I teach at the New York Institute of Technology, which has campuses in Manhattan and in Nassau County. Despite its mandate of preparing students for careers in various majors – electrical and mechanical engineering, architecture, business, health care – it has always required philosophy as part of its core curriculum, and has had as many as four full-time philosophy professors. The school is friendly to the introduction of new courses, provided that the Curriculum Committee properly vets them.
As a professor of undergraduates at a school that does not have a philosophy major, I often look for ways to make my own work in philosophy both relevant and comprehensible to my students. Now I have done a great deal of work on the German philosophers Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann. Scheler is notable for having given the emotions, especially love, an epistemological function. Love opens us to values, and to the things, persons, and events that bear value. Hartmann called love for another person the highest and purest of human emotions. Why not design a course around this highest of emotions that would give young people the thoughts of deep thinkers and poets on love as a framework upon which they could conduct and measure their own furtive attempts to enter lovingly into the emotional life of other persons?
From AAPT meetings and articles in the APA Newsletter on Philosophy, I was aware that such courses were offered around the country, and I drew upon these resources. Many courses on love and sex are aimed at analyzing moral problems arising from them, but I was more interested in the phenomenology of the experience. This will be apparent from the questions on the syllabus that I direct at the students. Finding a textbook that would correspond to these interests was easy enough, after I got my hands on several anthologies.
The core pedagogical goals that any professor of philosophy wishes to reach are the growth of students in their capacity to grasp the materials studied and to articulate their own responses to them in exams and in discussions with other students. With that in mind, the course is designed to have students work in groups to create tabs presenting, analyzing, and perhaps illustrating one specific unit of the course (the units concern, among other issues, the nature, sociology, psychology and the value of love and sex), and then to work as a class to create a coherent website for the course into which each group’s efforts may be incorporated. Students tend to enjoy the process. I find, however, judging from their written work, that my goals can be achieved in a standard lecture/discussion course. A great deal of classroom time is spent in creating a website that has no additional pedagogical value, except, perhaps, for what I call the development of groupmanship. A great deal of oversight has to be exercised by the instructor in order to ensure that the students stay on target, and that each student participates appropriately in the process.
Since this was the first time I taught a course on love and sex, it took me a couple of sections before I got a general sense of what elements of the course were more meaningful to the students. Giving them every week an in-class ten-minute writing exercise on some topic we had discussed during the proceeding discussion session gave me insight not only into their levels of skill in writing and analysis, but also into what materials they were appropriating both intellectually and personally.
At the end of one semester, I included the following question in a final exam and made answering it mandatory:
“Since this is the first time I’ve taught this course, I would like you to tell me what if anything you got out of it. In answering, argue the following theses: 1) The readings on the nature of love were relevant/irrelevant to my own experience of love and sex; 2) The readings on feminism enlightened me about/failed to establish the differential and unjust position of women in marriage; 3) The readings in the psychology of love and sex helped me to understand the role of love and sex in our psychic life/gave incorrect assessments of the psychology of love; 4) showed me/ failed to account for the different forms of love; 5) gave me deep insight into what it is to love another person/gave me no insight into the love of another person at all.”
Here is the syllabus for the course.
NEW YORK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Draft of Core Seminar: The Philosophy of Love and Sex
Proposed by Eugene Kelly Professor,
Department of Social Science
PART ONE CONTENT
Philosophers since Plato have concerned themselves with the nature of being human, that is, with the peculiar characteristics of human life that mark us off from other living creatures. Usually the focus has been on the unique human capacity for reason and for its adjunct, language, which makes rational thought and communication possible. But attention has sometimes been drawn to other perhaps minor but nonetheless unique features of being human, such as our willingness to kill members of our own species and even members of our immediate communities, our presumed freedom of the will and its attendant moral responsibility, our upright posture, our talents for tool making, for art and government, and even our capacity for laughter and tears.
Yet perhaps the most peculiar feature of human beings, one again unique to our species, is the phenomenon of personal love of one human being for another. Of course animals, too, are capable of sexual love, but they do not seem able to love the unique personhood of another of their species, as humans do. This course will consider the phenomena attendant upon that capacity: romantic love, friendship, marriage and family, and the psychological and sociological sources of the typical relations between the sexes. Some of the moral questions raised by these phenomena will be considered as we proceed.
PART TWO REQUIREDTEXTBOOK
Solomon, Robert C., and Kathleen M. Higgins, Eds. The Philosophy of Erotic Love (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1991).
