LoF24: Irene Breuer - Erôs and Philia: Their ethical role

Spencer Brown’s description of the experience of love emphasizes the partner’s communion in feeling, their perfect fitting, their absence of selfishness, their mutual responsibility in the pursuit of a shared happiness, all which features enable the partners to fully realise their potentialities and benefit from their mutual exchange. These features are no other than those that define the semantic content of the word ‘love’ in terms of Plato’s and Aristotle’s erôs and philia. While philia is commonly translated as friendship, erôs is characterized as a desire that is felt towards what is loved. While Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus offer the best account of erôs insofar as it involves not only relationships based on intimacy, affection and sexuality but philia as well, the fullest discussion of philia is provided by Books VII and IX of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Both of these terms are present in Husserl’s ethics: From love as a primal instinct or drive ensuring self-preservation to love in the context of a rational faith in God. Embracing this quest is first and foremost an act of love and, as in Plato’s and Aristotle’s ethics, it is a love for the pursuit of happiness. 

Degree in Architecture (1988) and in Philosophy (2003) from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. 2012: PhD in Philosophy from the Bergische University Wuppertal (BUW), Germany. 1988-2002: Lecturer, then Professor for Architectural Design and Theory at the UBA. 2012 to mid 2017: Lecturer for Theoretical Philosophy and Phenomenology at the BUW. 2019: DAAD scholarship, research on the reception of the German Philosophical Anthropology in Argentina. Pesently working on mentioned research subject, with the support of the BUW. Her main research focus is set on Ancient Philosophy, specially the Pre-Socratics and Aristotle, Phenomenology and Aesthetics.