In the 2002 biographical documentary on Jacques Derrida the director Amy Ziering Kofman asks the philosopher what he would most like to see in a film about Kant, Hegel or Heidegger. Derrida takes his time before answering. Then he responds: “their sex lives”.

Kofman is taken aback. “Why?” she asks. Derrida explains that these philosophers never speak about their own sex lives in their philosophy. They present themselves as asexual. But, he wonders, what could be more important to them and to their writing than love, those they love, and the making of love? Philosophy has a lot to say about love in general. Perhaps philosophy even began with this question: what is love? And yet, according to Derrida, individual philosophers have little to say about their own love lives, at least in their philosophical texts. Philosophy concerns the depersonalised construction of logical and universal systems of thought. Traditionally there should be no room in it for biographical introspection about one’s own love life. However, the more one looks into the canon of philosophy the more it becomes apparent that in fact philosophers have had a great deal to say about their own sexuality.

The writing of Plato and Aristotle is replete with references to Greek love. The relations between characters in these texts are not always, shall we say, Platonic. Theologian and philosopher St Augustine of Hippo founded the confessional genre in writing. He writes of his pre-celibate days as a lover of many women, asking of God: “give me chastity and continence, but not yet”. The story of the medieval scholar Peter Abelard and his equally philosophical lover, Héloïse d'Argenteuil, is well known. Their love letters are one of the great epistolary exchanges in the western canon and Abelard’s love poems were at least as influential in his lifetime as his extensive philosophical writing.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau makes reference to this in his own epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise. Like much of Rousseau the novel is a mix of fiction and philosophical reflection. In his own Confessions Rousseau tells us about his loves and losses, including Madame de Warrens, for whom he served as steward to her household and lover. Rousseau, like Kant after him, has a surprising amount to say about masturbation. Kant offers a treatise on conjugal rights and is quite stiff on the vice of self-love.