Love
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Calibrate modern love with classics and philosophy
Why talk about LOVE in an academic program?Because at the “future partner” intersection, one serious misjudgment can quietly undo years of effort. Many students work hard on exams, majors, and careers, yet receive almost no guidance on how to choose—and be—a partner.
When school and home stay largely silent, the internet fills the gap. Platforms reward performance, comparison, and quick emotion, spreading a highly narcissistic view of love. In PPE100, we return to classics and philosophy not to offer clichés or simple rules, but to recalibrate how students think about love, commitment, and responsibility.
Love?
What Is Love?
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Erich Fromm — Transcendent
For Fromm, love is an active practice of giving, caring, and responsibility. It addresses existential separateness and alienation, enabling growth and authentic connection. Love is not limited to one “object” but an orientation to the world, a character one cultivates.
problem
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How do students learn about love?
With little structured conversation about love at school or at home, many students build their understanding almost entirely online. Platform visibility and algorithmic incentives push intimacy toward performance and comparison: image comes before person, short-term feeling before long-term commitment, and “gifts” slide easily into conditional exchanges.
To explore a question that has resisted final answers for centuries, PPE100 anchors its inquiry in four philosophical coordinates—Erich Fromm, Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek—to ask, with rigor, what love is and what it asks of us. We then extend the discussion through Stendhal’s De l’Amour and Carrie Jenkins’s “Love as a Gift Economy,” examining how love can be understood as both feeling and practice.
Our aim is not to tell students whom to love, but to give them a deeper language and clearer judgment so that, when they reach the “future partner” intersection, they can choose—and be chosen—with more maturity, honesty, and care.
