properties) from bestowal (conferring value on someone beyond their merited worth). His claim is that genuine love essentially involves bestowal — it creates value rather than merely recognizing it. This has been enormously influential and is the direct target of several later essays that worry about its apparent arbitrariness.
Martha Nussbaum on Alcibiades
Nussbaum's "The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato's Symposium" is arguably the most philosophically dense piece in the contemporary section. Her reading centers on what Alcibiades' speech reveals that Diotima's cannot: the irreducible vulnerability that attends loving a particular person. For Nussbaum, Alcibiades exposes the cost of Socrates' philosophical apatheia — Socrates has indeed achieved the self-sufficiency Diotima describes, but at the cost of genuine responsiveness to another person. Erotic love, on Nussbaum's reading, requires the kind of openness to being changed and wounded that Socratic ascent precisely forecloses.
Robert Nozick, "Love's Bond"
Nozick's essay advances the "we" thesis: romantic love involves the formation of a new entity, a shared identity, such that each partner comes to define their own interests partly in terms of the other's. This is not mere interdependence but ontological: the boundaries of the self are redrawn. He is careful to distinguish this from self-abnegation — the "we" is constituted by both.
Annette Baier and the trust dimension
Baier's contribution brings an ethic-of-care perspective to bear, emphasizing that love is not primarily a cognitive or even emotional state but a relation of trust — structured vulnerability over time. This connects the philosophy of love to her broader project of rehabilitating trust as a central moral concept neglected by Kantian and contractarian ethics.
Amélie Rorty
Rorty's essay complicates the unity of "love" as a concept, arguing that what we call love is a family of quite different relations — desire, attachment, care, admiration, identification — that don't reduce to a single structure. This deflationary, pluralist move is important methodologically: it suggests that many of the classic debates (Is love a feeling or a disposition? Is it altruistic or self-interested?) are pseudo-debates generated by assuming too much uniformity in the phenomenon.
The feminist cluster
Beyond Firestone, the anthology includes Kathryn Pauly Morgan on Beauvoir, Elizabeth Rapaport, and Karen Horney. Taken together they press the question of whether the philosophical idealization of erotic love has systematically obscured its gendered power dynamics. Morgan in particular shows how Beauvoir's analysis of love under patriarchy is both a critique of bad faith and a structural-sociological claim, not merely a psychological one.
The anthology's lasting value is precisely this tension it sustains without resolving: between love as self-transcendence (Plato, Singer's bestowal) and love as self-constitution (Solomon, Nozick's "we"); between love as the site of human flourishing (Nussbaum, Baier) and love as ideological mystification (Firestone, the feminist critics). It refuses to let philosophy domesticate eros while also refusing to abandon philosophical analysis of it entirely.
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