PART THREE PROCEDURES
The first seven weeks of the course will have a lecture-discussion format, in which essays on love and sex, contained in the primary text, will be discussed and analyzed. This phase of the semester will culminate in a written midterm exam, in which students will be asked to synthesize themes of the essays under the following rubrics:
The Nature of Love
Personal Love
Marriage and Fidelity
Feminist Issues in Love and Marriage
The Psychology and Sociology of Love
The Value of Love.
In a three-page paper on one of the six rubrics, which responds synthetically and succinctly to several questions about the material contained under that rubric. This paper will serve as a foundation for the second part of the course.
On the seventh week of the semester, when papers have been critiqued, graded, and returned to the students, the class will be broken into six action groups, one for each of the rubrics. Each group will have as members those students whose three-page papers concerned that particular rubric.
Each group will contribute, under the guidance of the instructor, to the creation of a website called “The Philosophy of Love and Sex.” The site will have six tabs, one for each rubric, each containing the work by the corresponding action-group.
During the first of two weekly sessions after the midterm, the class will discuss one or two articles dealing with one of the rubrics. These discussions should be incorporated in the tab developed by the action group assigned to it.
In the second weekly session after the midterm, members of each group will meet to read each other’s three-page paper; the task of each group will be to synthesize the papers. This means (a) organizing the material contained in the papers; (b) placing some materials in the foreground, others in the background, and dropping others entirely; (c) checking for the correctness of English and clarity of thought. The product will be a paper of two or three pages that presents the essential insights into its theme; the supporting evidence for these insights; and the theme’s continuing significance for an account of the human being.
In later weeks, members of each action group will make decisions regarding what supplementary materials may be added to the presentation to increase its communicative value based on their estimation of their relevance, value and validity. The tabs should contain at least some of the following (a) links to material closely related to the presentation of the theory; (b) slides, where relevant; (c) pictures of relevant persons or things; (d) illustrative quotations from the authors read; (e) literary or other artistic expressions of any of the ideas contained in the presentation. Students should formulate questions and participate in give-and-take about them, for persistence in analysis enables a deeper development of the issue.
When the tabs are about ready, the members of each action group will present to the members of the other action groups, that is, to the whole class, via a video or projection screen, their contribution to the website. Based on the knowledge of the whole, representative members of each action-group will met with representatives of the other committees to make decisions regarding uniformity of format. The other members of the class will meet to create a home page for the website, with a link to a general bibliography of relevant print and electronic materials.
Students may, if they wish, add a separate concluding tab containing any of the following:(a) a statement of the relative importance of the philosophy of love and sex for college students today; (b) a list of the names and e-mail addresses and photos of the class.
PART FOUR OBJECTIVES
CONTENT
Students must demonstrate college-level knowledge, on essays and examinations of the nature and content of the themes falling under the six rubrics;
Students will evince skills in finding and evaluating print and electronic sources of information, and integrate that material with their own presentations of the assigned tasks;
Students will be able to compare theories on love and sex developed by different cultures at different historical moments, and to evaluate them with reference to their own experience.
ANALYTICAL SKILLS
Students will demonstrate the capacity to distinguish between theories, facts, and philosophical speculation, and to describe methods appropriate to each;
They will criticize intelligently sophisticated intellectual material and make judgments concerning the reliability of information found in a variety of sources for its relevance to their writing;
They will learn to create organized and clear accounts of theories, and present them to others for their evaluation, and evaluate the accounts of others.
GROUPMANSHIP
Students will communicate the content of their written work to members of other groups;
Students will present orally the content of group outcomes to the entire class;
Students, working in groups, will make decisions regarding the product of their common efforts;
Students will learn to criticize each other’s work effectively while working on a common project, thus reflecting the responsibilities of citizenship in the broader community.
PART FIVE EXAMINATIONS
On examinations, students should be able to state the basic insights and theories of the authors we read, give the authors’ supporting evidence for their views, and to criticize and evaluate those views. Students should be able to synthesize (compare and reconcile, if possible) those differing views under any of the six rubrics. Final grades will be calculated with the following weights: Midterm exam, 20%; Three-page paper, 20%; Group participation in the creation of the website, 30%; Final exam, 30%
PART SIX READING ASSIGNMENTS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION DURING THE FIRST SIX WEEKS:
Week 1: The Nature of Love.
Readings: Plato, 13-32; Nussbaum, 279-316.
