GAMSAT Section II - Beauty, Love, Friendship, Marriage, Parenthood Flashcards
Types of Love (Greek)
Agape – “pure” ideal type of love, rather than physical translation. Love of the soul
Eros – passionate love, sensual desire and longing. With contemplation, it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person or even becomes an appreciation of beauty itself. Helps with an understanding of spiritual truth
Philia – dispassionate virtual love. Loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality, and familiarity
Storge – natural affection, parent and offspring
Xenia – hospitality, a ritualized friendship formed between host and guest
Helen Fischer (Biology)
Love into 3 partly overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment
Robert Sternberg (Triangle of love)
Psychology - Intimacy, commitment, and passion
Plato (Beauty)
Ideal of beauty – eternal types that transcend the world of ideas. Identify beauty with good
St. Thomas Aquinas (Beauty)
Beauty gives joy in knowledge. Aesthetic knowledge is intuitive, joy flows from an object known.
3 conditions in beauty
1. Integrity or perfection – completeness or wholeness
2. Proportion - harmony
3. Brightness - clarity
Kant (Beauty)
Beauty is subject – a product of aesthetic sense Intermediate between understanding and the will, feeling attended with imagination:
Understanding – concerned with truth
Will – freely strives for the good
Aesthetics concerned with beautiful
The objective in the sense that it is the object of a judgment
Beauty is an object of disinterested satisfaction
Aristotle
Holds a mirror up to nature. Emotional expression, appeals to intellect as well as to feelings
Criticism to this argument – art is not just imitation but constructive and creative
Other arguments on beauty
Art is different from work because it has no end goal
Pleasure and beauty are not the same thing
Beauty is objective, and its evaluation is subjective.
Philippe Arie’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family LIfe
childhood is an invention of the modern mentality (the unconscious notions and concepts by which people view the world around them), that social institutions evolve in accordance with changing mentalities, and that social change is ultimately caused by changes of mentality.
Idea of childhood emerged in the seventeenth century and became an integral part of private life, changing the face of society in ways that continue to evolve today.
Philippe Ariès develops three secondary themes: the importance of using new and unconventional source material; the widening division in modern society between public and private life; and the shortcomings of modern society.
The first two address the core readership of Centuries of Childhood—scholars, students, and the reading public; the third is aimed at those who share Ariès’s political convictions or who are interested in French political ideas.
The division between public and private life, essential to his analysis of childhood and the family, is Ariès’s most influential secondary idea.
Friendship Duties
We have obligations to aid and support our friends that go well beyond those we have to help strangers because they are our friends, much like we parents have special duties to aid and support our children because they are our children.
“I am just as likely to be directed by your interest in gambling at the casino as by your interest in ballet”
one’s friend is properly engaging in moral deliberation, but then defer to one’s friend’s judgment about what to do, even when one disagrees with the moral conclusion, for such deference is a matter of properly respecting the friend’s moral agency.
