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Daniel Russell - Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life - 9780199282845 - KTS0037486
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Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life

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Description for Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life hardcover. Examines Plato's insightful analysis of pleasure and explores its intimate connections with his discussions of value, happiness and human psychology. This book offers a fresh perspective on how good things bear on happiness in Plato's ethics. It presents a discussion of the topic for fifty years, and shows its relevance to contemporary debates. Num Pages: 284 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: HPCA; HPQ; JMA. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 242 x 163 x 21. Weight in Grams: 585. Good clean copy with minor shelfwear. DJ has some minor nicks and tears, remains very good
Daniel Russell examines Plato's subtle and insightful analysis of pleasure and explores its intimate connections with his discussions of value and human psychology. Russell offers a fresh perspective on how good things bear on happiness in Plato's ethics, and shows that, for Plato, pleasure cannot determine happiness because pleasure lacks a direction of its own. Plato presents wisdom as a skill of living that determines happiness by directing one's life as a whole, bringing about goodness in all areas of one's life, as a skill brings about order in its materials. The 'materials' of the skill of living are, in the first instance, not things like money or health, but one's attitudes, emotions, and desires where things like money and health are concerned. Plato recognizes that these 'materials' of the psyche are inchoate, ethically speaking, and in need of direction from wisdom. Among them is pleasure, which Plato treats not as a sensation but as an attitude with which one ascribes value to its object. However, Plato also views pleasure, once shaped and directed by wisdom, as a crucial part of a virtuous character as a whole. Consequently, Plato rejects all forms of hedonism, which allows happiness to be determined by a part of the psyche that does not direct one's life but is among the materials to be directed. At the same time, Plato is also able to hold both that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and that pleasure is necessary for happiness, not as an addition to one's virtue, but as a constituent of one's whole virtuous character itself. Plato therefore offers an illuminating role for pleasure in ethics and psychology, one to which we may be unaccustomed: pleasure emerges not as a sensation or even a mode of activity, but as an attitude - one of the ways in which we construe our world - and as such, a central part of every character.

Product Details

Format
Hardback
Publication date
2005
Publisher
OUP Oxford
Condition
Used, Very Good
Number of Pages
284
Place of Publication
Oxford, United Kingdom
ISBN
9780199282845
SKU
KTS0037486
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
Ref
99-3

Reviews for Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life
interesting and provocative book.
Naomi Reshotko, Mind
...finds considerably more coherence and philosophical interest than others have before him ... well and clearly written ... a good and challenging book. Anyone working in the field of ancient philosophy will want to own this book... It is not just that Russell develops his own views well, but he also has the gift of expressing others' or other possible views rigorously and fairly. This is a book to which I will return again and again; like all good academic books, it forces the reader to refine his own views.
Robin Waterfield, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
...one of the most complete presentations of Plato's ethics.
Classical World

Goodreads reviews for Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life


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