Love and Sexuality
Posted on 7 May 2011
Frisbee Sheffield, an expert on Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus, chats to Peter about love and friendship in the erotic dialogues.
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Posted on 1 June 2014
The Persian poet Rūmī and mystical philosopher al-Qūnawī carry on the legacy of Sufism.
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Posted on 22 February 2015
Discussion, debate and denunciation of philosophical attempts to explain the Trinity in Abelard, Richard of St Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux.
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Posted on 27 September 2015
Two Beguine authors, Hadewijch and Mechthild of Magdeburg, deploy the tropes of courtly love in vernacular writings about their mystical experiences.
11 comments
Posted on 22 May 2016
Sex, reason, and religion in Jean de Meun’s completion of an allegory of courtly love, the Roman de la Rose.
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Posted on 18 December 2016
Marguerite Porete is put to death for her exploration of the love of God, The Mirror of Simple Souls.
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Posted on 31 December 2017
Philosophical themes in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and “Troilus and Criseyde,” as well as Langland’s “Piers Plowman.”
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Posted on 7 January 2018
Philosophy is put into practice in Kashmir Śaivite Tantra and Buddhist Tantra.
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Posted on 14 January 2018
Medieval attitudes towards homosexuality, sex and chastity, and the status of women. Authors discussed include Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, and Chaucer.
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Posted on 28 January 2018
Peter is joined by Isabel Davis to discuss marriage, sex and chastity in Chaucer, focusing on the Wife of Bath's speech.
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Posted on 24 June 2018
Egyptologist Richard Parkinson joins us to talk about the context and meaning of the Eloquent Peasant and other literary works of ancient Egypt.
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Posted on 30 December 2018
The role of women in Byzantine society and the complex attitudes surrounding eunuchs: did they make up a “third gender”?
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Posted on 26 January 2020
Ficino describes a “Platonic” love purified of sexuality, prompting a debate carried on by Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Tullia d’Aragona.
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Posted on 23 February 2020
Jewish philosophers in Renaissance Italy, focusing on Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love, the Averroism of Elijah del Medigo, and Italian Kabbalah.
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Posted on 12 July 2020
Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun and other utopian works of the Italian Renaissance describe perfect cities as an ideal for real life politics.
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Posted on 1 August 2021
How Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone and his attack on the Church relate to the history of philosophy.
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Posted on 12 September 2021
How radical was Luther? We find out from Lyndal Roper, who also discusses Luther and the Peasants' War, sexuality, anti-semitism, and the visual arts.
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Posted on 20 March 2022
In The Fire Next Time and other writings, the essayist and novelist James Baldwin seeks to dispel the illusions surrounding racial and sexual difference.
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Posted on 5 June 2022
A Renaissance queen supports philosophical humanism and produces literary works on spirituality, love, and the soul.
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Posted on 19 June 2022
In his outrageous novel about the giants Pantagruel and Gargantua, Rabelais engages with scholasticism, humanism, medicine, the reformation, and the querelle des femmes.
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Posted on 24 July 2022
Frantz Fanon combines psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology to diagnose neuroses deriving from the colonial condition.
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Posted on 2 October 2022
The author of the famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, explores questions of violence, sexuality, and more during her too brief life.
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Posted on 1 May 2011
In this episode, Peter discusses Plato’s erotic dialogues, the Lysis, the Phaedrus and the Symposium, and talks about the relationship between love, friendship and philosophy in Plato’s thought.
11 comments