The need to create art is found in every human society, manifest in many different ways across many different cultures. Is this universal need rooted in our evolutionary past? The Art Instinct reveals that it is, combining evolutionary psychology with aesthetics to shed new light on fascinating questions about the nature of art.

Here I speak in favor of the view that life's meaning can be found in the pursuit of pleasure. I first present an argument for this view that is grounded in a traditional concept of meaning. To help ease remaining concerns about accepting it, I then draw attention to four things the view does not imply: (1) that we have a reason to take hedonistic theories of meaning seriously; (2) that meaning can be found in the deeply immoral, the deeply (...) ignorant, or the deeply repulsive pursuit of pleasure; (3) that there is a significantly easier route to meaning than the pursuit of morality, the pursuit of knowledge, or the pursuit of art; and (4) that meaning can be found in pursuits that involve only baser aspects of human nature. (shrink)

The following text is not just unpublished. There is something intimate, secret, confidential about it. It consists of a series of notes - classed from A to H - that Gilles Deleuze had entrusted to me in order that I give them to Michel Foucault. It was in 1977. Foucault had just published La Volonté de savoir, the introduction to a Histoire de la Sexualité which challenged the play of categories through which the struggles of sexual liberation reflected itself. The (...) reception of the book, poorly understood, was contemporary with a sort of crisis in Foucault, already wholly bent to the task of bringing out of himself, and converting himself to, what would become the problematic of L'usage de plaisirs and the Souci de soi. Gilles Deleuze, sensitive to what he perceives as a suffering in his friend, thus writes up these notes: therein he gives the account of his convergences and divergences with Foucault. It is not a matter of a critique, even less of a polemic, but of an invitation, entirely imbued with the sincerity of friendship, to take up again a dialogue which had been interrupted. (shrink)

.In this paper, I address Descartes’ claims that sensory perceptions function to aid and preserve the subject in interacting with the world, and focus specifically on the ‘valence’, or agreeable/disagreeable quality, that characterizes many sensations. I show how Descartes considers this aspect of sensation to be a significant factor in the ecological role of sensory perception and I then turn to a kind of case that seems to pose a problem for this view: that of aesthetic pleasure. I consider Descartes’ (...) remarks on a particular kind of aesthetic pleasure – that found in musical consonance – and argue that his discussion of this phenomenon reveals that he distinguishes between two distinct kinds of valence – evaluative sensory valence and aesthetic valence – only one of which functions to report directly on ecological evaluation. Further, I suggest that the best way to understand the distinction between these is by appealing to Descartes’ three grades of sensory perception. (shrink)

Utility- and pleasure-Friendship in the "nicomachean ethics" have commonly been held to be wholly self-Seeking relationships and of no great interest as forms of "friendship". Recently, John cooper has argued that these relationships essentially involve disinterested concern in a subtle blending of self- and other-Regarding purposes and causes. The article argues against cooper that disinterestedness has no part in these relationships but that they can nonetheless be seen as exhibiting trust, Sharing, Interdependence, And other virtues of interpersonal relationships.

Being whipped, getting a deep-tissue massage, eating hot chili peppers, running marathons, and getting tattooed are all painful. Sometimes they are also pleasant—or so many people claim. Masochistic pleasure consists in finding such experiences pleasant in addition to, and because of, the pain. Masochistic pleasure presents a philosophical puzzle. Pains hurt, they feel bad, and are aversive. Pleasures do the opposite. Thus many assume that the idea of a pleasant pain is downright unintelligible. I disagree. I claim that cases of (...) pleasant pains are more common than many philosophers suppose, and that they have no essential connection to either sex or psychopathology. I review several attempts to account for masochism that preserve the intuition that nothing can be both pleasant and painful at once. These account for some, but not all, cases of masochism. The stubborn remainder, I argue, are sensations that are genuinely pleasant and painful at once. I give an account of how that might be, focusing on boundary-pushing aspects of masochistic pleasure that have been largely overlooked in the literature. I show how, properly understood, pain and pleasure can coexist—and also why it is very rare for them to actually do so. (shrink)

Several philosophers have argued that interpersonal comparisons of utility are problematic or even impossible, and that this poses a problem for the thesis that pleasure is a legitimate, measurable quantity. This, in turn, is thought to pose a problem of some kind for a variety of normative ethical and axiological theories. Perhaps it is supposed to show that utilitarianism or hedonism is false, or is supposed to show that there is no genuine hedonic calculus, or that any view that presupposes (...) that pleasure and pain are morally relevant is false or untenable. Its proponents begin by noticing that interpersonal comparisons of pleasure and pain are impossible in some relevant sense. This impossibility has been exploited by different philosophers for different purposes. It is clear, however, that a great many ethical theories rely in some way on the thesis that pleasure is measurable, and that its incoherence therefore threatens a great many theories in ethics. The purpose of this paper is to survey several of the most interesting versions of this argument; then to explain several attempts to respond to the problem, and to explain why each attempt fails; then to present, explain, and defend the correct solution to the problem. (shrink)

