Abstract

Arthur Schopenhauer finds it surprising that sexual love, which powerfully guides every existence, has never been seriously considered by philosophers. The only one to deal with it was Plato at the Symposium and Phaedrus, but remaining in his opinion within the frame work of Greek myth and pederasty. Our investigation agrees with Schopenhauer on the speculative importance of love, but not with his judgment of Platonic dialogues; for this reason, the article starts from the platonic Symposium and proposes an original thesis on love. It shows first of all that it consists in a very particular logical structure, closely related to beauty and death. It then indicates how this relationship changes as the underlying ontological categories change, taking as an example the way in which the history of ontology has guided the poetic-literary conception of love.