His research interests have been mainly in areas of philosophy that seek to understand the mind: emotion, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, aesthetics, ethics, and sex. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
Academic Skip to main content. Search Start Search. Choose your country or region Close. Dear Customer, As a global organization, we, like many others, recognize the significant threat posed by the coronavirus.
Please contact our Customer Service Team if you have any questions. To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider. Love: A Very Short Introduction Ronald de Sousa Very Short Introductions Provides a lucid introduction to the basic philosophical problems about love Considers the notion that love is not just an emotion, but something much more complex Looks at the distinctions between different kinds of love - affection, affiliation, philia, storge, agape , before focussing on eros : erotic or 'romantic' love An informative summary of the latest science on love, making clear what lies behind distinctions such as love and infatuation; love and lust, as well as ways of classifying different types of love and their psychological origins Examines different ideologies of love, distinguishing between the ideals and practices of monogamism, swinging, and polyamory Part of the bestselling Very Short Introductions series - millions of copies sold worldwide.
Also of Interest. Why Think? Ronald de Sousa. Emotional Truth Ronald de Sousa. Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again.
Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. By Availability Free. You are looking at 1 - 20 of books Download result of the search. Items per page: 10 20 Starting with:.
View: no detail some detail full detail. Item type: book ISBN: The abolitionist movement launched the global human rights struggle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, redefining the meaning of equality throughout the Atlantic world.
In the In the twenty-first century, it remains a touchstone of democratic activism—a timeless example of mobilizing against injustice. Abolitionism: A Very Short Introduction highlights the key people, institutions, themes, and events that shaped the antislavery struggle across the Atlantic world.
Highlighting the activist exertions of abolitionists from the Caribbean and Great Britain to the United States and Iberian society, this short text shows that abolitionism was a potent social movement that ended the most profitable institution of the early modern era: racial slavery. Connected by their mutual—if differentiated—veneration of the One God proclaimed by Abraham, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam compose a family of related traditions.
The Abrahamic The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction explores their intertwined histories and the ways in which encounters among their adherents have helped construct their own independent religious identities from antiquity to the present. Those identities have not been fixed and static, but have rather reflected particular historical contexts. The political arrangements in which the religions emerged and intermingled—notably, their changing relationships to state power—have figured importantly in their development.
The common heritages of the Abrahamic religions have both brought them together and divided them. Accounting: A Very Short Introduction provides a guide to understanding and using accounting information. It examines the key concepts and the main types of accounting work, from bookkeeping and financial reporting to auditing and management accounting.
It traces the development of accounting over the centuries; examines the building blocks of financial reports, such as assets and liabilities; and looks at how accounting differs between countries and the importance of international standards.
However, Adam Smith was far more than an economist. Adam Smith is introduced through an overview of his writings and moral philosophy.
Adam Smith: A Very Short Introduction offers a balanced and nuanced view of this seminal thinker, embedding his fierce defence of free trade, competition, and assault on special interests in contemporary European history, politics, and philosophy. Adolescence is a turbulent period to live through. Marking the transition from the world of childhood to adult life, the adolescent faces many challenges and opportunities, including Marking the transition from the world of childhood to adult life, the adolescent faces many challenges and opportunities, including puberty, cognitive changes, forming their own identity, relating to often conflicting demands from parents and peers, and negotiating first romantic relationships.
Adolescence: A Very Short Introduction provides a guide to the classical research that has informed our knowledge on adolescence, as well as the results of modern research into the contemporary adolescent experience.
It also examines a number of aspects of adolescence, including the cultural and historical context, the biological changes to the adolescent brain, and the controversies that adolescence brings. Advertising: A Very Short Introduction dispels the myths surrounding the advertising industry. Advertising is a diverse entity, and campaigns work or fail to work in a Advertising is a diverse entity, and campaigns work or fail to work in a plethora of ways.
How does the advertising industry work? What part do all the key players the advertisers, the media, and the agencies play? All three provide reasons to act. I decided to include some quotes from authors touching on love from works I have read at the bottom and continued in a comment below. Poets, musicians, artists, and philosophers have drawn inspiration from that feeling and, spurred on by love, done their best and worst.
