3 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Rousseau's 1761 epistolary novel (Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse) — the best-selling novel of the 18th century — following the love between Julie and her tutor Saint-Preux, exploring the conflict between authentic feeling and social duty.
Plato's dialogue set by a river outside Athens — featuring Socrates's three speeches on love (the last, the palinode, recanting the first's dismissal of eros) — and the discussion of rhetoric (only philosophy-based rhetoric is genuine rhetoric), the myth of the charioteer, and the critique of writing.
Plato's dialogue on the nature of love — in which Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and others give competing speeches on Eros at a drinking party — culminating in Socrates's account of Diotima's teaching on love as ascent from particular beauty to the Form of Beauty itself.