An Inconsistency in the Philebus?

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (5):817 - 837 (2013)
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Abstract

Plato's Philebus contains an intricate difficulty. Plato seems to hold both (a) that all pleasures are processes of becoming, a crucial premise in the argument that no pleasure is good (53c?55c) and (b) that some pleasures contribute in their own right to the goodness of the best life (64c?67b). Since it seems also plausible that only things which are good can contribute to the goodness of the best life in their own right, Plato's view seems to be inconsistent. Interpreters usually reject either (a) or (b). As Plato seems firmly committed to both (a) and (b), I propose a third way of dealing with the inconsistency. The apparent inconsistency highlights a vital contrast between what is independently good (good per se), what is dependently good (good through participating in what is independently good), and what is derivatively good (good through standing in a certain relation to dependent goods). I argue that while pleasure's being a process of becoming marks it out as derivatively good, some kinds of pleasure are also dependent goods in virtue of their objects ? irrespective of their being processes of becoming

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Joachim Aufderheide
King's College London

Citations of this work

Socrates, Vlastos, Scanlon and the Principle of the Sovereignty of Virtue.Daniel Simão Nascimento - 2020 - Archai: Revista de Estudos Sobre as Origens Do Pensamento Ocidental 30:e03009.
The Unorthodox Theory of Forms in Plato's Philebus.James Wood - 2017 - Journal of Ancient Philosophy 11 (2):45.

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References found in this work

Plato's Socrates.Thomas C. Brickhouse & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.) - 1994 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy.David Wolfsdorf - 2012 - Cambridge University Press.
Plato’s examination of pleasure.R. Hackforth - 1945 - Philosophy 21 (79):182-183.
Plato.Lane Cooper - 1939 - Philosophical Review 48 (6):650-651.

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