By Clancy Martin. Few philosophical projects are more ambitious or daunting than writing a book about love. First of all, the literature on love is larger, I’d wager, than that on any other subject. There are classics like The Odyssey, The Symposium, the Kama Sutra, Pascal’s Discourse on Love, Kierkegaard’s "Diary of a Seducer," Ortega y Gasset’s On Love, not to mention Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust — and Woody Allen. See also the explosion of interest in the topic in contemporary American philosophy since the pioneering work of Irving Singer, Robert C. Solomon, Harry Frankfurt, and Martha Nussbaum, along with contemporary critical minds who have tackled the subject, like Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Adam Phillips, Simon May, and Laura Kipnis. I have only a small sampling of my favorite books on love at home, and they take up three walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. And that’s leaving out the neuroscientists. More...