Bloom, Allan, "The Ladder of Love," Plato's Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Excerpt:

All of this amounts to nothing more than an abstraction, the improbable assertion that thinking is erotic, unless there is some real connection between the activity of thinking and the phenomena everyone recognizes as erotic. This paradoxical philosophical eroticism does not accord very well with our usual image of philosophers, such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, or Kant, especially at this moment, when reason is in such low repute. More important, it does not accord with the depiction of Socrates by Aristophanes in the Clouds, which Socrates refers to in the Apology as the first accusation against him.

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