Feldblyum, Vivian
(2024)
Pleasure as Evaluative Perception.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
Pleasure is a familiar and normal part of everyday life. Consider the pleasure of stepping into a warm bath. There are at least three seemingly intertwined features of this experience. The first is perceptual: the experience involves the sensory feeling of the warm water on the skin of one’s legs. The second is evaluative: the warm water feels good on the skin. The third is motivational: one’s desire to submerge oneself fully in the bath. Ancient philosophy typically incorporated all of these elements in their discussions of pleasure, thereby furnishing unified and systematic accounts. Rooted in and inspired by Aristotle’s account of pleasure, I advance a novel framework with which to investigate foundational questions about pleasure. According to what I call the evaluative cognition framework, pleasure is best understood not as an object or property of experience, but as a form of evaluative perception—a way of sensing that something is good for the perceiver. Experiencing something as pleasant is a way of finding it good without necessarily thinking that it is good. A striking consequence of this framework is its rejection of a commonly accepted axiom in value theory: the claim that pleasure is intrinsically good. That the evaluative cognition framework leads to the rejection of this axiom may at first glance seem to warrant dismissing the framework out of hand. However, I contend that understood as a mode of evaluative cognition, pleasure can still play a foundational role in how we understand the relationship between value and action. Pleasure is a primitive form of valuing for human and non-human animals. It is best understood as a biological mechanism which, when working properly, leads animals to things that are genuinely good for them.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
22 July 2024 |
| Approval Date: |
27 August 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
3 August 2024 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
198 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Philosophy |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Pleasure, Aristotle, Perception, Ethics |
| Date Deposited: |
27 Aug 2024 13:19 |
| Last Modified: |
29 Aug 2024 17:59 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/46824 |
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