Beyond Romance critiques the romantic ideal that predominates contemporary thought and practice--it defines, explores, and advocates authentic love as a preferable alternative. The author claims that you can't genuinely love a person you don't know, and that the quality of love depends on the quality and extent of the knowing. Drawing heavily from the work of Merleau-Ponty, Dillon also takes up the classical treatments of love from Plato to the present, emphasizing Hegel, Freud, Sartre, and Derrida. Dillon argues that much of contemporary erotic malaise is traceable to the flaws in the...
Beyond Romance critiques the romantic ideal that predominates contemporary thought and practice--it defines, explores, and advocates authentic love as...
M. C. Dillon (1938-2005) was widely regarded as a world-leading Merleau-Ponty scholar. His book Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (1988) is recognized as a classic text that revolutionized the philosophical conversation about the great French phenomenologist. Dillon followed that book with two others: Semiological Reductionism, a critique of early-1990s linguistic reductionism, and Beyond Romance, a richly developed theory of love. At the time of his death, Dillon had nearly completed two further books to which he was passionately committed. The first one offers a highly...
M. C. Dillon (1938-2005) was widely regarded as a world-leading Merleau-Ponty scholar. His book Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (1988) is recognize...