Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T22:20:56.616Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Sexual Arousal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

Human beings talk and co-operate, they build and produce, they work to accumulate and exchange, they form societies, laws and institutions, and, in all these things the phenomenon of reason—as a distinct principle of activity—seems dominant. There are indeed theories of the human which describe this or that activity as central—speech, say, productive labour (Marx), or political existence (Aristotle). But we feel that the persuasiveness of such theories depends upon whether the activity in question is an expression of the deeper essence, reason itself, which all human behaviour displays.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Kinsey, Alfred, Pomeroy, W. B., Martin, C. E. et al. , Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (London and Philadelphia, 1949)Google ScholarPubMed; Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (London and Philadelphia, 1953).Google Scholar

2 On the classification of mental states, in terms of these formal distinctions, see my Art and Imagination (London, 1974), Part II.Google Scholar

3 Procopius, Secret History ix, 20.Google Scholar

4 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris, 1972).Google Scholar

5 See the discussions of the glance in Sartre, J. P., Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, H. E. (London, 1957), 379ffGoogle Scholar, and Nagel, Thomas, ‘Sexual Perversion’, in Mortal Questions (Oxford, 1974).Google Scholar

6 Being and Nothingness, cit., III, 3.Google Scholar

7 Grant, R. A. D., ‘The Politics of Sex’, Salisbury Review 1, No. 2 (1983), 5.Google Scholar

8 Grice, H. P., ‘Meaning’, Phil. Rev. (1957)Google Scholar; Searle, J. R., Speech Acts (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar; Lewis, D. K., Convention (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).Google ScholarPubMed

9 Nagel, Thomas, ‘Sexual Perversion’, cit.Google Scholar

10 Grice, , ‘Meaning’, citGoogle Scholar; Strawson, P. F., ‘Intention and Convention in Speech Acts’, Phil. Rev. (1964)Google Scholar, reprinted in Logico-Linguistic Papers (London, 1971).Google Scholar

11 Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, Dick, O. L. (ed.) (London, 1949), 138.Google Scholar

12 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1959).Google Scholar

13 Being and Nothingness, cit.