Plato’s Symposium is, on the surface, a collection of essays on erotic love. But it is also a carefully crafted dialectic – a kind of back and forth exchange of ideas – that reveals some of the conflicts between physical lust, intellectual love of knowledge, and erotic and and agapic love of a particular person. It sets the stage our efforts to understand love’s complex nature. Nussbaum examines love in the Symposium and the failure of the love of Alcibiades for Socrates.
Questions for discussion: Can you find on the Web a diagrammatic representation of Aristophanes’ description of men and women before and after Zeus split them? Agathon believes that Love is a beautiful god. How does Socrates demonstrate that this is not so? Diotima claims that love is the need to give birth to them immortal upon the beautiful. What does that mean, and is it true? Does Alcibiades love Socrates, as he says he does? If so, describe the form this love takes; if not, what is lacking in it? Nussbaum comments on Vlastos’ claim that Plato’s theory of love, as spoken by Diotema, contains nothing of loving affection for concrete human beings. Is this so?
Week 2: Personal Love.
Readings: Hartmann (Handout); Singer, 259-287; Nozick 121-131.
Personal love seems to be of a different kind from mere lustful yearning for another, which can find its satisfaction in the body of any other willing person. In personal love, there is no such interchangeability of bodies and persons: both love and lust is directed at some specific person. It does not aim at the other’s characteristics, but at his or her selfhood. Hartmann sees love as the process by which one’s own person hood is made valuable in its uniqueness by the love of another person. It is a transformative process of life, body, and mind. Nozick’s essay is a phenomenology of love and marriage and the bond they create between persons; you love someone when your well being is affected by changes in the beloved’s well being.
Questions: What does personal love perceive in a beloved person that others do not see? How does personal love “transform” the lives of the lovers? What does Hartmann think about love that is not returned? What does Nozick tell us about how love can eventually lead to marriage?The love of God, or the love of one’s country seems not to contain any loving affection for a unique individual, while the love of one’s dog or cat does. Is the latter more authentic love than the former?
Week 3: Marriage and Fidelity, Seduction and Infidelity
Readings: Singer, 259-287; Milton, 79-84; Kierkegaard (handout); Schopenhauer, 121-131; Marvell (Handout for an assignment).
Singer describes, among other things, romantic love, and traces it to medieval courtly love. John Milton’s short essay considers the justice of divorce where a marriage ends in failure. Schopenhauer’s contribution denounces love and marriage as based illusion that turns our eyes from its true meaning, the propagation of the species. Kierkegaard describes the process of sexual and spiritual seduction and its aftermath. Marvell’s poem is itself a kind of seduction, yet one in the form of an invalid syllogism.
Questions: What does Singer identify as the “idealist” and the “realist” conceptions of the value of love? What does he say about “appraising” people (as potential spouses) and “bestowing value” up on them? Why does she think that one discovers oneself in personal love? Does Kierkegaard’s Seducer argue that one should enjoy personal and erotic love just “for fun?” How might Marvell’s mistress respond fairly to his proposition?
Week 4: Feminist Issues in Love and Marriage.
Readings: Goldman, 204-213; de Beauvoir, 233-240; Firestone, 247-256.
Women often argue that the value of marriage is less for a woman than for a man, and that, even more, marriages is intrinsically unjust. De Beauvoir is considered to be the European inspiration of modem American feminism. She claims that culture, rather than nature, determines a woman’s place in society, and that in a society such as hers, real love becomes difficult but not impossible. Firestone argues that love means something entirely different for men and women, and shows how this difference works itself out “dialectically”to the detriment of women.
Questions: How does the condition of middle-class American women today differ- or does not differ- from that described by Goldman? What does Goldman think is missing for women’s happiness? What does de Beauvoir identify as the central psychological problem of women? How are women the “second” sex? Does Firestone think a genuine marriage of equals is possible at all? If not, why, if so, how?
Week 5: The Psychology of Love
Readings: Freud, 153-176; Jung, 177-189.
What are the roots of love and sex in the human psyche? Freud and Jung, perhaps the two greatest European psychologists of the twentieth century, have remarkably different perspectives on this issue, Freud identifying those roots in an unconscious instincts and Jung in what he calls “archetypes” inherited by the human race.
Questions:What does Freud identify as”psychical impotence” in men? What are its sources? How is it partially resolved by a man conceiving of a woman as a “debased sexual object,” as “ethically inferior” to him? What are the three stages of civilization, and how does the third stage, our own, with its repressive sexual morality, contribute to sexual dissatisfaction and neurosis? Try to make Jung’s metaphor of the “contained” and the “container” in marriage relate to concrete experience.
