Marriage is not a timeless ritual devoted to consecrating the private feelings between two individuals, but rather a legal and social institution policed “at its entrance and exit” by the state and capable of extraordinary change over time. Beginning in the early colonial period and ending with gay and lesbian marriage reform in the early twenty-first century, this chapter traces three crucial shifts in the history of marriage: first, the shift from informal cohabitation to official state-sanctioned marriage; second, the gradual tilting of the balance away from male headship to liberal individualism; and finally, the deinstitutionalisation of marriage in the early twenty-first century. On one level, this is a story of progress. For much of the Victorian era marriage was an institution that legally codified relations of male dominance and female submission, confining women to the private sphere, turning them into dependent wives, taking away their children in cases of divorce and sanctioning marital violence. A series of legislative shifts across the two centuries, particularly the Married Women’s Property Acts and Divorce Law Reform, as well as social movements towards gender equality have replaced the principle of male headship that once characterised marriage with more egalitarian notions of liberal individualism. What constitutes the terms of marriage and the partners to a marriage is now largely a matter for individuals rather than the state. Yet this legal history is more elliptical than linear, and less triumphalist than we might imagine. Our preference for cohabitation today could be paralleled to that of colonists in early colonial Australia, polygamy continues to be prohibited by law and, far from marriage having been displaced by de-facto arrangements it maintains its position at the pinnacle of social and legal hierarchies of intimacy.

This chapter investigates Plato’s thoughts on poetic creativity by tracing a path from a traditional divine inspiration view to a new kind of inspiration, which transforms the poet into a philosopher. The path begins with divine inspiration in the Ion, then turns to the power of public poetry in the Gorgias. Next is the beginning of a new conception of poetic creativity in the Symposium. By considering poetry as a kind of communication between a lover and the beloved, Plato views poetry as a basis for a philosophical ascent to the Form of Beauty. In the Republic, Plato emphasizes further the power of poetry by classifying traditional poetry as a degraded kind of imitation. He highlights its power to corrupt the listener by strengthening irrational emotions. In the Phaedrus, Plato extends his notion of poetic creativity to linguistic communication in general, thereby developing further his notion of philosophical communication as a creative force generated by love. In the end, Plato pulls together both his denunciation of traditional poetry and his new conception of poetic creativity by offering a new type of public poetry in the Laws, consisting ultimately of his own body of laws.

A commitment ensures I forsake other options and allows another to make predictions about my future actions. Emotions are physiological and psychological experiences that serve a survival function by motivating our behavior. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, an emotional commitment is a mating strategy with a psychological, physiological, and behavioral milieu naturally selected to forge an ensuring partnership with short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. Using Dawkins’ concept of genesmanship, people have the predisposition to commit to another because this long-term alliance will increase the likelihood of passing on their own genetic legacy. Women and men faced differing reproductive issues over the course of human evolution, and through sexual selection, the sexes have developed competing mating strategies to solve problems of maximizing fitness. Women have far fewer reproductive opportunities and far more substantial childbearing and childrearing costs compared to men, and therefore making a an emotional commitment to a man, and securing one from him in return, would have allowed for a better chance of offspring survival in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) by access to provisioning and protection. With our minds still operating today as they did over the course of millions of years of human existence, women world-wide still seek emotional commitment to a greater extent than men. In this chapter, I discuss the nature of emotional commitment, and the significance of love, romance, and marriage. Moreover, emotional commitment to others (nonromantic partners) also serves a survival function. I therefore also discuss emotional commitment to kin (parent-child attachment, other family) and to non-kin (friends, pets).

With special reference to Diotima’s teaching in Plato’s Symposium, this chapter discusses the central importance to Hermetic spirituality of beauty and reverence (eusebeia), Hermetic psychological theory, and the centrality of imagination to the Hermetic concept of “becoming aiōn” and gaining cosmic consciousness.

Dante’s Francesca, damned for what she claims Love did to her, refers to Lancelot as cotanto amante, “so great a lover,” at the very moment she recounts that her unnamed consort in hell kissed her on the mouth. The problem is not just that she has been befuddled by romance, misapplying it to the facts on the ground, but that she has been seduced by the wrong story and ignoring the greatest of lovers. “If only,” she says wistfully, “the king of the universe were my friend.

Gabriel Zamosc argues that a proper understanding of TSZ will help to advance the contemporary transhumanist movement that often claims to be inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch. According to Zamosc, Zarathustra warns us against falsely or sickly transcendent versions of his superhuman ideal that are actually a veiled hatred of our unchangeable human-all-too-human past. Indeed, this is why he teaches eternal recurrence, in order to show us how to love this past as an embodiment of our creative will to power. The transhumanist movement must therefore incorporate this doctrine so as to secure a joyful version of itself that embraces our transitional destiny of forever remaining mere bridges to the superhuman.

J. L. Andruska sees close affinities between the Song of Songs and Wisdom Literature. She acknowledges that this is a minority position, surveying the history of reception, which has offered various alternative interpretations (e.g. literal, allegorical, cultic, feminist). She then defines Wisdom Literature, centralising the forms found in ANE advice literature, the concern for wisdom, and the intended character transformation of the audience. All of these are found in the Song. Andruska discusses the mashal (proverb) in 8:6-7 and the intergenerational instructions found in the refrains (2:7, 3:5, 8:4). She argues that the Song offers wisdom about love, didactically advocating one particular vision of love (in contrast to other ANE love songs, which give varied depictions of love). The purpose of the Song is to transform its readers into wise lovers who follow the example of the lovers in the Song.

