The CEU Philosophy Department cordially invites you to a talk (as part of its Departmental Colloquium series) by Roger Teichmann (St Hilda's College, Oxford University) on Is Pleasure a Good? Tuesday, 17 March, 2009, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412 Abstract: The idea that pleasure as such is good (or a good) faces various problems. One is that people can take pleasure in nasty things, such as cruelty: it seems wrong to say that in such cases the pleasure is good, only the activity and its effects being bad. Connected with this point is another one, to do with the relation of pleasure to the activities (or states) that give pleasure. A number of philosophers have correctly argued that pleasure is not a separable sensation or quasi-sensation, common to pleasant activities; rather, 'Jones finds X pleasant/pleasurable' amounts (roughly) to 'Jones enjoys doing/experiencing X'. And this poses a clear problem for the view that pleasure is a good, when this view is re-expressed as the view that 'It's pleasant' gives a prima facie adequate answer to 'Why do you want (to do) that?'. For enjoying and wanting are very close cousins; so if 'It's pleasant' amounts to 'I enjoy it', then it seems that it could hardly give an informative answer to 'Why do you want (to do) that?'. I argue that the solution of these difficulties lies in examining the sorts of answer that can be given to 'What's pleasant about that?'. Answers to this question may relate to features of the activity itself, not merely to the psychology and habits of the agent. But in saying in what ways e.g. stamp-collecting is fun, I do not thereby present stamp-collecting as a means to anything further; rather, I adduce facts about stamp-collecting that might make sense of one's going in for stamp-collecting for its own sake. This phrase, 'make sense of', is evidently the crucial one. Light is cast on such topics as nasty pleasures, addictive vs. non-addictive pleasures, the nature of hedonism, etc. - and a decent, though fairly modest, sense is found for the natural claim that pleasure is a non-instrumental good. Kriszta Biber Department Coordinator Philosophy Department Tel: 36-1-327-3806 Fax: 36-1-327-3072 E-mail: biberk(a)ceu.hu