Alain de Botton – The Course of Love

In Edinburgh, a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married. They have children. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning.

The long-awaited and beguiling sequel to Essays in Love, The Course of Love charts the complex and intricate course of a long-term relationship.

We all know the headiness and excitement of love’s early days, but what can be expected over a shared lifetime? We follow our couple – Rabih and Kristen – from the first flush of infatuation through to inevitable disenchantments and then onto the freedom and insights of maturity. The Course of Loveis a novel that explores not so much the start of love, as its maintenance over time; the way our ideals bend and reform under the pressures of an average existence, and the magnificent, sometimes frightening, developments we can make as we slowly realise that love is in essence a skill we need to learn rather than an enthusiasm we simply experience.

Playful, wise, and profoundly moving, The Course of Love is an unparalleled meditation on modern relationships —and a delightful return to the novel for Alain, more than 20 years after Essays in Love.

What is Metaphysics ?

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. The word “metaphysics” comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean “after or behind or among [the study of] the natural”. It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle’s works into the treatise we now know by the name Metaphysics (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, meta ta physika, lit. ‘after the Physics ’, another of Aristotle’s works).

Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions:

1. What is there?
2. What is it like?

Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics.

Alain de Botton – The Course of Love

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