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.
(MP3 download; 96 min., with Q & A, 87.49 MB)
