The Nature of Pleasure

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of Plato's use of idioms. It then discusses his theoretical comments in the Protagoras, the Gorgias, the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Philebus. It argues that that the phenomena which a theory of pleasure would, for Plato, have to explain, are all those phenomena which could correctly be described as examples of enjoyment, or being pleased, or taking pleasure, or, the dots to be filled in with other appropriate pleasure expressions. There is no interest shown in whether or not these expressions are equivalent, or what the relationships between them are, though examples tend to get treated in a way that assimilates them all to cases of enjoyment.