Plato conceived of the Form of Beauty as quite distinct from the Form of the Good. Beauty was a means to the Good. The ascent theory of the Symposium has suggested to some commentators that Plato envisaged two kinds of beauty, the sensuous and the intellectual, and that to reach the Good we must transcend our sensuous desires and cultivate an appreciation of intellectual beauty. However, in the Laws Plato presents us with a third notion of beauty, which is neither (...) sensuous nor intellectual. To experience beauty we need to cultivate our pleasure in harmonious forms. This is where we find a theory of beauty that resonates in Kant’s aesthetic theory. According to the latter, the feeling for beauty is a feeling for harmony that takes us beyond the confines of a world marked out by self-interest. I conclude that Plato’s aesthetic theory anticipates the role that aesthetic judgment would play in Immanuel Kant’s system of the mind. (shrink)

The fashion industry needs to become more circular, given the unsustainable levels of waste it produces. Our research empirically explores and theoretically develops how adopting a virtue ethics approach can encourage and support second-hand clothing consumption as a form of reuse and a way of practicing sustainability. Based on ethnographic interviews with consumers who shop in UK charity shops, our grounded theory study focuses on how consumers experience second-hand clothing consumption as constitutive of sources of (in)action that encourage or inhibit (...) virtuous, sustainable behaviour. We find that pleasure and/or shame or guilt (pain) are key to enabling virtuous moral decision-making towards reuse and sustainability. We furthermore argue that seduction and conversion, hand in hand with pleasure, act as levers supporting such moral decision-making, mitigating aversions and wayward desires that obstruct good moral intentions to consume second-hand clothing. By engaging empirically with moral decision-making, our research theoretically advances scholarship on virtue ethics and second-hand clothing consumption, whilst contributing to an ethically informed vision of the circular economy. We conclude with implications for charity retail practices in support of circularity and sustainability informed by a virtue ethics perspective, as well as suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Human lives are full of pleasures and pains. And humans are creatures that are able to think: to learn, understand, remember and recall, plan and anticipate. Ancient philosophers were interested in both of these facts and, what is more, were interested in how these two facts are related to one another. There appear to be, after all, pleasures and pains associated with learning and inquiring, recollecting and anticipating. We enjoy finding something out. We are pained to discover that a belief (...) we hold is false. We can think back and enjoy or be upset by recalling past events. And we can plan for and enjoy imagining pleasures yet to come. This book is about what Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics had to say about these relationships between pleasure and reason. (shrink)

In this article I intent to go through the Epicurean thought and the role it plays in the concrete life of man. In this endeavour, I shall use some of Epicurus’ maxims, and also The Poem of Nature, written by Lucretius, and thought up in the spirit of Epicureism. The idea from which the entire argument grows is sustained by the pragmatic role that Epicurus cultivates in respect to life. In fact, this is the same way that his very philosophy (...) looks like. Another issue to be discussed here deals with the way in which Greek philosophy is brought into man’s factual space by Epicureism. To conclude, we shall see the limits to which Stoicism and Epicureism merge, and which is the belt separating the two conceptions. (shrink)

Enthusiasm over technology is found among men. Or, at least, that is the impression we get from the main body of earlier research, which leaves us with an understanding of men as computer enthusiasts, while women are more reluctant and ‘rational’ in their relation to the computer. In this paper I will argue that women do in fact enjoy working with computers. The empirical material is from a study of a group of students taking a computer course. We will meet (...) women who enjoy working with computers, and explore how they express their pleasure in relation to the computer. Contrary to earlier claims that ‘computing is incompatible with being a girl’, we will find that many of the 21 women in this study are not afraid to articulate their pleasure in computing. (shrink)

Most commentators think that Plato's account of the varieties of false pleasure is disjointed and that various types of false pleasure he identifies are false in different ways. It really doesn't look that way to me: I think that the discussion is unified, and that Plato starts with less difficult cases to build up to a point about more important but less clear cases. In this paper, I do my best to show how this might work. I don't think I (...) will ever work on this again: the experience of writing this paper and dealing with frustrating refereeing practices has led me to pretty much switch to aesthetics. I'm much happier. But here are the fruits of my labor. I know there are a few details I got wrong (in particular a place or two where I should have scrutinized Frede's translation more closely), but I still think that I'm on the right track. I hope it's useful to someone. (shrink)

This paper formulates and defends a version of moral vegetarianism. Since eating animals is not causally connected to their death, I begin with analyzing the moral status of consumer actions that do not, taken on their own, harm animals . I then formulate a version of moral vegetarianism . Three different opponents of moral vegetarianism are then distinguished and criticized . I then take up the argument according to which eating animals benefits them . I close with the question of (...) the desirability of collective vegetarianism from the point of view of animals. (shrink)

Some philosophers have claimed that pleasures and pains are characterized by their particular or . Most contemporary writers reject this view: they hold that hedonic states have nothing in common except being liked or disliked (alternatively: pursued or avoided) for their own sake. In this article, I argue that the hedonic tone view has been dismissed too quickly: there is no clear introspective or scientific evidence that pleasures do not share a phenomenal quality. I also argue that analysing hedonic states (...) in terms of liking or wanting is implausible. If it is correct that pleasures and pains are not united by any particular hedonic tone, we should instead simply conclude that there are several different hedonic tones. This pluralistic understanding of the hedonic tone view has generally been overlooked in the literature, but appears to be fairly plausible as a philosophical account of pleasure and pain. (shrink)

Music impinges upon the body and the brain and has inductive power, relying on both innate dispositions and acquired mechanisms for coping with the sounds. This process is partly autonomous and partly deliberate, but multiple interrelations between several levels of processing can be shown. There is, further, a tradition in neuroscience that divides the organization of the brain into lower and higher functions. The latter have received a lot of attention in music and brain studies during the last decades. Recent (...) developments in neuroimaging techniques, however, have broadened the field by encompassing the study of both cortical and subcortical processing of the sounds. Much is still to be investigated but some major observations seem already to emerge. The domain of music and emotions is a typical example with a major focus on the pleasure that can be derived from listening to music. Pleasure, however, is not the only emotion that music can induce and the mechanisms behind its elicitation are far from understood. There are also mechanisms related to arousal and activation that are both less differentiated and at the same time more complex than the assumed mechanisms triggering basic emotions. It is tempting, therefore, to bring together contributions from neuroscience studies with a view to cover the possible range of answers to the question of what pleasurable or mood-modifying effects music can have on human beings in real-time listening situations. (shrink)

Plato’s Philebus develops an ontological model in four terms to account for “all the things that are now in the all”. The fourfold model consists of Limit, the Unlimited, the Mixture of these two, and the Cause of the mixture. Traditional interpretations place pleasure in the class of the Unlimited and knowledge either in that of Limit or, sometimes, in that of the Cause of mixtures. The aim of my paper is twofold: it challenges the received interpretation and defends instead (...) the view that pleasures, insofar as they are true, are placed in the class of Mixtures, while knowledge and its cognates are among Causes of mixtures, and it explores some of the major implications of the right placement of pleasure and knowledge on the metaphysical map. In particular, I argue that Socrates’ identification of pleasure as a Mixture and of knowledge as Cause of mixtures accounts for the fact that we witness throughout the dialogue a gradual progression from the initial absolutely unbridgeable distance between pleasure and knowledge to an intimate collaboration between them. I suggest that this shift reflects a transition from the Phileban conception of pleasure as thoughtless thrill or sensation to the Platonic understanding of pleasure as cognitively structured experience that depends on our beliefs not only about factual situations, but also about the meaning and value of such situations for life generally. (shrink)

Arguably, emotion is always valenced—either pleasant or unpleasant—and dependent on the pleasure system. This system serves adaptive evolutionary functions; relying on separable wanting, liking, and learning neural mechanisms mediated by mesocorticolimbic networks driving pleasure cycles with appetitive, consummatory, and satiation phases. Liking is generated in a small set of discrete hedonic hotspots and coldspots, while wanting is linked to dopamine and to larger distributed brain networks. Breakdown of the pleasure system can lead to anhedonia and other features of affective disorders. (...) Eudaimonia and well-being are difficult to study empirically, yet whole-brain computational models could offer novel insights potentially linking eudaimonia to optimal metastability in the pleasure system. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, empirical researchers have become increasingly interested in explaining the formation of “basic” aesthetic judgments, i.e. simple judgments of sensory preferability and the pleasure that seems to accompany them. To that end, Reber et al. have recently defended a “processing-fluency” view, which identifies aesthetic pleasure with one’s ability to easily process an object’s perceptual properties (e.g. Reber 2012 ). While the processing-fluency theory is certainly an improvement over its competitors, it is currently vulnerable to several serious (...) criticisms. In what follows, I aim to provide a more holistic, explanatorily robust, model of the processing-fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure by incorporating what the view neglects: the crucial role of perceptual disfluency, interest, and the underlying values that drive aesthetic appraisal. (shrink)

