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Understanding Love
Philosophy, Film, and Fiction
Edited by Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau
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Book Presentation:
• Draws on notable figures not just in philosophy but also from other areas of the humanities.
• Seeks to analyze and understand love through both literature and film.
• Discusses a wide range of types of love (friendship, parental love, romantic love, love for animals) as well as a wide range of films, from old Holywood through to the 21est century.
This collection of original essays, written by scholars from disciplines across the humanities, addresses a wide range of questions about love through a focus on individual films, novels, plays, and works of philosophy. The essays touch on many varieties of love, including friendship, romantic love, parental love, and even the love of an author for her characters. How do social forces shape the types of love that can flourish and sustain themselves? What is the relationship between love and passion? Is love between human and nonhuman animals possible? What is the role of projection in love? These questions and more are explored through an investigation of works by authors ranging from Henrik Ibsen to Ian McEwan, from Rousseau to the Coen Brothers.
About the authors:
Edited by Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau Susan Wolf is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work focuses chiefly on ethics and its close relations in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy, and aesthetics. She is author of Freedom Within Reason (OUP, 1990) and Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton, 2010), as well as numerous articles ranging widely over topics in ethics. Christopher Grau is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University. He specializes in ethics , topics in metaphysics, and philosophical work on film. He has published articles in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Journal of Moral Philosophy, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, The Southern Journal of Philosophy and Philosophical Topics. He has also previously edited two books on philosophy and film: Philosophers Explore The Matrix (OUP, 2005), and Philosophers on Film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Routledge, 2009).
Press Reviews:
"Born out of a desire to bring together disparate voices across the humanities, this volume looks at love using a "non-disciplinarian" model of interdisciplinarity... Highly Recommended." - S. J. Shaw, CHOICE
"The book represents a heavily interdisciplinary approach through which one can glean invocations for what might count as love or, more often, what ought to count as good, healthy love. The book offers a multiplicity of accounts, wonderfully illustrated through examples from literature and film, some of which serve as foils to ideal love and others that seem to urge us to broaden our folk-psychological concept of it, or at least to not dogmatically demarcate the boundaries of the concept along familiar lines." - Allison Fritz, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
"Reading these essays in conjunction with viewing or reading the works on which they focus can be instructive, both about how much is in these works and about ways of reading films, novels, and plays more generally.This is a book that can be enjoyed in many ways over time by reading the essays and going to the art works discussed armed with new questions and with new knowledge about the meanings of the art works discussed." - Metapsychology Reviews Online
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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