Week 6: The Value of Love
Readings: Danto, introduction; Gass, 451-466; Morgan, 391-414; Augustine, 44-48.
What is the profound meaning and value of love and sex for human beings? Danto argues that Plato got the value of love all wrong. Perhaps the value of love is “subjective” in the sense that no object is in itself lovable, but love must be bestowed upon it. Perhaps also the capacity to love another person enhances our own person hood. In a later reading, Augustine recalls for us the Fall of Man and the role of sex in our sinful nature and future damnation. Solomon, to the contrary, seeks reasons to affirm erotic love as a virtue.
Questions: Singer, we recall, finds the highest value of love in the love of a person (as in rubric 1). But what is a person? Is personal love impossible, as Gass argues? Then how can the object loved be a value for the lover?
Week 7:
Midterm Examination, first session. From here on, the first session of each week recapitulates the problems discussed under the rubrics along new readings relevant to them. Group work is undertaken each second session according to the schedule under III.
Week 8: First session. The Nature of Love.
Readings: Stendhal, 132-150.
Week 9: First session: Personal Love
Reading: Baier, 433-450; Handout from Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida.
Week 10: First session: Marriage and Fidelity.
Readings: Capellanus, 56-71; Mackey, 336-351.
Week 11: First session Feminist Issues in Love.
Reading: Rapaport, 372-390.
Week 12: First session. The Psychology of Love.
Reading: Horney, 190-201
Week 13: First session. The Value of Love.
Reading: Solomon, 492-518.
Week 14: Presentation of Group Work to the Entire Class.
FINAL EXAMINATION.
PART SEVEN A FEW SUGGESTED ENHANCEMENTS
Film: When Harry Met Sally.
Novel: Pierre Chaderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons. Novel: Alain de Botton, On Love, a Novel (Grove, 1993). Novel: Toni Morrison, Sula (Knopf, 1983).
Novel: Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (many editions).
Novella: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Essays: C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Geoffrey Bles, 1960).
Play: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Opera: Jules Massenet, Manon.
PART EIGHT RELEVANT WEBSITES
Philosophy of Sexuality: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love philosophyofsexandlove.org/
You Tube: Accessto a variety of lectures on sex and love.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article on love:
PhilosophicalPapers: contains an extensive bibliography of newer books and papers on sex and love from a philosophical perspective.
PART NINE SUGGESTIONS FOR FINAL EXAM QUESTIONS/TOPICS FOR TERM PAPERS
Plato’s Symposium identifies three forms of love: erotic, spiritual and personal love. Show how all three may function in what you consider to be an ideal relation between two free and equal partners.
Is personal love only possible where the parties to it are free and equal?
Discuss some of the impediments to personal love discussed by de Beauvoir and Firestone.Does either”idealist”or”realist”love contain the possibility of personal love?
Personal love refers essentially to the”person.” How does N.Hartmann conceive of the person? Are there personal elements in love in the views on love of Kierkegaard’s Seducer? In those of Nozick? of Gass? In Jung’s concept of “containment”?
Nozick argues that not all persons will be enhanced by a loving “we,” for they would be forced to forego extraordinary possibilities. What does he have in mind, and how does he argue for it? Does marriage (or even a “partnership” that is more than temporary) impede the development of extraordinary intellectual talent?
Is lifelong marriage possible?Under what conditions? Can marriage survive adultery? Find among the authors we read reasons to argue that a happy lifelong marriage is possible or impossible.
How does contemporary “bourgeois” society make marriage as a life long loving fidelity difficult or impossible in the view of de Beauvoir, of Gass, of Firestone?
Why does Goldman condemn modern marriage arrangements as destructive of women? Does Freud’s claim, if true, that an “inferiority complex” stalks women make the psychological origins of these modem marriage arrangements clear? What is Goldman’s hope for a better future of love and marriage? What is de Beauvoir’s?
What are the “experiments” in loving that Baier hopes will open us to a new and less “risky” form of love?
Some of our authors – Freud, notably – have argued that to make a woman a love-object for a man she must be “degraded” in some manner. Find such claims (or counter-claims) in Freud, de Beauvoir, Mackey, and Firestone. If this is true, marriage as a relation of free an equal partners would be impossible, and women would be forever the “second sex.”
Whatever the nature of erotic love, it is prompted by deep urges and needs concealed in human nature, and out of these wellsprings erotic love among individuals living in some specific sociological arrangement is generated. Thus erotic love may be freighted with contradictions, tensions, and neuroses. What are the specific sources of love and Eros, according to Plato’s “Aristophanes,” to Freud, to Jung, to Horney?