They have vied to convey the life-changing intensity of it; and yet when most of us try to describe it, love sinks lifelessly into banality. Love stories seldom have happy endings. The greatest love stories usually end in death. The lighter ones, known as romantic comedies, end in marriage: but the convention that marriage is a happy ending also hints that marriage is indeed an ending, which is a kind of death.
Not death of the lovers, or even of their love, but death of the love story. In the end, then, all love stories are sad. And yet, what a ride is to be had while it lasts! Eros in its most extreme, obsessive, anxious, and passionate romantic form.
And if it also evokes a disturbance the might call for medical attention, that connotation is not always inappropriate. A person in love, especially if they are limerent, is often said to be crazy with love. Rightly understood, then, the blindness of love may be a matter not of failing sight but of failing judgement. But reciprocal attention can also feed doubts and anxiety. From that point of view, love unrequited might be better off: it has no expectations, and so has nothing to be anxious about.
The common dogma that love is purest when not contaminated by sex has an equally plausible converse: we can be sure that sexual desire is pure only when it remains uncontaminated by love. In desire as in love, freedom requires purity of focus. Just as you might get that someone who loves you for the sake of sex does not really love you, so you might suspect that someone who has sex out of love without being limerent does not really desire you.
Your love for Mary will seem to you objectively necessary, just as it appears objectively necessary to the average follower of Islam or Catholicism that theirs is the only true religion. And yet we can be virtually certain that each one, had they been switched at birth, would now with equal devotion hold the other view. It's a part of the grip of limerence that we cannot imagine our devotion ever changing. If they are, they should move anyone to love.
For it is the very essence of reason to be universally applicable: a reason for you is a reason for anyone. Anyone in the same circumstances, that is. The qualifier is essential, but it weakens the force of the universality requirement: for circumstances are never the same.
The lesson of these cases is that the target of love is a particular individual, not just whoever happens to have the right qualities. Even lacking the right qualities altogether may not matter. Once the target is picked, only that casual individual counts as relevantly similar. Mere acquaintance in itself tends to induce liking. Other things being equal, familiarity should make the heart grow fonder when it fails, blame all the other things that are not equal.
Some writers on love have settled for a more benign version of that hypothesis. Your beloved is indeed unique, it has been said, because you have bestowed on him the characteristics that make him lovable. Anxious children have learned that their caretaker is not altogether reliable: as a result, they exhibit ambivalence both about leaving and returning to their side. And avoidant children, who have been more consistently rebuffed or rejected, learn a sort of stoical independence which masks their insecurity and neediness, or perhaps altogether supersedes it.
More tellingly, both forms of love deactivated regions of the temporal cortex and prefrontal lobe associated with rational thought and critical judgement. Men were asked to wear the same T-shirt for two nights, while refraining from soap, deodorant, and garlic. The T-shirts were then sniffed by female subjects.
Providing that the women were not on the pill, they preferred the odour of the men whose genes coded for a type of major histocompatibility complex MHC different from their own. Psychologist Helen Fisher: 2. It involves obsessive and exclusive preoccupation with the lover, longing for their constant presence, and highs and lows triggered by over interpreted signs or reciprocation or rejection.
Although often condemned because of its disruptive effects, limerence has been observed in most societies. Its is no coincidence that the third and fourth anniversary of a marriage or love partnership is when it is most likely to break up. As for the belief in a weaker sex drive in women, it is worth noting that this is only about years old.
We love only our idea of what someone is like. We love an idea of our own; in short, it is ourselves that we love. We love one or other of the following: 1 Narcissistic Type: a What we ourselves are b What we ourselves were c What we would like to become d A person who was once part of our own self 2 Imitative Type: a The woman who feeds us b The man who protects us And the many surrogates who take their place.
View all 6 comments. May 04, David rated it liked it. Some valuable insights mixed with some oversimplifications of human emotional and social experience View 2 comments. Jul 28, Gowtham rated it really liked it. There are two tragedies in life: the first is not to get what you want; the other is to get it. Jun 28, Mohit Dhanjani rated it really liked it. It is a balanced book and faithful to its title and framework.
It provides multiple perspectives on Love from philosophy to science, including natural and social science. My own experience with love and that of people around me made me contemplate a lot and come up with certain insights. What came as a surprise to me is that it was already well covered in this book in the 'bestowal theory' of love.
References and suggested readings are also quite valuable. From academic point of view, this is undoubtedly a good book.
0コメント