The Anticipatory and Consummatory Interpersonal Pleasure Scale is a psychometric instrument that has been used to indirectly measure social anhedonia in many cross-cultural contexts, such as in Western, European, Eastern, and Israeli samples. However, little is known about the psychometric properties of the ACIPS in Korean samples. The primary goal of this study was to validate the Korean version of the ACIPS among non-help-seeking individuals. The sample consisted of 307 adult individuals who had no current or prior psychiatric history. Participants (...) were administered the ACIPS, along with the Behavioral Inhibition and Behavioral Activation Scales and Beck Depression Inventory. We examined the association of the total ACIPS scores with the other measures. The ACIPS showed good internal consistency. We also explored the factor structure of the Korean translation of the ACIPS using principal component analysis with Promax rotation and Kaiser normalization. Factor analysis yielded a three-factor structure that accounted for 58.8% of the variance. The three-factor model included the following subdomains: interactions involving close relationships, casual interactions, and interactions involving family members. Total BAS and BIS scores were significantly associated with total ACIPS scores, while BDI scores were inversely associated with total ACIPS scores. The current research indicates that the Korean version of the ACIPS is a useful and valid scale. Future directions include using the Korean translation of the ACIPS to elucidate the varying degrees of hedonic capacity in psychiatric patients. (shrink)

The paper examines Daniel Furlanus’ critique of Michael of Ephesus’ commentary on Aristotle’s Parts of Animals I. Furlanus was a Greco-Venetian of the 16th Century from Crete who studied in Padua and wrote in Latin a commentary on PA I. His main critical position is that the Byzantine commentator of the 11th/12th Centuries Michael of Ephesus is making a Platonic interpretation of the Aristotelian text. On the question of the relation between biological science and pleasure, the two commentators give radically (...) different answers. Pleasure for Michael of Ephesus is not worth of philosophical consideration except as a possible hindrance to scientific knowledge; for Furlanus, the pleasure of biological science is quite similar to the pleasure provided by the works of art. Consequently, the two authors have a diverging opinion as to the status of the cognizing individual’s position as to pleasure. (shrink)

The popular impression of Epicurean hedonism is that it advocates a life of sensual delights. Scholars know, however, that this impression is mistaken, both because of the overall conceptual structure of Epicurus’ ethics and because Epicurus prominently and repeatedly expressed such ideas as this.

This time, McGirr shares his love of philosophy, looking at the works of twenty eminent thinkers across history. The book goes back to Pythagoras and comes forward to the contemporary Australian Frank Jackson; back to Mungo Woman and forward to Martha Nussbaum, by way of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch. It is animated by two related questions: from where do we draw a sense of life's purpose, and how can philosophy make life better? It ranges widely across subjects: from solitude (...) to community, language to order, experience to ecstasy, the idea of good to that of a good idea. McGirr's approach is warm and inviting. Drawing on many years' experience teaching philosophy to teenagers, he shares stories from his life and discusses how philosophers have shed light on them. Ideas to Save Your Life is often funny, but it is serious about philosophy. It makes the impenetrable accessible, the indescribable palpable, and invites you to change the way you see the world. (shrink)

There is little more common in ethics than to think pain is intrinsically bad and pleasure is intrinsically good. A Humean-style error theory of the axiology of pain and pleasure is developed against these commonsense claims. We defend the thesis that the value of pain and pleasure is always contingent and only instrumental. We survey prominent theories of both intrinsic value and pain/pleasure, all of which assume that pain and pleasure are intrinsically valuable. We base our error theory on counterexamples (...) to this assumption, upon which these theories falter, and a theory of pain and pleasure which derives their value solely from their evolutionary function. (shrink)

The large extent to which aesthetic terms pervade Adam Smith’s discussion of ethics would seem to suggest, in the least, that the spheres of aesthetics and ethics are interwoven in a way hardly possible to conceive in the wake of Kant. Despite this recognized closeness between the two areas, one account in the literature has claimed that Smith’s understanding of beauty anticipates Kant’s modern notion of disinterested pleasure. It is claimed that according to Smith, disinterested pleasure is aroused by the (...) harmony of our moral sentiments as well as by the beauty of “productions of art.” By analyzing the relation of beauty to utility in Smith’s aesthetics and ethics, I will be arguing against the attribution to Smith of a specifically disinterested pleasure in our judgments of the beauty of the productions of art, as well as in the beauty of moral objects, such as virtuous character and conduct. (shrink)

The following essay examines visual representations of hurricane Katrina in popular media in order to show how photography continues to be enlisted in the production of the racial spectacle, the transformation of the plight of people of color into entertainment. The essay also analyzes how such a use of the visual serves to solidify the understanding of people of color by way of a black-white binary that does not do justice to current U.S. demographics. The essay provides a glimpse into (...) the intertwining between the visual and racial thinking. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)