Taking its departure from the Western cultural project of historical humanism, this seminar will ask questions about the amorous deeds that occur within the processes of humanism's emergence and development. These questions presume that the pathology of love acts as the cultural dominant within domains of knowledge production, creativity, and species formation. They attempt to test the thesis that the erotic is both a necessary component in the development of humanism—one of its necessary conditions—and one of the consequences of that emergence. The syllabus will move from philosophy to aesthetics, from the classical Greek to the posthuman. It shall cover a range of genres and include creative, critical, philosophical, and theoretical works.