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If any of you would like to get an orientation to pleasure, beyond
what Roxanne has provided in the Philosophy of Sex and Love course, by
the sound of the discussion, I found a few things that might be of
interest.
Easiest because it is an audio file is this audio-talk (about 15
minutes) by Hurka: http://cdn2.libsyn.com/philosophybites/Thomas_Hurka_on_Pleasure.MP3?nvb=20090418105025&nva=20090419110025&t=00bfb25f8b633dccad804
Some of you may recall Kim Setton - he has attended a couple of CHIPS,
our man in Confucian studies. He also runs a website:
http://pursuit-of-happiness.org/default.aspx
For the industrious, there is an exhaustive survey, invoking a good
deal of psychological work, in SEP:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pleasure
I'd be glad of Roxanne's ideas. Beyond that, I shall simply
contemplate the next few bottles of wine.
Ed
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There is a much longer, and unfree talk, mainly by Robert Solomon, available from here: http://www.philosophytalk.org/pastshows/Happiness.htm - since it costs money I've not heard it, but the site gives a brief synopsis and a long list of reading and some other stuff.
ReplyDeleteOne link is now dead, but it was intended to reach this: http://www1.eur.nl/fsw/happiness/ which is a big global database of empirical work on happiness.
Ed
Roxanne started us off by getting us to agree/remember that pleasure isn't just sexual pleasure. She enjoys eating; Felicia enjoys shopping. People enjoy playing games; people enjoy watching them. And so on and on.
ReplyDeleteOne question that arises for me, once we accept all that, is what philosophical interest is there in pleasure? There is a traditional doctrine, hedonism, that enjoins us to seek pleasure. But what exactly is it telling us? If pleasure were only sexual pleasure, then at least it would be obvious what hedonism recommends. And it would be equally obvious that humans, unlike bonobos, are not hedonists. But once we agree that there are an unlimited range of different
pleasures, what is hedonism telling us?
It may be telling us not to take cold showers and mortify the flesh. But an injunction against what Hume called the monkish virtues hardly warrants the dignity of an ism. (And Roxanne's point allows that some
strange people might actually enjoy cold showers etc. Masochistic pleasure is still pleasure.)
Joy brought up the case of people who think pleasure means something is wrong. Maybe hedonism is telling us that such people have got a totally inverted view of what is morally good. But again, do we need to erect that into a doctrine? It is unfortunately far too common for people to buy into views about how to live that stunt their lives. We need perhaps to consider what the point of having any views at all about how to live our lives is to see that such views are profoundly
wrong, but hedonism isn't doing much for us.
Ed