Pleasure

This paper shows the ways in which Kant’s notions of the feeling of life and the feeling of the promotion of life may be influenced by Epicurus’ theory of pleasure and the Stoic notion of oikeiôsis, respectively. Accordingly, getting a clear picture of Epicurus’ theory of pleasure and the Stoic notion of oikeiôsis will help us (i) understand why Kant introduces these notions in the third Critique and (ii) why he identifies aesthetic pleasure with the feeling of the promotion of (...) life. As I will demonstrate, the feeling of life allows us to be conscious of the harmonious interaction of our faculties with each other while the feeling of the promotion of life allows us to be aware of the harmonious relationship between our faculties and nature. Hence, the feeling of the promotion of life indicates the well-being of the subject in its relation to its environment. (shrink)

In ancient Greek thought, the final destination of humans’ life journey is eudaimonia, “happiness.” Aristotle follows this tradition in taking eudaimonia as the “goal” (telos) of human life. Eudaimonia, however, is not a momentary achievement or a means for attaining something else, nor is it identified with the chance “goods” of aristocracy, wealth, beauty, or political power. It is tied rather to the specific nature of human beings and depends on their particular function or “work” (ergon) as their proper condition (...) throughout an entire lifetime. There is also a pleasure (hêdonê) which corresponds to this activity as the most essential and highest possible pleasure for human beings according to their nature. What is the proper activity for the human species and its proper pleasure? Which pleasure corresponds to a human being’s true nature? This paper explores the paramount importance of pleasure within the ethical/political framework of Aristotle’s philosophy and its association with the ultimate destination of human life – which is to fully realise our human potential and function according to our nature. As such, Aristotle’s view of pleasure and happiness may provide some key insights for understanding – and perhaps redirecting – the pursuits of the tourist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. In the first instance it is an attempt to offer a new perspective from which to reflect on the meaning and philosophical presuppositions of Friedrich Schlegel’s defence and use of (romantic) irony, as well other related notions: humour, wit, and other comic devices. I propose to situate this perspective within a revaluation of pleasure and joy. To do this in a new way (although not in opposition to authors such as Manfred Frank, Elizabeth (...) Millan-Zaibert, or Gary Handwerk), I refer to one of Schlegel’s earliest texts devoted to The Aesthetic Value of Greek Comedy from 1794. In addition, this paper questions the extent to which Schlegel’s position is tenable in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. For this, I reflect briefly on the ways in which Nietzsche’s writings and notion of life-affirmation respond to Schlegel’s vindication of romantic irony. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Thomas More’s Utopia represents not a pleasurable alternative world, but rather a debate on how to make life more pleasurable in the actual world. It involves a tussling with questions of truth in an age in which unifying transcendental answers were giving way to more instrumental solutions as demanded by the growth of mercantile city-states. This article traces the function of pleasure in Utopia as a dialectically mediating agent on the recognition that pleasure is available only in compromised form. For (...) More, solutions must be sought through the mind’s capacity to form agreeable relations out of contradictions. It implies assembling meaning from the perspectives Utopia provides, and a constant balancing and rebalancing process in search of an overall point of view that may give pleasure. (shrink)

This paper proposes a unified reading of pleasure's nature and value in Plato's _Philebus_. It also explains how the proposed reading illuminates certain claims about pleasure across the corpus that initially seem to be in some tension: (i) that pleasure is not the good; (ii) that pleasure is choiceworthy and an aspect of the best human life; and (iii) that pleasure is dangerous and tends to make us into bad people who live badly.

Explores C. S. Lewis's views of the purpose of higher education and his distinctive answer: to experience pleasure.