Hartmann calls personal love the”purest and highest joy, the richest happiness.”Socrates (Diotima) calls spiritual love of eternal beauty the state that makes us worthy of conversing with the gods. Others, perhaps Sappho, Abbe Prévost, or Stendhal, find simple lust and its consummation in intercourse the highest joy in life. Still others, represented by Augustine and Capellanus, consider Eros as the mark of sinfulness and a cause of damnation. Arrange a symposium of three imaginary representatives of each of these assessments of the value of love, and let each draw his talking points from the philosophers discussed this semester.
What is “romantic” love? How is it related to chivalrous or courtly love?
PART NINE NOTE WELL
Policy for make-up exams and missed or late assignments
Discuss the problem with the instructor.
Attendance policy
Only three absences will be allowed. Beyond this number, the student will lose at least ½ a letter grade
Withdrawal policy
A student may withdraw from a course without penalty through the end of the 8th week of class during a 14- or 15-week semester and through the 8th meeting during an 8 week course cycle. After this, the student must be doing passing work in order to receive a W grade. Students who are not passing after the 8th week or equivalent will be assigned the grade of WF.
It is the student’s responsibility to inform the instructor of his/her intention to withdraw from a course. If a student has stopped attending class without completing all assignments and/or examinations, failing grades for the missing work may be factored into the final grade calculation and the instructor for the course may assign the grade of WF. The grade of F is used for students who have completed the course but whose quality of work is below the standard for passing.
Withdrawal forms are available in departmental offices and once completed must be filed with the registrar. Students should be reminded that a W notation could negatively impact their eligibility for financial aid and/or V.A. benefits, as it may change the student’s enrollment status (full-time, part-time, less than part-time). International students may also jeopardize their visa status if they fail to maintain full-time status.
Incompletes
Work must be completed by the end of the semester. If you need an incomplete, you have to sign a paper with the instructor indicting what you owe and how long you have to make up missed work.
Academic integrity and plagiarism policies
Each student enrolled in a course at NYIT agrees that, by taking such course, he or she consents to the submission of all required papers for textual similarity review to any commercial service engaged by NYIT to detect plagiarism. Each student also agrees that all papers submitted to any such service may be included as source documents in the service’s database, solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers.
Plagiarism is the appropriation of all or part of someone else’s works (such as but not limited to writing, coding, programs, images, etc.) and offering it as one’s own. Cheating is using false pretenses, tricks, devices, artifices or deception to obtain credit on an examination or in a college course. If a faculty member determines that a student has committed academic dishonesty by plagiarism, cheating or in any other manner, the faculty has the academic right to 1) fail the student for the paper, assignment, project and/or exam, and/or 2) fail the student for the course and/or 3) bring the student up on disciplinary charges, pursuant to Article VI, Academic Conduct Proceedings, of the Student Code of Conduct.
Library Resources
All students can access the NYIT virtual library from both on and off campus. The same login you use to access NYIT e-mail and NYITConnect will also give you access to the library’s resources from off campus.
On the left side of the library’s home page, you will find the “Library Catalog” and the “Find Journals” sections. In the middle of the home page you will find “Research Guides;” select “Video Tutorials” to find information on using the library’s resources and doing research.Should you have any questions, please look under “Library Services” to submit a web-based “Ask-A-Librarian” form.
Support for students with disabilities
NYIT adheres to the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504. The Office of Disability Services actively supports students in the pursuit of their academic and career goals. Identification of oneself as an individual with disability is voluntary and confidential. Students wishing accommodations, referrals and other services are encouraged to contact the Office of Disability Services as early in the semester as possible, although requests can be made throughout the academic year.
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Eugene Kelly
Eugene Kelly has been Professor of Philosophy at the New York Institute of Technology for forty years. He received his Ph.D. from New York University, and spent two years doing research as a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service at the F.U. Berlin and the University of Cologne. Among his research interests is German phenomenology, and he has published many essays in this field in both English and German. Three books may be mentioned: Max Scheler (Boston: Twayne, 1977), Structure and Diversity(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), and Material Ethics of Value: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann (Springer: Phaenomenologica 203, 2011). More recently, de Gruyter published Nicolai Hartmann’s Aesthetics, translated with an introduction by Kelly (2014). For many years he has been the co-editor (with Tziporah Kasachkoff) of the Newsletter on Teaching, which is published by the American Philosophical Association.
