Webb - Eros & Psychology

I would like in this essay to use the theme of "Eros" to explore some of the ways psychology and philosophy can illuminate the sources of our world views.(1) In view of the fact that Eros has been a major theme of philosophy as well as psychology and that attitudes toward it seem often to be both deeply rooted in world views and also generative of world views, it seems especially suited to an inquiry into the ways philosophical thinking, psychology, and world view might be linked. The linkage among these was first sketched by Karl Jaspers early in the twentieth century in his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919), but few have ventured to explore it further in a systematic way—a point that seems underscored by the fact that this is one of the few books of Jaspers that has still never been translated into English.