Can Love Let Us Transcend Ourselves?

Event Details

What exactly is eros? Why does it engage the body and desire while also reaching toward beauty, goodness, and human self-transcendence? For more than two thousand years, Plato's Symposium has stood as a classic of Western philosophy for thinking through these questions. In the dialogue, a group of Athenians from different walks of life take part in a celebrated debate on Eros, the god of love. A poet, a physician, an aristocrat, a comic playwright, and a philosopher speak in turn, each giving love a different meaning: it can inspire the pursuit of honor and noble action; it can sustain harmony within the body and the cosmos; and it can take the form of a search for one's lost "other half." In the teachings of Diotima, as recounted by Socrates, love becomes an ascending force: beginning with attraction to a particular person, it gradually rises toward the love of souls, knowledge, and ultimately "Beauty itself."

Selected, translated, and introduced by Armand D'Angour, Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford, How to Talk about Love: An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers presents the key passages and central ideas of the Symposium in a fresh, vivid, and accessible new translation. With the original Greek printed alongside the English translation, the book preserves as much as possible of the dialogue's dramatic character, humor, and intellectual tension while guiding contemporary readers more clearly into the questions at its heart: when love is no longer simply an infatuation with one particular person, might it become a force that helps us know ourselves, understand others, and move toward a fuller way of life?

On September 22, Princeton University Press and Yale Center Beijing will jointly host an online conversation between Professor D'Angour and Wei Liu, Professor at the School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China. They will explore how the ancient Greeks understood desire, intimacy, virtue, and creativity, and what insights these ideas might offer for love and relationships today.

Speakers

Armand D’Angour
Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, University of Oxford
Armand D’Angour is Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the language, literature, psychology, culture, and music of ancient Greece. He is the author of The Greeks and the New (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Socrates in Love (Bloomsbury, 2019). He is also the editor and translator of How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2021), and How to Talk About Love: An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers (Princeton University Press, 2025). Before pursuing an academic career, he worked as a cellist and businessman.
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Wei Liu
Professor, School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China
Wei Liu is Professor at the School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China. His research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy, Western ethics, and the history of Western ethics and political philosophy. He is the author of The Common Good and Private Interest: A Study in Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy (Peking University Press, 2019), Machiavelli and Modernity (East China Normal University Press, 2012); and editor of A History of Western Political Philosophy, Volume I (China Renmin University Press, 2017). He has previously been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton Univerisity; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; and the University of Patras.
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