Joe Pastorious and Janet Waverley are an emotionally healthy young couple, who are deeply in love with each other. However, their relationship is shattered when Janet is diagnosed as a psychopath by a therapist she is seeing to help her work on impulse control problems. On the one hand, the diagnosis seems to fit Janet’s personality. But on the other hand, it seems to do nothing to undermine the fact that Joe is in an unusually happy relationship with his soulmate. Eve and Alice are deciding whether or not to have children. Eve is childfree, but is finding her childfree preference derided by Alice. This derision is similar to how Eve’s religious family derided Eve’s homosexuality, when she first announced to them that she was a lesbian. Davis McFarlin is a porn star who absolutely adores her 14 year old son Max, who is both quite sensitive and intellectually gifted. The only problem is he doesn’t approve of his mother’s career. Even worse, he may disapprove of it because he is secretly attracted to her.
Greg Scorzo’s book Love: Post-Socratic Dialogues is an attempt to update a longstanding philosophical tradition. Philosophical writers as diverse as Plato, Galileo, Berkeley, Rousseau, Murdoch and Badiou have deployed the literary style of the dialogue in order to explore philosophical themes. Greg attempts to push the boundaries of genre in order to create something new. Here the dialogues function as moving thought experiments, portraying elaborate, unfolding situations which, at every turn, force the reader to examine his or her philosophical intuitions about a range of ideas related to love. The dialogues in this book are called “Post-Socratic” because there is no Socrates character, telling the reader which arguments (if any) are the best ones. The reader decides that on their own. Drawing upon Greg’s book and his radio play Love Before Covid, which focuses on the story of Joe and Janet, we attempt to explore and challenge our philosophical intuitions about love.
