Writing over two and a half thousand years ago, Plato points to the similarities between the experience of love and the desire for knowledge. The arts of seduction are central in each case – to induce the beloved to accept and reciprocate the lover's approaches parallels the art of charming the uninitiated into the ways of philosophy. Plato's Symposium, perhaps the most enduring and influential philosophical reflection on love, describes not only the experience of erotic love but also the passions of the mind. It reveals links between the erotics of sexuality and philosophical inquiry and demonstrates how we are all, in the throes of erotic love, also lovers of knowledge. It intertwines these experiences while also showing how one may lead to the other.

Constructed as a series of stories of love recounted by a group of friends during a drinking party, Plato's Symposium inaugurates a philosophy founded on love. From Alcibiades' impassioned tale of his unrequited love of Socrates, to Aristophanes' story of love as the reuniting of souls cut asunder by the vengeful gods, to Socrates' account of love as mediation and ascent, the Symposium not only paints varying images of the relation between lover and beloved, it also reveals how philosophy, like love, arises through the work of the passions. In this account, philosophy is more than logical analyses and reasoned arguments. It is an impassioned yearning for greater knowledge and understanding.