In Praise of One-night Stand An Old Philosopher’s Sexual Memoir

About the Book

One book that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for a long time is a book about sex. You see, abort forty years ago while I was going through a painful divorce, I decided to teach a course called “Philosophy of Sex” at my university. My other favorite philosopher Wittgenstein once said to his student:“ What is the use of studying philosophy if all that does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?” Other than the food, is there anything more significant to everyday life than sex? Yet, philosophers rarely discuss sex as a philosophical topic. I tried to apply my philosophical skills to help myself think clearly about the male-female relationships while living them. Over the years I have formed my own philosophy of sex and seriously contemplated writing a philosophical book, following my course outline with the title, “Thinking About Sex”. But such a book would be too didactic and boring. My recent writings convinced me that I write best when I let my thoughts range freely, and do not try to organize them into a set form. So there won’t be a table of contents or chapter divisions in this book. What follows are my sexual reminiscences interjected with my philosophizing about them. The events described are real, and the persons involved are real, but with names changed. Some parts of it may sound to some people like pornography, but it is actually a philosophy book. A great contemporary philosopher Noam Chomsky said,“ The job of a philosopher is to tell the truth and to expose lies.” That’s what I am trying to do. Another great philosopher Karl Marx said,“ Philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.” I am also trying to do that. This is not just a memoir, but I meant it to be a subversive track. I wish to subvert the status quo of our sexual mores. In fact, I meant this to be a Manifesto of Sexual Liberation!

About the Author

K. T. Fann, now retired, was formerly Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Atkinson College, York University, Canada. He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy (Basil Blackwell and University of California Press, 1969), Pierce’s Theory of Abduction (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), and Reading Laos’s Dao De Jing in English (Partridge, 2020), and editor of Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy (Dell Publishers, 1967) Symposium on J. L. Austin (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. In 1995, he retired to his ancestral village in Taiwan and turned a one-hectare abandoned farm into a self-sufficient Taoist retreat where he lives a life of simplicity in harmony with nature.