Future Research

Pleasure and the Virtues in Aristotle, under contract with Lexington Books 

Pleasure and the Virtues in Aristotle concerns the ways that Aristotle's philosophically rich conception of pleasure is revealed by and informs his description of the virtues. These examples compose Aristotle's response to the problem of how, if pleasure is indeed in natural union with the good, pleasure can also be the primary cause of vice. Consideration of these examples of pleasure in virtuous and vicious actions show pleasure to be a sort of promiscuous, associational thinking that is indispensable to our ability to navigate through the world, but lacks in itself the standards for assessing how well this thinking is proceeding. Chapter 1 will provide an overview of the various philosophical attempts to answer the messy question of the relation between pleasure and action. I show why debates regarding the more explicitly metaphysical claims made about pleasure have proven to be intractable. By bringing resources Aristotle gives us through his descriptions of virtuous actions and friendship to bear upon these interpretive difficulties, we can push our understanding of Aristotle's theory of pleasure forward. Using the example of courage, Chapter 2 sets forth the general structure of pleasure taken in the performance of the character virtues. Chapter 3 uses a puzzle about temperance to explore some ways our pleasures and our appetites, as belonging to appetitive soul, are rational and some ways these are not. In Chapter 4, I use prudence to think through the "impressive realism" of Aristotle's ethics, as expressed in his argument that the good, virtuous person is the measure of what is good and truly pleasant. In Chapter 5, I show how Aristotle's discussion of friendship gives us resources to elaborate how vicious pleasures can be sustained and sustaining, and also how pleasure functions in the development and functioning of the virtues.

“Aristotle on Learning to Enjoy Bodily Pleasures”, under review

This paper shows how temperance narrowly concerns the bodily pleasures, even as it is broadly preservative of phronēsis and the proper pursuit of pleasure in general. A child's earliest instruction in the bodily pleasures, and especially the experience of finding what reason holds forth as good to eat to be pleasant, is crucial for learning to trust reason and its vision of the good, and so for developing temperance and practical wisdom.

“Can We Change Our Pleasures?: A New Look at Kant on Pleasures in the Agreeable”, under review

I argue that agreeable pleasures are open to cultivation because they are both an evaluative response to the world and a motive to action. Our ability to control our actions in pursuit of agreeable pleasures means that, especially over time, our experiences of pleasure in the agreeable may be reflective of rational will.

“Breaking Bad Together: Aristotle on Vicious Pleasures, Sociality, and Coherence”

This paper argues that the primary explanation for how a person first becomes habituated to vicious pleasures is the friendship, or more vaguely, the connectedness to others, found in these vicious pleasures. Despite Aristotle's claim that the “depraved”  person is in flight from himself, the vicious person need not feel regret, for there are distinctive ways in which vicious lives hang together, arising from our social training into these vicious pleasures.

“Kant on Mistaking Pleasures”

Starting from the assumption that Kant holds a functional account of pleasure, where the kind of pleasure one is experiencing is primarily identified not from a particular, phenomenological feel, but from what it moves the subject to do, this paper will examine what this means for the possibilities of mistaking the kind of pleasure one is experiencing, and where possible, the normative implications of such mistakes. 

“Pleasurable Eating and Aristotle’s Energeia-Kinēsis Distinction”

One vexing metaphysical problem for Aristotle’s account of pleasure is how to explain the taking of pleasure in processes. Aristotle means to improve upon Plato’s conception of pleasure by arguing that pleasure either is activity or supervenes on activity, and that pleasure does not have the metaphysical form of process. However, eating is both one of the most pleasant things we do and a process. I argue Aristotle’s energeia-kinēsis distinction allows for the possibility that an action may be both a process and an activity. In eating a meal, for example, the activity we engage in consists in the exercise of our capacity for self-nourishment, and this activity is normatively dependent upon the process form of what we are doing. The activity is unimpeded or perfected – i.e., it is pleasant – only when we are proceeding well in accordance with the standards given by the process form of the action. The modern assumption that we can cleanly separate what pleasure is from what pleasure is in undermines the realism of Aristotle’s conception of pleasure, and should be avoided in our interpretations of the energeia-kinēsis distinction.

“Pleasure as a Transformative Good and the Three Character Formations of Appetitive Soul in Republic 8 and 9”

I argue that the difference between the pleasures of the philosopher and the pleasures of the oligarch, democratic man, and tyrant, is not simply a difference in the objects enjoyed. Instead, pleasure for Plato functions as a transformative good, meaning that to have good pleasure, you must have a different conception of what pleasure is and how it is good from the bad conceptions of persons ruled by appetite, who view pleasure as (unlimited) consumption.

The Pleasures of Anger: Insights from Aristotle and Kant on Getting Mad, Staying Mad, and Doing This With Others

I am in the early stages of undertaking a monograph on the pleasures of anger. This project begins from the question, 'Why anger?', or more precisely, 'Why do people get angry when they do rather than some other response?'. A person can perceive and fight against injustice without feeling angry, so what does anger accomplish? I will show a crucial part of any satisfactory answer is that anger is in some way pleasant. This idea that anger is tied to pleasure may appear paradoxical from the viewpoint of commonsense psychology, which characterizes experiences of anger, along with other negative affects, as painful. Yet anger can have its pleasures without anger being experienced by the subject as pleasurable overall. Different sorts of pleasures can be identified within the experience of getting angry, but the pleasure of anger in the most fundamental sense is found in how being angry enables the angry person to claim, assert, and begin to restore their lost standing from the perceived injustice. 

While this analysis proceeds from the individual's experience of anger, the focus of the book is on how anger can be something that a group of people do together. Pleasure is necessary for explaining how the character of the anger itself is changed when anger is done by an individual or done as a group. At the individual level, pleasure is key for explaining not just why anger is preferable to other sorts of feelings in response to the intentional object of the anger, but also why someone may want to stay with their anger, or even return to some anger after setting it aside. This possibility — that feeling angry can be not only an immediate emotional response to a perceived injustice, but a kind of activity that can be voluntarily taken up and also put aside — can be glimpsed within some individual experiences of anger, but anger as an activity is fundamentally something people do together, with individuals entering into and tabling some socially-shared anger at their convenience. Certain features are distinctive of the activity of anger as done by more than one person. The object of the group anger will be more diffuse, as this is necessary for different persons to partake in feeling angry towards it. Group anger will be less easy to resolve, since there is not usually a clear, unitary account of the wrong suffered and the appropriate remedy for this wrong. In general, group anger will be less practical in its orientation than individual anger: in some vital way, the point or goal of individual anger is to secure redress for the wrong suffered, including revenge upon the wrongdoer, whereas the point or goal of group anger is primarily the feeling of anger itself. In being done primarily for the feeling itself and so for its own sake, group anger is even more self-sustaining than individual anger. Moreover, in being done simply for the experience of doing/feeling it, and so becoming something like an end-in-itself, group anger becomes in its formal structure more like pleasure.