SOURCE: Knox, Bernard. “The Heart Has Its Reasons.” Washington Post Book World (25 November 1990): 1, 10.

In the following review, Knox asserts that the essays in Love's Knowledge are persuasive, lucidly written, and accessible to a general readership.

What is one to make of a book called Love's Knowledge that offers detailed critical analyses of Platonic and Aristotelian ethical theory, critical discussions of Henry James's Golden Bowl, Ambassadors and Princess Casamàssima as well as of Beckett, Dickens and Proust, and also calls in to support its argument such texts as Homer's Odyssey and Sophocles's “Women of Trachis,” not to mention Nietzsche, Kant and Wittgenstein? The reader's first reaction may well be skeptical. To move with authority over so wide a range of intellectual history, the author must be an unlikely combination: an acute and sensitive critic of ancient and modern literature, a professional philosopher and a trained scholar of ancient...