Most readers of ancient Greek psychology will agree that the Philebus is where we find Plato’s best attempt to theorize about bodily pain.1 But they will probably also agree that the account he develops there has no real chance of being true, and so should not have much appeal to us today — at least insofar as we are philosophers rather than historians. It’s this second conviction that I want to challenge in what follows. More specifically, I want to argue (...) for two connected claims about the merits of Plato’s account: first, that despite its flaws — which are significant — it is stronger and more subtle than most commentators have yet realized; and second, that it anticipates in interesting ways a view that has become both increasingly popular and increasingly controversial in the last couple of decades: the view that pains — like beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears — are mental states with representational content. I will call this view representationalism. (shrink)

In the Philebus Plato argues that every rational human being, given the choice, will prefer a life that is moderately thoughtful and moderately pleasant to a life that is utterly thoughtless or utterly pleasureless. This is true, he thinks, even if the thoughtless life at issue is intensely pleasant and the pleasureless life at issue is intensely thoughtful. Evidently Plato wants this argument to show that neither pleasure nor thought, taken by itself, is sufficient to make a life choiceworthy for (...) us. But there is some disagreement among commentators about whether or not he also wants the argument to show why. Is the argument designed to establish that we should reject thoughtless and pleasureless lives because some pleasures and some thoughts are goods? Or is it silent on this issue? Many interpreters take the first option, claiming that Plato uses the argument to attack both the hedonist view that only pleasures are goods and the intellectualist view that only thoughts are goods. My aim in this paper is to show that the second option is at least as attractive as the first, both exegetically and philosophically. (shrink)

Near the beginning of the Cratylus (385e-387d) Plato's Socrates argues, against his friend Hermogenes, that the standards of correctness for our use of names in speech are in no way up to us. Yet this conclusion should strike us, at least initially, as bizarre. After all, how could it not be up to us whether to call our children by the names of our parents, or whether to call dogs “dogs“? My aim in this paper will be to show that, (...) although Plato's argument does not succeed in establishing this apparently bizarre conclusion, it may well succeed in establishing an equally momentous conclusion: that the standards of correctness for our use of concepts in thought are in no way up to us. (shrink)