Hale Lecture Series

The Hale Lecture SeriespresentsAdam Rosen-Carole (Philosophy, RIT)Lovers' Knowledge: Sexuality as Practical FreedomThursday, March 10th4-5:30pm01-2000Today, sex is increasingly distinct from the historically interconnected ends of procreation and institutionalized sexual domination. And sexual love has an unprecedented normative authority _ an increasingly central and broad role to play in accounting for developments in social practices. Sexual love is an increasingly compelling reason to limit institutional forms of sexual domination, placing a demand on institutional acknowledgement as a value around which a way of life might be structured. Love may yet be a fundamental way we structure our social world. Seeing how this might be requires coming to see sex as a form of mutual acknowledgment, as a fundamental shape or practice of freedom. What lovers know, minimally, is that natural appetite or inclination, reproduction, and sexual domination have lost their longstanding cultural authority, that these are not reasons adequate to their practices. As lovers, we know ourselves to be free and work out the practical meaning of our freedom.