The Philosophy of Love and the Bible

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I want to thank Jason Harman, Jason Hoult, Terri Kulak, and John Mahaffy for reading my review essay and for sharing with me their comments on it.

Notes

1. Much earlier in his book Ferry writes that it “was only with the man-God that I really started to construct this second, non-metaphysical humanism, that I developed the new point of view of a humanism of love” (32). Let me note here that when I cite more than one passage consecutively from the same page of a text within a single paragraph, I give the page number only at the end of the last passage cited.

2. I paraphrase here at once Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments.

3. See my study “Love and Death in Modern Opera,” Existenz 9.2 (2014).

4. Because Shakespeare consciously bases Antony and Cleopatra on the values, both historical and ontological, of antiquity, consistent with his other Roman and Greek plays, it is not to be viewed as a modern (biblical) tragedy of love. See my book Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2011).

5. See my book Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible: From Kant to Schopenhauer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

6. Biblical study is always complex. While the original prophet Isaiah lived in the eighth century BCE, this passage belongs to a complex of passages that is post-exilic (from the later sixth century BCE on). Paul cites this passage in support of his conception of resurrection. See 1 Cor. 15.54.

7. The New Oxford Annotated Apocrypha, ed. Michael D. Coogan, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

8. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), 12.581–87.