Love cover art

Love

A Very Short Introduction

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Love

By: Ronald De Sousa
Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

About this listen

Although there are many kinds of love, erotic love has been celebrated in art and poetry as life's most rewarding and exalting experience, worth living and dying for and bringing out the best in ourselves. And yet it has excused, and even been thought to justify, the most reprehensible crimes.

Why should this be? This very short introduction explores this and other puzzling questions. Do we love someone for their virtue, their beauty, or their moral or other qualities? Are love's characteristic desires altruistic or selfish? Are there duties of love? What do the sciences-neuroscience, evolutionary and social psychology, and anthropology-tell us about love?

Many of the answers we give to such questions are determined not so much by the facts of human nature as by the ideology of love. Ronald de Sousa considers some of the many paradoxes raised by love, looking at the different kinds of love - affections, affiliation, philia, storage, agape, but focusses on eros, or romantic love. He considers whether our conventional beliefs about love and sex are deeply irrational and argues that alternative conceptions of love and sex, although hard to formulate and live by, may be worth striving for.

©2015 Ronald de Sousa (P)2021 Tantor
Consciousness & Thought Love, Dating & Attraction Movements Philosophy Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Relationships Thought-Provoking

Listeners also enjoyed...

Consciousness, 2nd Edition cover art
The History of Emotions cover art
Emotion (2nd Edition) cover art
Beauty cover art
Nietzsche cover art
The Brain cover art
The Meaning of Life cover art
All About Love cover art
Confessions cover art
All stars
Most relevant
I love this collection of books. And I always feel I learn at least one thing that stays with me. The theory can get a bit heavy for an audiobook but the way the reader works through the book makes it easier to follow.

Such an interesting way to see love.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.