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Unlike the holidays of Valentine's Day, the love This is not a single day of publishing for Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, which spends a whole spring course studying the roots of contemporary love.
"Studying love is as important or more important than studying physics"Explains Professor Robert Pogue Harrison, who asks" what is the point of understanding the cosmos if we can not develop our knowledge and priorities? "
It is with this in mind that the School of Humanities and Sciences of the prestigious university designed five years ago the course "What is love?? ","What is love? "In his English translation.
"It's a question everyone is asked at one point in life. Maybe he does not have an answer, but it must be done, "says David Lummus, one of the teachers who designed the course.
"What is love? ", Which is offered in the spring semester to freshmen, has gained popularity among students in recent years.
The study plan aims at the end of the course, the student has tried to answer questions such as: Is love a spiritual phenomenon or body, a concept of eternal love or constant evolution? How to think about love leads us to ask other important philosophical and social issues?
The badysis that teachers do love as Harrison, who is in charge of the course, is the inverse of the commercial burden that represents the celebration of the day of the Valentine's Day.
The National Federation of Retailers in the United States estimates that Canadian consumers will spend about $ 20.7 billion to celebrate love in 2019.
Although the spending figure continues to grow each year, the number of those celebrating this day is shrinking paradoxically.
Ten years ago, more than 60% of American adults had announced that they were going to celebrate in one way or another the day of love or lover, as it was In some countries. In 2019, the percentage was halved, according to retailers.
"Love is not a trivial subject", Emphasizes Harrison.
The professor warns that romantic love has been over the centuries a subject of discussion and inspiration for the greatest philosophers, writers and thinkers of the history of Western culture.
For example, Harrison explains that people celebrating this day of love and friendship should thank Plato for the soul mate concept and for the "half-orange" search.
Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium suggests that humans were originally creatures similar, but that the gods divided them in two.
"Since then, humans would feel incomplete and would need to restore unity. That's why they are looking for the other half lost."Explain Harrison.
While the belief of the other half goes back to the fourth century BC. AD, details such as flowers and chivalry find their origin in the courtiers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern modern France, where Western lyric poetry originated.
Harrison thinks that our ideas about romantic love have changed very little over time in the essentials: "We always think that love is ennobling and intimate, a deeply personal form of spiritual transcendence"
Even the romantic lyrics of pop music are inherited from the great tradition of courtly love and flourishing of the love poetry of the troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
"Most students are surprised to find that all of these concepts about love and expressions of romance have been inherited and studied by personalities like Dante or Shakespeare," says Harrison.
"What is love?? "This is not the only course that Stanford teaches on this subject." The California University also offers the online course "Love as a force of social justice".
This course, taught by Professor Anne Firth Murray, aims to educate participants about the power of love and the opportunity to practice it on a daily basis, including the idea of love as a force for social justice.
While the State University of California, Long Beach, south of the state, offers a course that explores representations of eroticism, love and romance throughout history.
"Love was, is and will continue to be a topic of studyHarrison, EFE sentence.
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