A good deal of recent debate over the nature of pleasure and pain has surrounded the alleged phenomenon of unconscious sensory pleasure and pain, or pleasures and pains whose subjects are entirely unaware of them while experiencing them. According to Ben Bramble, these putative pleasures and pains present a problem for attitudinal theories of pleasure and pain, since these theories claim that what makes something a sensory pleasure or pain is that one has a special sort of pro- or con-attitude (...) toward it at the time one experiences it. In this paper, I look at the two existing defenses of attitudinal theories against this worry and explain (following Bramble) that each is inadequate. I show that this inadequacy is in part a result of existing attitudinal theories failing to recognize an important distinction in pro- and con-attitudes, and I propose and defend an amended attitudinal view that does recognize this distinction. I then offer a more promising response to the objection from unconscious sensory pleasures and pains: that experiences of apparently unconscious pleasure or pain only seem pleasant or unpleasant because their subjects are disposed to experience pleasantness or unpleasantness. In this sense, unconscious pleasures and pains are not really pleasures or pains at all. (shrink)

I develop and defend metaethical experientialism, the thesis that phenomenal facts explain certain kinds of value facts. I argue, for example, that anyone who knows what it’s like to feel extreme pain is in a position to know that that kind of experience is bad. I argue that metaethical experientialism yields genuine counterexamples to the principle that no ethical conclusion can be derived from purely descriptive premises. I also discuss the prospects for a pluralistic metaethics, whereby different metaethical theories hold (...) for different classes of ethical facts. (shrink)

It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for action. This (...) view allows me to flesh out the global workspace theory of consciousness, as well as some of the phenomenal characteristics of conscious experience. (shrink)

Some mental states have valence—they are pleasant or unpleasant. According to imperativism, valence depends on imperative content, while evaluativism tells us that it depends on evaluative content. We argue that if one considers valence’s informational profile, it becomes evident that imperativism is superior to evaluativism. More precisely, we show that if one applies the best available metasemantics to the role played by (un)pleasant mental states in our cognitive economy, then these states turn out to have imperative rather than evaluative content, (...) since: (i) they are much more informative about behaviour than they are about the world; and (ii) they occupy a stage in the information-processing chain that is closer to behaviour production than it is to the uptake of sensory information. This is our metasemantic argument for imperativism. (shrink)

Pains are unpleasant, universally unpleasant. What seems trivially true has been rejected by various pain scientists because of several phenomena which allegedly show that there can be pain which is not unpleasant. This rejection is partly based on the ambiguity of ‘pain unpleasantness’ which can be avoided by distinguishing between primary and secondary pain affect. As for the alleged counterexamples to the above, I will argue that experiences of episodic analgesia as well as the ‘pain’ experiences of some lobotomized and (...) morphine patients should not be construed as cases in which pain and unpleasantness come apart, but rather as cases in which nociceptive activity and pain dissociate. Regarding the notorious case of pain asymbolia, I will demonstrate that the behaviour of patients with this syndrome suggests that they do feel pain, and that their pain sensations are unpleasant, but much less unpleasant than the pains normal people would have if exposed to the same noxious stimuli. Adopting such an account of these phenomena allows us to retain the widely accepted IASP definition of pain, and thus avoids the issue of integrating non-unpleasant pains into a plausible definition of pain. (shrink)

Optimism and pessimism are two diametrically opposed views about the value of existence. Optimists maintain that existence is better than non-existence, while pessimists hold that it is worse. Arthur Schopenhauer put forward a variety of arguments against optimism and for pessimism. I will offer a synoptic reading of these arguments, which aims to show that while Schopenhauer’s case against optimism primarily focuses on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, his case for pessimism focuses on the ways in which life (...) as a whole is structurally defective. (shrink)

What is the best way to account for the badness of pain and what sort of theory of welfare is best suited to accommodate this view? I argue that unpleasant sensory experiences are prudentially bad in the absence of contrary attitudes, but good when the object of positive attitudes. Pain is bad unless it is liked, enjoyed, valued etc. Interestingly, this view is incompatible with either pure objectivist or pure subjectivist understandings of welfare. However, there is a kind of welfare (...) theory that can incorporate this view of the badness of pain and which is very, very close to being a form of subjectivism. Moreover, this hybrid account of welfare is entirely compatible with the deep motivations of subjectivism. I therefore argue that those who lean towards welfare subjectivism should adopt this account of pain, and that we should revise our understanding of subjectivism to count such theories as subjective. (shrink)

