Joachim Aufderheide

An Inconsistency in the Philebus

Platos Philebus contains an intricate difficulty. Plato seems to hold both (a) that all pleasures are processes of becoming, a crucial premise in the argument that no pleasure is good (53c–55c) and (b) that some pleasures contribute in their own right to the goodness of the best life (64c–67b). Since it seems also plausible that only things which are good can contribute to the goodness of the best life in their own right, Platos view seems to be inconsistent. Interpreters usually reject either (a) or (b). As Plato seems firmly committed to both (a) and (b), I propose a third way of dealing with the inconsistency. The apparent inconsistency highlights a vital contrast between what is independently good (good per se), what is dependently good (good through participating in what is independently good), and what is derivatively good (good through standing in a certain relation to dependent goods). I argue that while pleasures being a process of becoming marks it out as derivatively good, some kinds of pleasure are also dependent goods in virtue of their objects – irrespective of their being processes of becoming.

Aristotle Against Delos: Pleasure in Nicomachean Ethics X

Two crucial questions, if unanswered, impede our understanding of Aristotle’s account of pleasure in EN X .4-5: (1) What are the activities that pleasure is said to complete? (2) In virtue of what does pleasure always accompany these activities? The answers fall in place if we read Aristotle as responding to the Delian challenge that the finest, best and most pleasant are not united in one and the same thing ( EN I .8). I propose an ‘ethical’ reading of EN X .4 according to which the best activities in question are those integral to the exercise of virtue.