He is also known for being disobedient but a loyal child of Aphrodite.Īmong his love-sick targets, Catullus, along with others like Héloïse, would find himself summoned in the 12C to a Love's Assize.

He is known for being portrayed as being armed with a bow and arrows or a flaming torch. Eros was known for sparking the flame of love in gods and men. He was a companion of the goddess Aphrodite. Įros in greek, also known as Cupid, was the mischievous god of love. Īristotle by contrast placed more emphasis on philia (friendship, affection) than on eros (love) and the relationship of friendship and love would continue to be played out into and through the Renaissance, with Cicero for the Latins pointing out that 'it is love ( amor) from which the word 'friendship' ( amicitia) is derived' Meanwhile, Lucretius, building on the work of Epicurus, had both praised the role of Venus as 'the guiding power of the universe', and criticised those who become 'love-sick.life's best years squandered in sloth and debauchery'. Plato's sublimation theory of love - 'mounting om one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty'.Aristophanes's conception of mankind as the product of the splitting in two of an original whole: Freud would later draw on this myth - 'everything about these primaeval men was double: they had four hands and four feet, two faces' - to support his theory of the repetition compulsion.

As Uncle Toby was informed, over two millennia later, 'of these loves, according to Ficinus's comment on Valesius, the one is rational - the other is natural - the first.excites to the desire of philosophy and truth - the second, excites to desire, simply'. The idea of two loves, one heavenly, one earthly.From its riches, we may perhaps single out three main threads that would continue to reverberate through the centuries that followed. Plato's Symposium digs deeper into the idea of love and bringing different interpretations and points of view in order to define love. Setting aside Empedocles's view of Eros as the force binding the world together, the roots of the classical philosophy of love go back to Plato's Symposium. There are evolutionary theories that hold that love is part of the process of natural selection there are spiritual theories that may, for instance consider love to be a gift from God there are also theories that consider love to be an unexplainable mystery, very much like a mystical experience. Psychologists like Eric Erikson for example who believed that finding intimacy was a necessary part of human development. Among the prevailing types of theories that attempt to account for the existence of love there are: psychological theories, the vast majority of which consider love to be very healthy behavior. In fact, to such a person love would appear to be quite strange if not outright irrational behavior. It would be very difficult to explain love to a hypothetical person who had not himself or herself experienced love or being loved.

There are many different theories that attempt to explain what love is, and what function it serves.

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Unconditional love philosophy