Symposium, a philosophical text written by Plato, explores the ideas of love through the retelling of speeches made amongst philosophers as they gathered for an intimate victory celebration after Agathon won a theatre festival. Eryximachus, a very prominent and boastful doctor, makes the third speech on the subject of Love where he uses his experience in the science of medicine to voice his opinion on Love, as a deity and as a human act, known to all the attendees of the party as something scientifically. Readers are presented with the following unstated philosophical assumption from the speaker, Eryximachus: Love and medicine go hand in hand. This underlying assumption made by Eryximachus is the driving force of his speech on Love.
This assumption can lead the discussion of love to a different place then most readers would expect to find. Eryximachus uses his background as a doctor to help convince his fellow celebration attendees as to what Love is to him, and how it should be praised. To Eryximachus, love occurs everywhere in the universe, whether that is in the human sole or within the animal and plant kingdom. The deity Love controls all of the occurrences on earth and in the heavens. Eryximachus starts to bring in the idea of science when he describes his view on the two different types of love. Instead of the view that Pausanias took, with the idea of a heavenly and common Aphrodite, he sees the different versions of love to be health and disease.
This assumption that medicine and love occur at the same time, stems from his idea that the love manifested within ones body can be of the two different species, health and disease. The assumption of medicine playing a big role in love is presented when Eryximachus introduces the idea of a doctor needing to distinguish which form of love is occurring. Readers can see from his speech that if the love in a body is healthy, then it should be encouraged; but if it takes the form of disease than it should...