Is Love an Illusion ? What is the relationship between Love and Sexual Impulse ? Schopenhauer gives us a new way of thinking about relationships between men and women.

"Schopenhauer innovates by introducing the issue of sexuality into western philosophy. Of course, his assessment of it is not an encouraging one. For him, it embodies the will to life more strongly than any other urge or desire; hence it is responsible for the misery of the human condition more than anything else. Even the most elevated form of romantic love is nothing but a mental addition or justification for the natural need for sex and the species' desire to maintain itself. After succumbing to our sexual desires, he says, we realize that we have once again been deceived by the instinct of survival that seeks procreation through us. The lessening of sexual desire with age is thus to be welcomed as a liberation. Needless to say, Schopenhauer remained celibate throughout his life." Schopenhauer, New world encyclopedia.

A controversial philosopher and critic of modern Western civilization, Julius Evola (1898-1974) writes about the mystical and spiritual expression of sexual love. This in-depth study explores the sexual rites of sacred traditions, and shows how religion, mysticism, folklore, and mythology all contain erotic forms in which the deep potentialities of human beings are recognized.

As the third part of a philosophy of Christian life, A Metaphysics of Love builds on a view of Christian life as shaped by the dynamic of call, response, and promise. It argues that love is the ultimate content of this dynamic and considers how far this claim extends. Taking its bearings from Dante's vision of divine love as 'the power that moves the sun and other stars', this study explores the requirement that love is both human and cosmic, uniting being and beings. Cognizant of much recent philosophy's desire to overcome or move beyond a metaphysics of being, it examines some of the formal structures that make love possible, including language, time, social being, forgiveness, and ultimacy. Following on from the earlier volumes, extensive use is made of the idea of the poetic as the eminent mode of Christian witness, contextualized within the prose of everyday life. Heidegger provides fundamental philosophical orientation, whilst key features of love are brought to the fore through dialogue with Kierkegaard. Dante and Dostoevsky are frequent points of reference, in addition to a range of literary and religious sources, including the Scottish poet Edwin Muir. Leading scholar George Pattison concludes that the phenomenon of love requires us to articulate a metaphysics that involves both being and nothingness, thereby taking a critical position vis-à-vis both classical theism and existential atheism.

In Plotinus on Love, Alberto Bertozzi argues that love is the origin, culmination, and regulative force of the double movement that characterizes Plotinus' metaphysics: the derivation of all reality from the One and the return of the soul to it.

Ironically, the philosophy of love has long been neglected by philosophers, so-called “lovers of wisdom,” who would seemingly need to understand how one best becomes a lover. In Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Love, Michael Strawser shows that the philosophy of love lies at the heart of Kierkegaard’s writings, as he argues that the central issue of Kierkegaard’s authorship can and should be understood more broadly as the task of becoming a lover. Strawser starts by identifying the questions (How should I love the other? Is self-love possible? How can I love God?) and themes (love’s immediacy, intentionality, unity, and eternity) that are central to the philosophy of love, and he develops a rich context that includes analyses of the conceptions of love found in Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel, as well as prominent contemporary thinkers. Strawser provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of Kierkegaard’s writings—from the early The Concept of Irony and Edifying Discourses to the late The Moment, while maintaining the prominence of Works of Love— to demonstrate how Kierkegaard’s writings on love are relevant to the emerging study of the philosophy of love today. The most unique perspective of this work, however, is Strawser’s argument that Kierkegaard’s writings on love are most fruitfully understood within the context of a phenomenology of love. In interpreting Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of love, Strawser claims that it is not Husserl and Heidegger that we should look to for a connection in the first instance, but rather Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Emmanuel Levinas, and most importantly, Jean-Luc Marion, who for the most part center their thinking on the phenomenological nature of love. Based on an analysis of the works of these thinkers together with Kierkegaard’s writings, Strawser argues that Kierkegaard presents readers with a first phenomenology of love, a point of view that serves as a unifying perspective throughout this work while also pointing to areas for future scholarship. Overall, this work brings seemingly divergent perspectives into a unity brought about through a focus on love—which is, after all, a unifying force.

The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love offers a wide array of original essays from leading philosophers on the nature and value of love.

Solomon and Higgins have chosen excerpts from the great philosophical texts and combined them with the most exciting new work of philosophers writing today. It examines the mysteries of erotic love from a variety of philosophical perspectives and provides an impressive display of wisdom that the world's best thinkers have brought, and continue to bring, to the study of love.

Discusses the work of a central, but poorly understood, figure in the development of Persian Sufism, Aḥmad al-Ghazālī.