PHL 315

Philosophy of Love, Sex & Gender

Love, Sex, and Gender constitute a complex triad of concepts that play a central role in human life. Everyone, consciously or not, is constantly filtering their experiences and forming beliefs about the world on the basis of these phenomena. Behaviors, beliefs and choices are made on the basis of our understanding of them. Collectively, laws are made and religious ceremonies held that are meant to establish the importance of some (and, by extension, the triviality of others). But personally, our ideas about gender, our conceptions of sex, and our understanding of love are consistently a source of intense emotional responses and meaning in our lives, for better and for worse. Still, despite their centrality, it is common for us to adopt our notions of love, sex, and gender unthinkingly, and simply assume that our received accounts of them are natural, fixed and unproblematic. Many people refrain from asking deep questions about these concepts that seem worth asking. This class is meant to remedy this oversight by creating a venue for asking interesting and difficult critical questions about love, sex, and gender.

Units: 3.0