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Editorial

Birds Do It

by Rick Lewis

Gentle reader, if you have just bought this magazine in the hope of finding tips for attracting a soulmate, then I must warn you that you will probably find it a disappointment. If, on the other hand, you want to understand the nature of love better – it being a central preoccupation of most people at one time or another as well as of art, music, poetry, cinema and literature – then perhaps you might find it more enlightening.

If you think love is about wild, ungovernable passions and philosophy is about the cool use of reason, you might suppose they are mutually exclusive, and hence wonder why a philosophy magazine would devote pages to the subject. But the exact nature of love is a complex, tangled problem and that’s just the sort of problem philosophers like best, which is one reason it has been a subject of philosophical disputes ever since it was invented. Since philosophy was invented, that is.

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