Why are pains bad for us? A natural answer is that it is just because of how they feel (or their felt-qualities). But this answer is cast into doubt by cases of people who are unbothered by certain pains of theirs. These pains retain their felt-qualities, but do not seem bad for the people in question. In this paper, I offer a new response to this problem. I argue that in such cases, the pains in question have become “just more (...) of the same,” and for this reason have ceased to be bad for the relevant individuals. It is because they (implicitly) recognise this that they are unbothered by such pains. (shrink)

According to Schopenhauer’s compensation argument for pessimism, the non-existence of the world is preferable to its existence because no goods can ever compensate for the mere existence of evil. Standard interpretations take this argument to be based on Schopenhauer’s thesis that all goods are merely the negation of evils, from which they assume it follows that the apparent goods in life are in fact empty and without value. This article develops a non-standard variant of the standard interpretation, which accepts the (...) relevance of the negativity thesis but rejects that the argument assumes that life’s goods are all empty and valueless. Instead, it argues that whatever value negative goods might possess, they do not have the kind of value to compensate for positive evils. This involves additional development of the negativity thesis and a defence of it against objections from Byron Simmons (2021). (shrink)

A collection, edited by David Bain, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns, originating in our Value of Suffering Project. Table of Contents: Michael Wheeler - ‘How should affective phenomena be studied?’; Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni – ‘Pleasures, unpleasures, and emotions’; Hilla Jacobson – ‘The attitudinal representational theory of painfulness fleshed out’; Tim Schroeder – ‘What we represent when we represent the badness of getting hurt’; Hagit Benbaji – ‘A defence of the inner view of pain’; Olivier Massin – ‘Suffering pain’; (...) Frederique de Vignemont – ‘The value of threat’; Colin Leach – ‘Bad feelings can be good and good feelings can be bad’; Tasia Scrutton – ‘Mental suffering and the experience of beauty’; Brock Bastian – ‘From suffering to satisfaction: why we need pain to feel pleasure’; Marilyn McCord Adams – ‘Pain and moral agency’; Jennifer Corns – ‘Hedonic rationality’; Jonathan Cohen & Matthew Fulkerson – ‘Suffering and rationality’; Tom McClelland – ‘Suffering invites understanding’; Michael Brady – ‘Suffering as a virtue’; Glen Pettigrove TBA. Further authors TBA. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness appears to be particularly normatively significant. For this reason, sentience-based conceptions of ethics are widespread. In the field of animal ethics, knowing which animals are sentient appears to be essential to decide the moral status of these animals. I argue that, given that materialism is true of the mind, phenomenal consciousness is probably not particularly normatively significant. We should face up to this probable insignificance of phenomenal consciousness and move towards an ethic without sentience.

Beyza Şen and Ali Tacar's interview with Masahiro Morioka on painless civilization and his recent works. "In our contemporary civilization we can experience pleasure, pleasantness, and comfort, and can avoid pain and suffering, albeit at the sacrifice of joy of life, which is indispensable for acquiring our life without regret. Of course we have a lot of pain and suffering in our society, so our lives are not painless at all, but I cannot help feeling that our contemporary scientific civilization (...) is progressing in the direction of eliminating pain and suffering irreversibly. ...". (shrink)

In the Philebus, Socrates argues that pleasures can be false in the same way that beliefs can be false. On the basis of Socrates' analysis of malicious pleasure, a mixed pleasure of the soul and a passion, I defend the view that, according to Socrates, pleasures can be false when they represent as pleasant something that is not worthy of our enjoyment, where that means that they represent as pleasant something that is not pleasant in its own right because it (...) is not fine. Since these pleasures misrepresent the value of their objects, they involve an evaluative error. In contrast, a pleasure is true when it correctly represents the actual value of things. (shrink)

Future-bias is preferring some lesser future good to a greater past good because it is in the future, or preferring some greater past pain to some lesser future pain because it is in the past. Most of us think that this bias is rational. I argue that no agents have future-biased preferences that are rationally evaluable—that is, evaluable as rational or irrational. Given certain plausible assumptions about rational evaluability, either we must find a new conception of future-bias that avoids the (...) difficulties I raise, or we must conclude that future-biased preferences are not subject to rational evaluation. (shrink)

I argue that pleasure is not only necessarily good, but also essentially so. Part of the nature of pleasure is to be (personally, finally) good.

