Love and Philosophy: Aristotelian vs. Platonic (MP3 download)

Focusing on the contrasting conceptions of love held by Plato and Aristotle, Dr. Gotthelf maintains that a person’s view of love—and his romantic choices—is linked to his metaphysics. He argues that Platonic love and Aristotelian love represent two antithetical views of man and existence—and that a number of apparently different interpretations of love and sex are actually versions of either the Platonic or the Aristotelian view. The talk presents a novel definition of “Aristotelian love,” an idea that has gone largely unnoticed in the history of philosophy until Ayn Rand.