Publisher's Synopsis
What is love? Starting with this question "A Philosophical Introduction to Human Relationships" examines accounts of the nature and justification of our personal and social relationships. Views, such as Freud's, that see them as the inevitable outcome of psychological drives or, like the sociobiologists, of evolutionary mechanisms are rejected. So too are theories that regard relationships as the product of individual competition for resources or of Nietzschean power struggles. Instead it is argued that to understand relationships we need to grasp what value the participants see in them.;The book goes on to examine topics such as the possibility of intimacy and the limits of privacy and the function and value of commitment and reciprocity, and enters into topical debates on such issues as family values, the feminist critique of traditional relationships and the return to romantic love in a post-AIDS environment.;Throughout, the book follows an interdisciplinary approach, discussing answers put forward not only by philosophers but also by psychologists, sociologists, political thinkers and novelists. In doing so it introduces topics from across the whole field of philosophy concerning human nature, ethical value, the scope of knowledge, political freedom and obligation, and other matters of human relationships.
