James Giles

James Giles (born 1958) is a Canadian philosopher and psychologist.He has written about personal identity and the self, and has published theories of the reason for human hairlessness and the cause of sexual desire.

Giles studied at the University of British Columbia and at the University of Edinburgh.He lectures in psychology at Roskilde University in Denmark.

Giles published his theory of sexual desire in The Nature of Sexual Desire in 2008.Sexologists usually account for sexual desire either in terms of social constructionism or as a biological characteristic essential to reproduction. Giles rejects both these views, and attempts to show by a phenomenological approach that sexual desire is an existential need rooted in the human condition, based on a feeling of incompleteness from the experience of one's own gender as a form of disequilibrium. The theory thus shows similarities to earlier theories such as those of Thomas Nagel on sexual perversion, or of Aristophanes on romantic love in Plato's Symposium.

Vulnerability and care theory of love

The vulnerability and care theory of love was put forward by Giles in an article entitled "A Theory of Love and Sexual Desire" (1994) and later developed in his book The Nature of Sexual Desire (2004). Giles' theory has been discussed by scholars Dr. Ruth, in her textbook Human Sexuality: a Psychosocial Perspective (2002), and Dr. Barbara Keesling, in her book Sexual Pleasure: Reaching New Heights of Sexual Arousal (2005).

Giles published his "naked love theory" of human hairlessness in 2010. He postulated that hairlessness in humans evolved as a result of the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact between mother and child, and thus ultimately as a consequence of bipedalism. According to Giles, naked skin is a precondition for the appearance of romantic love.

• The Shell of When, Windways Press/Lulu.com, 2011.
• Kierkegaard and Japanese Thought (Ed.), Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
• Kierkegaard and Freedom (Ed.), Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
• French Existentialism: Consciousness, Ethics, and Relations with Others (Ed.), Amsterdam and Atlanta : Rodopi, 1999.
• No Self to be Found: The Search for Personal Identity, Lanham: University Press of America, 1997.
• A Study in Phenomenalism, Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg University, 1994.