Pleasure
A History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23988889 |
|---|---|
| Editors | Lisa Shapiro |
| Year | 2018 |
| Publication date | 2018-06-21 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Pleasure (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oso/9780190225100.001.0001 |
| ISBN | 9780190225100 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
This book challenges received views about pleasures as principally motivating of action, themselves unanalyzable, caused, rather than responsive to reasons, and perhaps because of that, antithetical to rationality by looking to the history of philosophical accounts of pleasure. The book begins by showing how Plato, Aristotle, early Islamic philosophers, and philosophers in the medieval Latin tradition, such as Aquinas, honed in on the challenge unifying the variety of pleasures so that they fall under one concept. In the early modern period, philosophers shift from understanding the logic of pleasure to treating pleasure as a mental state. As the studies of Malebranche, Berkeley, and Kant show, the central problem becomes understanding the relation of pleasure to other sensory experiences and so the role of pleasure in human cognition and knowledge. The Reflections, on visual representations in seventeenth-century classrooms and the difficult music of composers like Bach, demonstrate translation of these concerns to cultural production in the period. As the essay on Mill demonstrates, the nineteenth-century development of scientific psychology narrows the definition of pleasure, and so the philosophical focus. Contemporary accounts of pleasure, in both philosophy and psychology, are now recognizing the limitations of this narrow focus, and once again recognizing the complexity of pleasure and so of its role in human life.
| Citations per year | 0.43 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |