A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

There are four sections: Sex Roles, Equality, and Social Policy, comprising feminism, pornography and prostitution; Sexual Norms and Ethics, comprising sexual perversion, homosexuality, sadomasochism, chastity, promiscuity, adultery and rape; Erotic Love; Friendship and Familial Love. There is also said to be an up-to-date (selective) bibliography (roughly 450 anthologies, books and papers altogether, of which about 40 are from the 1990's and half a dozen from 1994. However, almost all of the pieces also have their own references.). There is no index of names or subjects. 

Extracts from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant (two), Schopenhauer, Mill, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and de Beauvoir make up ten of the selections. Half the selections are from the 60's to the 80's, with five of most recent vintage (apparently 1993 or perhaps 1994) specially written for the book. 

I will just say a little about a few of the articles of most interest to myself. ElizabethRapaport , On the Future of Love: Rousseau and the Radical Feminists, confronts the charge that love, being a dependency relation, is necessarily destructive. She affirms that this is an illusion of a culture of individualism, and that only unhealthy dependency relationships won't work. On the contrary "Love may ... occasion the growth and positive development of personality."

Linda LeMoncheck, Feminist Politics and Feminist Ethics, argues for an ethic of care rather than an ethic of justice or rights: "an ethic of care advocates making empathic connections among concrete others to create a caring community; an ethic of justice presupposes a relationship of empathic distance between isolated moral agents whose primary aim is to ensure, using the force of abstract moral authority, that others respect their rights".

Women's "complaints about sex objectification ... speak to ... lack of care, lack of sensitivity, and ... failure of empathy. ... Men sexually force themselves on women because they are not morally required to come to know the sexual needs of any particular woman, but instead are morally encouraged by an ethic of justice constantly to assert their own sexual autonomy and defend it from potential moral battery".

Robert Nozick and Robert Solomon do their best to, in effect, catalogue the attributes of romantic love, and to condense it all into overarching concepts. However, the process has mostly a wrong feel to it. Love, like this, makes such dull reading, and one wonders if analytic philosophy is the right medium to explore it. Maybe autobiography or fiction or poetry or theatre or film are more likely to provide real substance. Understanding need not be something to do with syllogistic logic! For human beings, perhaps relationships came (and come) first, and are the paradigms from which all our other powers stem: their realities being only in their particularities in individual lives, making the starting point and reference point of all our being and knowing. 

Ellen Fox, Paternalism and Friendship, presenting an interesting scenario in support, criticizes the application of the concept of 'contract' to interferences by close friends with each others' autonomy on the grounds that those in intimate relation are constituted as non-individualistic. 

James Conlon argues that when friendship becomes romantic love something is inevitably lost as well as gained. He maintains that relationships are of different types and it is not the case that a more intimate relation contains all others. Finally, I was surprised to learn that in many of the United States of America "wives are still legally required to perform domestic duties and the husbands to provide financial support". 

Reviewed by David Yates