For a change[1], over the Thanksgiving meal at VILLA, I got to talking with a philosophy professor, Jeff, who is staying there as he gets some advanced treatment for cancer. Given that I had a tiff with my "Indian Management" earlier that morning regarding my current valency of being single, our conversation at the table quickly detoured into the subject of love and marriage, as philosophers have thought about (and are still thinking through) these powerful (and power bestowing) social concepts and institutions.

We discussed, very crudely and at very high level, the various theories and ideas of love and family, and in particular the relative silence on the part of Eastern philosophers (Jeff had lived and studied Taoism in China for more than ten years) on this subject of love[2]. Jeff seemed to agree with my assertion that the Chinese might have thought about the ideas of love that keeps families and societies harmonious but unlike the Western thinkers, have left dealing with love at the inter-personal level.

In this context, he asked me to look first look up Irving Singer's survey, "The Nature of Love", in three volumes, on this subject, in which Singer looks at the Western scene starting at the classical Greeks all the way to the Moderns. I haven't been able to find much information of Singer's work via Google other than this seminar course on love and family that Singer taught at MIT. So if you are thinking through some of these issues, you might want to take a look at these seminar discussions.

[1] Most of the guests who stay at VILLA are biological scientists or physicians, and are for most part extremely prosaic in their interests; these usually span the extremely limited slice of scientific work they might be doing, feeding of the body, and the muck of consumerism: clothes, electronics, movies and music. In other words, perfect case studies to illustrate how scientific education at the university now produces "edumacated monkeys". And yes, this is a rant.