Philippine E-Journals

Plato on the Goodness of Pleasure

Ciriaco M. Sayson Jr.

Discipline: Mathematics

 

Abstract:

In the Philebus Plato defends the view that pleasure, while not being the good, is an element in the good human life. This paper contends that the argument of the dialogue involves a solution to the problem of the one-and-many, a problem initially posed by Plato in the Parmenides to the theory of Forms of the middle dialogues. This solution to the one-and-many problem constitutes the basis for the classificatory scheme of pleasures into good and bad (as well as true and false) in the Philebus.