Prudential hedonism is a school of thought in the philosophy of welfare that says that only pleasure is good for us in itself and only pain is bad for us in itself. This dissertation concerns an especially austere form of prudential hedonism: basic prudential hedonism (BPH). BPH claims that all pleasure is good for us in itself, and all pain is bad for us in itself, without exception; that all pleasures feel fundamentally alike, as do all pains; and that the (...) amount of welfare in a person’s life can (in principle) be calculated just by adding up the amount of pleasure it contains and subtracting the amount of pain. The dissertation presents a positive argument for the claim that pleasures and pains are defined by common phenomenal properties, defends BPH against a battery of objections, and outlines an argument for accepting BPH on the grounds that it is simpler than competing views. (shrink)

This article has two main aims. First, it will defend an ‘attitudinal’ account of pleasure, that is, an account of what it is that makes an experience pleasurable for a subject that explains it in terms of a certain kind of de re desire that the subject has towards that experience. Second, in doing so, the article aims to further our understanding of unconscious desires, and of what the subjects of such desires can be. The article begins by introducing two (...) existing accounts of what makes an experience pleasurable. It then offers a diagnosis of a recent objection to attitudinal accounts from Bramble and existing responses from attitudinal theorists, arguing that the two positions are currently at a stalemate. After this, I argue for the possible existence of unknowable and unconscious de re desires, and show how such desires provide the best defence of such ‘attitudinal’ accounts. (shrink)

What makes it the case that a given experience is pleasurable? According to the felt-quality theory, each pleasurable experience is pleasurable because of the way that it feels—its “qualitative character” or “felt-quality”. According to the attitudinal theory, each pleasurable experience is pleasurable because the experiencer takes certain attitudes towards it. These two theories of pleasure are typically framed as rivals, but it could be that they are both partly right. It could be that pleasure is partly a matter of felt-quality, (...) and partly a matter of attitudes. It could be that a hybrid theory is true. In this paper, I aim to advance the cause of hybrid theories of pleasure. I do this in two ways. I begin by examining the challenges which motivate the search for a hybrid theory. I call these the HONEST challenges: Heterogeneity, Oppositeness, Normativity, Euthyphro, Separateness, and Togetherness. The first three challenges—HON—are challenges for the felt-quality theory. The second three challenges—EST—are challenges for the attitudinal theory. Having established the HONEST challenges, I then describe and motivate a particular cluster of hybrid theories which I will call dispositional hybrid theories. According to these theories, pleasurable experiences are all and only those experiences which dispose us to desire them in virtue of feeling the way that they do. The dispositional theories deliver on the promise of hybrid theories: because they appeal to both felt-qualities and attitudes, they have the resources to avoid most, if not all, of the HONEST challenges. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a (...) recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

My partner loves the experiences she gets from eating olives. I, on the other hand, hate the experiences I get from eating olives. We differ in tastes. But how exactly do we differ? In particular: do our taste experiences differ phenomenologically—that is, do my olive-experiences feel different than my partner’s olive-experiences? Some philosophers have assumed that the answer is “no,” and have advanced important arguments which turn on this assumption. I argue that, contrary to what these philosophers assume, ordinary taste (...) differences do involve differences in phenomenology. My olive-experiences feel different than my partner’s olive-experiences. I argue for this phenomenal thesis in stages. First, I argue that there is a link between our attitudes and our pleasures; second, I argue that there is a link between our pleasures and our phenomenology. Together, my conclusions link our attitudes and phenomenology in a way that vindicates the phenomenal thesis. Along the way, I fend off various worries about what the phenomenal thesis might entail. I show that it does not entail any form if radical subjectivism, nor does it entail that there is a “distinctive feeling of pleasure.” I close by considering how opponents of the phenomenal thesis might retreat to a weaker thesis: one which concerns extraordinary taste differences, as opposed to ordinary taste differences. I argue that there are no obviously sound arguments for even this weaker thesis, which should make us all the more confident in the phenomenal thesis. (shrink)

