No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Pleasure and Conation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
There is no subject to which the writers of ethical textbooks have devoted more attention than that of the relations between pleasure and desire, and yet it is surprising how little agreement their efforts have produced in philosophical circles. This failure seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that the question is only one among the many problems of conation, and can only be discussed in that context. In consequence, there remains a very wide gap between what psychologists have to say about the analysis of conation and what ethical writers have to say about the problems of moral psychology.1 My object in writing this article is to help to bring this deplorable state of affairs to an end by expounding a theory of the relations between pleasure and desire, which is based upon a careful analysis of the facts of conation.
Information
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1935
References
page 332 note 1 How wide this gap is, and how deplorable its consequences are, can be seen from a careful reading of the first two chapters of Mr. Joseph's Some Problems in Ethics.
page 337 note 1 It should of course be noted that on my view the connection between a want and its “object” is not a strictly logical one, since wants are immediate experiences.
page 341 note 1 Psychological Egoism—the doctrine that we only ultimately desire future states of our own minds—clearly rests on a confusion of satiation with the objective of desire. The former is always purely mental; the latter almost invariably a psycho-physical state of affairs.