Section 8 Group 2 Installment #1 Alyssa Degenhardt

 
                                                                          Love

  I decided to do my final report blog post on one of the most overused words in America: love. Oh, yes! I said it. The big, bad "L" word. I wanted to do this because it seemed that not too many people address "love" like you think they would, and that is quite frustrating. I noticed all throughout this semester that there are a few very large topics that deemed necessary for philosophers to address, but sadly, love was often left out of their major discussions. Unlike the many famous philosophers' opinions about God and reality, not too many of them seemed to truly question the concept and experiences of "love". For the older, Greek philosophers, this does not surprise me, though. I say this because in the English language, today, we only have one word for love, making our intentions and meanings a little challenging to portray, but in the Greek language there are at least 7 different ways to say the word "love", each with a different meaning and context to use it. So throughout this series of blog posts I will describe each type of love, I will mention the opinions on love of some famous philosophers, and I will assume the opinions of others on this topic.

    One of the Greek words for love, Agape, is used mostly in terms of a man loving God or God loving man (used often as a christian term). This is mentioned in the bible all throughout the new testament, and is usually described as representing brotherly love and charity. In many other cases in the bible Agape is used to represent or point out the love between God and "his children", making it easier to understand why in some ancient writings the word was used to describe a feeling someone had for his or her child. Though "agape" was not used very often in the Greek-speaking culture, it was used in the New Testament 320 times. This is probably because the word "agape" is used mostly to discuss a type of love that is unconditional, and to most christians, this meant that only God could fill that type of position, making it a harder word to slip into a conversation. I believe that this word is important, while ever challenging to use, because without the specific term, we would not have the ability to truly describe the love "God" has for us, nor would we be able to truly understand the meaning of it. If English-speakers now a days could come up with terms, like the Greek, in which separated the word "love" into very specific terms of emotions and truth, this nation would have a greater time at expressing true emotion.





6 more terms to go....