translated from Spanish: What love is. Protagonist of the celebration on Valentine’s

Los Angeles-contrary to the feast of St. Valentine, love is not theme day for Stanford University in Palo Alto (California), which dedicated an entire year of spring to study the roots of the master contemporary r.” “Study the love is as important or more than study physics”, says Efe Professor Robert Pogue Harrison, who wondered “of what use we understand the cosmos if we fail to develop the knowledge of ourselves and our priorities?”. With this idea the school of Humanities and Sciences from the prestigious University designed five years ago the course “What is love?”, “What is Love?” in its English translation.

Valentine’s day. Photo: EFE is a question that everyone at some point in life are made, may not have answer, but it must be done, says David Lummus, one of the teachers who designed the course.

“What is Love?”, which is featured in the spring semester of first year students, it has grown in popularity among students in recent years. The curriculum aims at the end of the course the student has tried to answer questions as: is love a corporal or spiritual phenomenon?, is a concept of love eternal, or always changing? How to think about love leads to make other important social and philosophical questions? Analysis making of teachers love as Harrison, who is in charge of the course, is the opposite of commercial load associated with the celebration of Valentine’s day.

Valentine’s day, the day of love. Photo: Pixaba the National Federation of retailers in the United States estimates that consumers in this country will spend around 20,700 million dollars in the celebration of love in this 2019.Aunque the number of expenditure continues to grow every year, paradoxically the number of those who celebrate this day goes down. Ten years ago more than 60% of American adults said they were going to celebrate the day of love somehow or lovers, as it is called in some countries, while in 2019 the percentage has dropped by half, according to retailers.
Love is not a trivial issue, says Harrison.

The Professor warned that over the centuries romantic love has been the subject of discussion and inspiration for the great philosophers, writers and thinkers in the history of Western culture.

Hearts. Photo: Pixabay for example, Harrison explains that people who celebrate this day of love and friendship should thank Plato for the concept of the soul mate and the search for the “other half” speech in Plato’s Symposium Aristophanes suggests that originally the Human were similar creatures, but the gods split them in half.
Since then, humans would be incomplete and would have the need to restore unity and looking for that lost half, explains Harrison.

While the belief of the other half would date from the 4th century BC, details like giving away flowers and acts of chivalry have their origins in the courtiers of the 12th and 13th centuries in the South of the current France, where Western lyric poetry originated. Harrison believes that our ideas about romantic love evolved very little over time when it’s the essentials: “Still think love is ennobling and intimate, a deeply personal way of spiritual significance”. Even the romantic lyrics of pop music are inheriting the tradition of courtly love and the blossoming of love poetry of the troubadours in the 12th and 13th.” The majority of the students are surprised that all these concepts about love and romance expressions have been inherited and studied by large as Dante or Shakespeare”, says Harrison.” What is love?”is not the only course that Stanford taught on this subject. The Californian University also offers the course online “Love as a force for social justice”. This course taught by Professor Anne Firth Murray seeks to make the participants aware of the power of love and the possibility to practice it in everyday life, as well as highlighting in particular the idea of love as a force for social justice. While the State University of California Long Beach, in the southern part of the State, promotes a course that explores representations of eroticism, love and romance through history.
Love was, is and will continue to be subject of study, sentence Harrison.

 

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Original source in Spanish

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