The pleasures of reason in Plato, Aristotle, and the hellenistic hedonists / James Warren.

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Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction: the pleasures of reason -- Pleasure and logismos -- Knowing and learning -- Planning ahead -- Remembering and anticipating -- Reason and emotion -- What the lion anticipates -- Damascius and the donkey -- 2. Plato on the pleasures and pains of knowing -- Pleasures and pains of learning in the Philebus -- The pleasures and pains of the cave -- Coming-to-know and continuing to know -- Resolving the difficulty -- A proposal -- Philebus 55a: pleasure, thought, and the divine life -- 3. Aristotle on the pleasures of learning and knowing -- A natural desire to know -- Pleasures of thought in the Nicomachean Ethics -- Learning and pleasure in Rhetoric 1.11 -- Learning and pleasure in Poetics 4 -- Conclusions -- 4. Epicurus and Plutarch on pleasure and human nature -- Epicureans on the pleasures of learning and knowing -- Epicureans against Plato, Platonists against Epicurus -- Plutarch's Platonist attack on Epicurean pleasures -- Plutarch and the pleasures of reason -- Conclusions -- 5. Measuring future pleasures in Plato's Protagoras and Philebus -- Weighing and measuring -- Measurement, illusion, and prudentialism -- The salvation of life -- Philebus 4Ie -- 42c -- Conclusions -- 6. Anticipation, character, and piety in Plato's Philebus -- Anticipation and false pleasure -- True and false pleasures and piety -- The unity of a life -- Character and false pleasure -- Protagorean hedonism and consistency -- Conclusions -- 7. Aristotle on the pleasures and pains of memory -- Memory, character, and pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics -- Memory and phantasia -- The memories of Eumaeus -- 8. Epicureans and Cyrenaics on anticipating and recollecting pleasures -- Epicurean prudential reasoning -- The limits of prudential reasoning -- Epicureans and their critics on memory, anticipation, and pleasure -- Cyrenaic recommendations -- The pleasures of confident expectation -- Conclusions -- 9. Epilogue.

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.

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