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Abstract: sub> One of the leading approaches to the nature of sensory pleasure reduces it to desire: roughly, a sensation qualifies as a sensation of pleasure just in case its subject wants to be feeling it. This approach is, in my view, correct, but it has never been formulated quite right; and it needs to defended against some compelling arguments. Thus the purpose of this paper is to discover the most defensible for- mulation of this rough idea, and to defend it against the most interesting objections
Abstract: This paper argues that pleasure and pains are not qualia and they are not to be analyzed in terms of supposedly antecedently intelligible mental states like bodily sensation or desire. Rather, pleasure and pain are char- acteristic of a distinctive kind of evaluation that is common to emotions, desires, and (some) bodily sensations. These are felt evaluations: pas- sive responses to attend to and be motivated by the import of something impressing itself on us, responses that are nonetheless simultaneously con- stitutive of that import by virtue of the broader rational patterns of which they are a part and that they serve to define. This account of felt eval- uations makes sense of the way in which pleasures and pains grab our attention and motivate us to act and of the peculiar dual objectivity and subjectivity of their implicit evaluations, while offering a phenomenology adequate to both emotional and bodily pleasures and pains
Abstract: Unpleasant experiences include backaches, moments of nausea, moments of nervousness, phantom pains, and so on. What does their unpleasantness consist in? The unpleasantness of an experience has been thought to consist in: (1) its representing bodily damage; (2) its inclining the subject to fight its continuation; (3) the subjects disliking it; (4) features intrinsic to it. I offer compelling objections to (1) and (2) and less compelling objections to (3). I defend (4) against five challenging objections and offer two reasons to believe it. Hence, I advocate Intrinsic Nature, the idea that unpleasantness is intrinsic to unpleasant experiences
Abstract: I defend these claims: (1) Pleasure has exactly one English antonym: unpleasure. (2) Pleasure is the most convincing example of an organic unity. (3) The hedonic calculus is a joke. (4) An important type of pleasure is background pleasure. (5) Pleasures in bad company are still good. (6) Higher pleasures arent pleasures (and if they were, they wouldnt be higher). Thesis (1) merely concerns terminology, but theses (2)-(6) are substantive, evaluative claims
