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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Ethics & moral philosophy
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Pleasure - A History (Paperback)
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Pleasure - A History (Paperback)
Series: Oxford Philosophical Concepts
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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For many, the word 'pleasure' conjures associations with hedonism,
indulgence, and escape from the life of the mind. However little we
talk about it, though, pleasure also plays an integral role in
cognitive life, in both our sensory perception of the world and our
intellectual understanding. This previously important but now
neglected philosophical understanding of pleasure is the focus of
the essays in this volume, which challenges received views that
pleasure is principally motivating of action, unanalyzable, and
caused, rather than responsive to reason. Like other books in the
Oxford Philosophical Concepts series, it traces the development of
the focal idea from ancient times through the 20th century. The
essays highlight points of departure for new lines of inquiry
rather than attempting to provide a full picture of how the idea of
pleasure has been explored in philosophy. The volume begins by
showing how Plato, Aristotle, early Islamic philosophers, and
philosophers in the Medieval Latin tradition, such as Aquinas,
honed in on the challenge of unifying the variety of pleasures so
that they fall under one concept. In the early modern period,
philosophers shifted 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 the role
of pleasure in human cognition and knowledge. Short
interdisciplinary reflections interspersed between essays focus on
art of 16th and 17th century textbooks and the difficult music of
composers like Bach, which demonstrate translation of these
concerns to cultural production in the period. As the essay on Mill
shows, the 19th century development of scientific psychology
narrowed the definition of pleasure, and so its philosophical
focus. Contemporary accounts of pleasure, however, in both
philosophy and psychology, are now recognizing the limitations of
this narrow focus, and are once again recognizing the complexity of
pleasure and its role in human life.
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