Evaluativism (Carruthers 2018) and reflexive imperativism (Barlassina and Hayward 2019) agree that valence—the (un)pleasantness of experiences—is a natural kind shared across all affective states. But they disagree about what valence is. For evaluativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of representing its worldly object as good/bad; for reflexive imperativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of commanding its subject to get more/less of itself. I argue that reflexive imperativism is superior to evaluativism according to Carruthers’s own standards. He maintains that (...) a theory of valence should account for its phenomenology and role in imagination-based decision-making. I show that it is reflexive imperativism, rather than evaluativism, that fits this explanatory bill. (shrink)

Affective experiences such as pains, pleasures, and emotions have affective phenomenology: they feel pleasant. This type of phenomenology has a loopy regulatory profile: it often motivates us to act a certain way, and these actions typically end up regulating our affective experiences back. For example, the pleasure you get by tasting your morning coffee motivates you to drink more of it, and this in turn results in you obtaining another pleasant gustatory experience. In this article, we argue that reflexive imperativism (...) is the only intentionalist account of affective phenomenology—probably, the only account at all—that is able to make sense of its loopy regulatory profile. (shrink)

This article gives a short presentation of reflexive imperativism, the intentionalist theory of valence I developed with Max Khan Hayward. The theory says that mental states have valence in virtue of having reflexive imperative content. More precisely, mental states have positive valence (i.e., feel good) in virtue of issuing the command "More of me!", and they have negative valence (i.e., feel bad) in virtue of issuing the command "Less of me!" The article summarises the main arguments in favour of reflexive (...) imperativism and against other intentionalist treatments of valence. (shrink)

The debate over the value of pleasure among Eudoxus, Speusippus, and Aristotle is dramatically documented by the Nicomachean Ethics, particularly in the dialectical pros-and-cons concerning the so-called argument from contraries. Two similar versions of this argument are preserved at EN VII. 13, 1153b1–4, and X. 2, 1172b18–20. Many scholars believe that the argument at EN VII is either a report or an appropriation of the Eudoxean argument in EN X. This essay aims to revise this received view. It will explain (...) why these two arguments differ in premises, contents and purposes, and why these distinctions matter for a proper assessment of Aristotle’s understanding of pleasure and pain in general and his dialectical art in particular. (shrink)

Affective experiences motivate and rationalize behavior in virtue of feeling good or bad, or their valence. It has become popular to explain such phenomenal character with intentional content. Rejecting evaluativism and extending earlier imperativist accounts of pain, I argue that when experiences feel bad, they both represent things as being in a certain way and tell us to see to it that they will no longer be that way. Such commands have subjective authority by virtue of linking up with a (...) relevant background concern. The imperative content explains but doesn’t constitute world-directed motivation. It also rationalizes action indirectly, by giving rise to an affective seeming that represents the situation as calling for the authoritatively commanded behavior. One experience feels worse than another if its content tells us to bear a higher opportunity cost to comply with the command. Finally, experience-directed motivation is contingent on our being attitudinally (dis)pleased with the character of our experience. (shrink)

In this thesis I provide an account of the unpleasantness of pain. In doing this, I shed light on the nature of pain and unpleasantness. I propose to understand the unpleasantness of pain based on the determinable-determinate distinction. Unpleasantness is a determinable phenomenal property of mental states that entails badness. I propose that an unpleasant pain experience has two phenomenal properties: i) the phenomenal property of being a pain, and ii) a phenomenal determinate property (u1, u2, u3, etc.) of the (...) unpleasantness determinable. According to this theory unpleasant pains feel bad, and this explains why we are motivated and justified in avoiding them. This explains, for example, why we are motivated and justified to take painkillers. This theory allows us to account for the heterogeneity of unpleasantness, i.e., we can explain how different unpleasant experiences feel unpleasant even if they feel so different. -/- The thesis is organised into seven chapters and divided by three main themes: i) what the unpleasantness of pain consists in, ii) how we can account for the great phenomenal diversity among experiences of unpleasantness, and iii) which cases suggest that there could be pains that are not unpleasant. Broadly, the first two chapters deal with the first theme, where I analyse two reductive accounts of unpleasantness: the content theories and the desire theories. I deal with the second theme in the third and fourth chapter, where I analyse different theories that try to account for the phenomenal property of unpleasantness. In the fifth and sixth chapter, I focus on the third theme, where I consider different cases that suggest the existence of pains that are not unpleasant. In the final chapter, I offer a conclusion of the three main themes by providing my own view on the unpleasantness of pain. (shrink)

Several theorists have defended that unpleasantness can be explained by appealing to (intrinsic, simultaneous, de re) desires for certain experiences not to be occurring. In a nutshell, experiences are unpleasant because we do not want them, and not vice versa. A common criticism for this approach takes the form of a Euthyphro dilemma. Even if there is a solution for this criticism, I argue that this type of approach is limited in two important ways. It cannot provide an explanation for: (...) i) the motivation, from a psychological conscious point of view, nor ii) a non-instrumental justification, for having the relevant desires. The lack of these explanations is relevant since these are precisely the type clarifications that we would expect from a theory about unpleasantness. (shrink)

Experiences like pains, pleasures, and emotions have affective phenomenal character: they feel pleasant or unpleasant. Imperativism proposes to explain affective phenomenal character by appeal to imperative content, a kind of intentional content that directs rather than describes. We argue that imperativism is on the right track, but has been developed in the wrong way. There are two varieties of imperativism on the market: first-order and higher-order. We show that neither is successful, and offer in their place a new theory: reflexive (...) imperativism. Our proposal is that an experience P feels pleasant in virtue of being constituted by a Command with reflexive imperative content, while an experience U feels unpleasant in virtue of being constituted by a Command with reflexive imperative content : More of P!Less of U! If you need a slogan: experiences have affective phenomenal character in virtue of commanding us Get more of me! Get less of me! (shrink)

This paper defends a desire-based understanding of pleasurable and unpleasant experiences. More specifically, the thesis is that what makes an experience pleasant/unpleasant is the subject having a certain kind of desire about that experience. I begin by introducing the ‘Desire Account’ in more detail, and then go on to explain and refute a prominent set of contemporary counter-examples, based on subjects who might have ‘Reflective Blindness’, looking particularly at the example of subjects with depression. I aim to make the Desire (...) Account more persuasive, but also to clear up more widespread misunderstandings about depression in metaethics. For example, mistakes that are made by conflating two of depression’s most prominent symptoms: depressed mood and anhedonia. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper assesses whether Evaluativism, as a view about the nature of unpleasant pains, can meet a specific normative condition. The normative condition says whatever candidate state is offered as an analysis of unpleasant pain should be intrinsically phenomenally bad for its subject to be in. I first articulate a method reflecting this condition, called the normative contrast method, and then frame Evaluativism in detail. The view is then tested through this method. I show that Evaluativism can explain why cases (...) of evaluative thought, with the same contents as unpleasant pains, are not intrinsically phenomenally bad for their subjects to be in by appeal to intentional modes. However, I argue the appeal to perceptuality, which is central to this response is problematic, and therefore it remains unclear whether Evaluativism, as standardly articulated, can meet the normative condition on unpleasant pains. (shrink)

This is a precis of The Emotional Mind (2018, Cambridge University Press), summarising the key claims of the book chapter by chapter. It covers the theories of mental content (valent representation), pleasure and pain, emotions, emotional bodily feelings, social emotions, the relationship between reason and emotion, the model of character, and the general model of mental architecture presented in the book.

Bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions share the striking property of being valenced, i.e. they are positive or negative. What is valence? How do bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions relate to one another? This chapter assesses the prospects of two popular theses regarding the relation between bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions in light of what we can reasonably think about valence. According to the first thesis, the valence of bodily (dis)pleasures is explanatory prior vis-à-vis the valence of emotions. According to the second, emotions contain (...) bodily (dis)pleasures. I argue that bodily (dis)pleasures are intentional states whose valence is to be understood in terms of evaluative experience, and bring to light the similarities and dissimilarities between their intentional structure and that of emotions. On this backdrop, I offer reasons to conclude that we should adopt neither of the two theses. (shrink)

The paper aims at clarifying the distinctions and relations between pain and suffering. Three negative theses are defended: 1. Pain and suffering are not identical. 2. Pain is not a species of suffering, nor is suffering a species of pain, nor are pain and suffering of a common (proximate) genus. 3. Suffering cannot be defined as the perception of a pain’s badness, nor can pain be defined as a suffered bodily sensation. Three positive theses are endorsed: 4. Pain and suffering (...) are categorically distinct: pain is a localised bodily episode, suffering is a non-localised affective attitude. 5. Suffering can be expressed, pains cannot. As a consequence, we can have compassion for the suffering of others, not for their pains. 6. The relation between pain and suffering is akin to the relation between danger and fear, injustice and indignation, wrongdoing and guilt: suffering is the correct reaction to pain. One upshot is that both the influential view that the experience of pain is incorrigible and the influential view that the ordinary conception of pain is paradoxical are false. (shrink)

This paper assesses whether Evaluativism, as a view about the nature of unpleasant pains, can meet a specific normative condition. The normative condition says whatever candidate state is offered as an analysis of unpleasant pain should be intrinsically phenomenally bad for its subject to be in. I first articulate a method reflecting this condition, called the normative contrast method, and then frame Evaluativism in detail. The view is then tested through this method. I show that Evaluativism can explain why cases (...) of evaluative thought, with the same contents as unpleasant pains, are not intrinsically phenomenally bad for their subjects to be in by appeal to intentional modes. However, I argue the appeal to perceptuality, which is central to this response is problematic, and therefore it remains unclear whether Evaluativism, as standardly articulated, can meet the normative condition on unpleasant pains. (shrink)

In The Pursuit of Unhappiness, Daniel Haybron has defended an emotional state theory of happiness, according to which happiness consists in a broadly positive balance of emotions, moods, and mood propensities. In this paper, I argue that Haybron’s theory should be modified in two ways. First, contra Haybron, I argue that sensory pleasures should be regarded as constituents of happiness, alongside emotions and moods. I do this by showing that sensory pleasures are sufficiently similar to emotions for them to be (...) included within the class of happiness-constituting states. Second, I argue that a plausible theory of happiness should not include mood propensities, since their inclusion is either counterintuitive or unnecessary. (shrink)

It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological (...) aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something. (shrink)

The Pleasures of Reason in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Hedonists se centra en la relación mutua entre las capacidades humanas de sentir placer y dolor y el carácter afectivo que las une con las facultades cognitivas de aprender, comprender, recordar, evocar, planificar y anticiparse. Para esto, Warren consagra toda su agudeza analítica a eminentes obras del pensamiento antiguo: particularmente nos referimos a los diálogos platónicos República, Protágoras y Filebo. Otro tanto hace con De Anima, De Memoria et Reminiscentia, Ética (...) a Nicómaco, Retórica y Poética de Aristóteles. Finalmente, hacia la mitad y sobre el final del libro, se dedica a poner en diálogo sus análisis sobre Platón y Aristóteles con las escuelas hedonistas clásicas del helenismo: epicúreos y cirenaicos. (shrink)