Search results for ""Author Irving Singer""

Beginning with a discussion of Kant, Schopenhauer, and others about the morality of sex and the morality of compassion, Explorations in Love and Sex offers a panoramic view of the philosophy of love from its beginnings in Plato up to the present. It examines the nature and limitations of sexual pluralism, and elaborates on Irving Singer's earlier ideas about appraisal and bestowal as well as various other distinctions he makes. The book's chapters are both philosophical and historical, and addressed to the average person who wants to understand the curious set of emotions called love.

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In the first edition of Sex: A Philosophical Primer, Singer offered a new conception of sex, locating it within a spectrum that also includes love and compassion. He suggested that this conception improves upon the work of theorists who tend to relegate sex, love, and compassion to separate and distinct compartments. Singer further argues that sex in human beings is normally—perhaps always in some degree—a composite of the appetitive and the interpersonal, a view that becomes the basis for his later remarks about the relative value of individual sex acts, as well as their place within the aesthetic and moral dimensions of human nature. In the present, expanded edition, Singer supplements the 2001 chapters with a timely and stimulating essay that focuses upon marriage, particularly same-sex marriage. Singer maintains that questions about sex are fundamental in all thinking about the marital condition, and addresses the problem of same-sex legitimization and rights to material benefits by analyzing the nature of marriage, union, and family in their relation to sexuality and love. For first-time and seasoned readers alike, Singer's lucid new reflections will clarify current and emerging issues in the philosophy of sex. Irving Singer is professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of many books, among them Explorations in Love and Sex, Feeling and Imagination, and his trilogies Meaning in Life and The Nature of Love.

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This book explores elemental principles in the study of sex while addressing readers who are not trained philosophers as well as those who are. Singer locates sex within a spectrum that also includes love and compassion. He claims that fundamental mistakes have persistently occurred because numerous theorists relegate sex, love, and compassion to separate and distinct compartments. His emphasis upon the internal linkage between sexuality and the varieties of love is further elaborated in later portions of the book: in relation to a distinction that Singer makes between 'the sensuous' and 'the passionate,' followed by consecutive ideas about the nature and valuation of sex. Discussing sex as both an appetite and an interpersonal drive, Singer argues that much philosophical confusion has resulted from the doctrines of those who constrain sexuality within either of these to the detriment of the other. What is sexual for human beings is normally, and perhaps always in some degree, a composite of the appetitive and the interpersonal. In us sex is generically a function of each. This conception of appetitive and interpersonal strands as unified in our sexuality then becomes the basis for his remarks about the relative value of individual sex acts as well as their place within the aesthetic and moral dimension of human nature.

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