The individual of our times is often characterized by a tendency toward narcissism and depression. What is the dynamic underlying these phenomena? How do these aspects correlate to the body image concept? Today we can also note that dynamics of counter-power inhabit the social system and trigger some processes: in the contemporary approach to the body, where frequently there is no “healthy distance,” there are difficulties in harmonizing sexual performance and tenderness, because people are often treated like things, or simply like soulless bodies (which is the point of view associated with pornography). The experience of falling in love also tends to assume the typical connotations of mercantile exchange in respect of particularly desirable personal and social characteristics, reflecting a more or less unconscious drive to obtain the best and most convenient things that concrete reality can offer. Contemporary psychological and anthropological perspectives on these topics are presented.

An important factor in progressive Victorian women’s interest in Germany is the decades-long friendship of Anna Jameson and Ottilie von Goethe, in itself a sustained form of cultural exchange and a bond that opened cultural exchange to others in Germany and England. First exploring the backgrounds of Jameson’s and Goethe’s openness to other cultures and foreigners (Jameson’s Anglo-Irish heritage, the German and English reading circles of Goethe and her mother), the chapter turns to Goethe’s friendship circle and the erotic same-sex relationship of Adele Schopenhauer, who had fallen in love with Goethe as a young woman, and Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen. These two were attracted to Jameson, who responded warmly to Mertens-Schaaffhausen. Jameson herself fell in love with Goethe on meeting her, though Goethe’s heteronormativity precluded reciprocal feelings, and desire modulated into deep, steadfast friendship from 1833 until Jameson’s death. The chapter then traces the phases and significance of this friendship, including Jameson’s willingness for almost two years to risk her career and income to accompany Goethe to Vienna when the widowed Goethe became pregnant out of wedlock and gave birth to a daughter she named after Jameson.

The five widows of the executed conspirators and the five wives whose men were transported leave poignant records of both impoverishment and courage. Before the trials, most couples seem to have been faithful to each other, William Davidson excepted. Left with 26 children to care for between them, the women had no support other than radicals’ charity. Most disappeared miserably from history. But Susan Thistlewood and Arthur’s illegitimate son Julian made good in the long run: Julian became a Parisian painter and fathered a noted impressionist. And Ings the butcher’s letters to his wife Celia suggest a loving marriage, and she lived adequately as a widow.

The chapter examines Jacob Grimm’s political biography and presents his long government service in German principalities, punctuated by dramatic displays of public political commitment. Faced with the conflict between rigid, patriarchal rule by monarchs to whom he was often tied as a civil servant and his own vision of the nation as a natural community of love, Grimm hoped for the eventual appearance of a loving king genuinely attached to one national people. The resulting harmony between the people and the king would, Grimm believed, resolve a key political tension of his day, namely the one between princely sovereignty and popular influence. The chapter also reconstructs the curiously thin nature of Grimm’s political beliefs. While he was confident and at times strident in debates over the territorial shape of the nation, he was less vocal on other, domestic political issues, including discussions of rights and the distribution of vital goods in a society increasingly dominated by the so-called social question. In these areas, his nationalism provided no guidance. Grimm concentrated on one dimension of political legitimacy – national self-determination – and had little to say about other aspects of governance.

It is often held that only by the time of the late Sophist did Plato discover a way of dealing with puzzles about the possibility of false judgement and false statement. Earlier dialogues such as Euthydemus and Theaetetus which introduce the puzzles are thought to labour under assumptions about how language relates to reality, born of inexperience in semantics, that stood in his way. Here it is argued that in both those dialogues Plato is in fact doing something subtler than captivity to a crude picture of the way language works would allow. A more attentive reading of these two texts makes it clear that he has already identified the structural relation between subject and predicate as the key: not only to understanding how false judgement is possible, but through that to bigger questions about the relation of thought and language to the world in general. The Euthydemus, in particular, shows us how many more ways there are for an argument to go wrong than are dreamed of in the logic books. It even suggests that a failure in logic may sometimes be simultaneously a failure in love.

“Tragic Implication” looks at the links between the first and last essays in Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell’s concept of acknowledgment as it emerges in the last two essays in this collection has received a fair amount of attention. This essay, by contrast, looks at his work on and in ordinary language philosophy as it emerges in this first extension and radicalization of Austin’s work in the title essay, and shows the latency of tragedy in that early work, even as Cavell goes on to find Austin’s work unable to accommodate tragedy. It thus links Cavell’s earliest work on Austin, with his latest work in A Pitch of Philosophy, and returns to Cavell’s reading of Lear to show that it is King Lear that teaches him his differences with Austin.

Chapter 3 connects Kierkegaardian critiques of amoralism to discussions of wantonness and Humeanism in action theory. By discussing the cultivation of love (and higher-order motives), it is argued that practical rational agency requires moral normativity. The chapter then presents and discusses Kierkegaard’s strong views about the inescapability of morality, interpreting it as a form of constitutivism concerning moral normativity, which tries to derive practical normativity from practical agency itself. However, Kierkegaard seems to combine such constitutivism with the theological view that moral obligations depend on us belonging to God as his creation. Still, he is not a divine command theorist who sees divine commands as necessary and sufficient for moral obligations. Rather, he sketches a form of moral realism and criticizes subjectivism in ethics.