The Philosophy of Viagra (Bioethical Responses to the Viagrification of the Modern World)

The impotency remedy Viagra is the fastest selling drug in history. It has grown beyond being simply a medical phenomenon, but has achieved the status of cultural icon, appearing on television as a pretext for jokes or even as a murder weapon. Viagra has socio-cultural implications that are not limited to sexuality. The Philosophy of Viagra offers a unique perspective as it examines the phenomenon of Viagra through ideas derived from more than two thousand years of philosophical reasoning. In philosophy, Eros has always had a central position. Since Plato, philosophy has held that desire is not only a medical but also a spiritual phenomenon and that scientific explanations claiming to give an exhaustive account of erotic perception are misleading. Philosophical ideas are able to debunk various scientific rationalizations of sexuality – one of which is the clinical-sexological discourse on Viagra. In this volume, several authors interpret Viagra through the lens of classical philosophy explicating the themes of immortality and hedonism. Others offer psychoanalytical considerations by confronting clinical sexology with psychological realities. Still others evoke intercultural aspects revealing the relative character of potency that the phenomenon of Viagra attempts to gloss over.