Pleasure

The history of the political thought on pleasure is not a cloistered affair in which scholars only engage one another. In political thought, one commonly finds a critical engagement with the wider public and the ruling classes, which are both perceived to be dangerously hedonistic. The effort of many political thinkers is directed towards showing that other political ends are more worthy than pleasure: Plato battles vigorously against Calicles' pleasure seeking in the Gorgias, Augustine argues in The City of God against the human tendency to hedonism in favor of a profound distrust of pleasure, and even Machiavelli claims in The Prince that it is in the prince's best interest to separate his pursuit of pleasure from his pursuit of political power. The thrust of the majority of political thought is to interrupt the popular equation that links pleasure with the good. Instead, political thought has largely followed Plato's lead and has worked to contain hedonism on two fronts. First, pleasure is rigorously separated from ethical and political good: what is good is not identical with what is pleasurable even if the two sometimes overlap. Second, even where the pursuit of pleasure is judged to be coincident with the good, pleasure should only be pursued to the degree it is rational to do so and pursued in the most rational way. Of course, it is not true that all thinkers hold to these two positions on pleasure. Epicureanism and utilitarianism are two major schools of thought that challenge the first precept equating pleasure with the good. Both Epicureanism and utilitarianism argue that the only good is pleasure. However, it is much less frequently that one finds a thinker challenging the second Platonic position that reason must master and guide our pursuit of pleasure—even the Epicureans and utilitarians believe that pleasure is best pursued rationally. However, Foucault has attracted recent attention by challenging the idea that reason should dominate the pursuit of pleasure

The Nature of Pleasantness

Sometimes we say that pleasure is distinct form joy, happiness, or good mood. Some other times we say the joy, happiness or good mood are types of pleasure. This suggests the existence of two concepts of pleasure: one specific, the other generic. According to the specific concept, pleasure is one type of positive affects among others. Pleasure is to be distinguished from joy, gladness, contentment, merriment, glee, ecstasy, euphoria, exhilaration, elation, jubilation; happiness, felicity, bliss, well-being; enjoyment, amusement, fun, rejoicing, delectation, enchantment, delight, rapture, relish, thrill; satisfaction, gratification, pride, triumph; good mood, jollity, gaiety, cheerfulness; relief (or at least from some of these concepts). According to the generic concept of pleasure, a pleasure is any of these positive affects. Joy, gladness, contentment, merriment, glee, ecstasy, euphoria, exhilaration, elation, jubilation, happiness, felicity, bliss, well-being, enjoyment, amusement, fun, rejoicing, delectation, enchantment, delight, rapture, relish, thrill, satisfaction, gratification, pride, triumph, good mood, jollity, gaiety, cheerfulness, relief and pleasure in the specific sense are all species of pleasures. In this thesis, I shall focus on the generic concept of pleasure, in order to address the question “what is the property of pleasantness common to all positive affects?” In order to address this question nevertheless, one need to have at least rough grip on pleasure in the specific sense and on what distinguishes it from other positive affects. I shall therefore start by hinting at the problem of the definition of the specific concept of pleasure

In Defence of Mixed Feelings

Mixed feelings occur when a same subject experience both pleasure and displeasure at the same time. I argued that mixed feelings are not only possible, but that they constitute a widespread phenomenon. In the first part, I answer to three objections against the possibility of mixed feelings, the most important one being that mixed feelings contradict the view that pleasure and displeasure are contraries. In the second part, I argue that pleasure in effort, the pleasure we take in doing things, is a widespread phenomenon that constitutes a case of mixed feeling of a special sort: a case where the displeasure grounds or explains the pleasure. I argue that none of the usual strategies of the enemies of mixed feelings for dealing with putative cases of mixed feelings (oscillation between pleasure and displeasure, rejection of one of the two feelings) achieves to deal with pleasure in effort

The pleasures of learning at work : Foucault and phenomenology compared

This paper provides a comparative account of two conceptualisations of pleasure. The first draws on Foucault's analysis of bio-power. The second provides a phenomenological account where pleasure is viewed as an aspect of our immediate consciousness. These conceptualizations are illuminated through an analysis of employees’ accounts of learning at work. Overall, the paper demonstrates how, in a Foucauldian analysis, pleasure disappears as it becomes a cipher for power whereas within the phenomenological account pleasure is foregrounded but power disappears. The concluding section focuses on the problems of both conceptualizations and explores whether we should simply accept that different analytical frameworks do different work for us or whether we should be more concerned at the losses, and gains, associated with theoretical choices. The conclusion further asks whether a concern to foreground pleasure in accounts of learning represents an antidote to the pessimism of much critical analysis or whether we should treat pleasure as a morally duplicitous category that encourages political apathy

Pleasure islands

Pleasure Islands is series of collaborative exhibitions that seeks to gather together new works from a diverse collection of early and mid-career painters. Each iteration of Pleasure Islands builds upon previous connections, both painterly and in terms of curatorial strategies, and extends new invitations, pursuing a shifting, dynamic and open conversation about the role and viability of painting today. The First exhibition featured works by 11 artists: Robin Megannity, Louise Giovanelli, Brian Moutford, Dylan Thomas, Tom Farthing, Jane Hayes Greenwood, Tal Regev, Tom Palin, Donal Moloney, Peter Daviz and Tom Howse, and took place in Artwork Atelier, Salford. The second show contained the work of 11 artists, and took place in 3Space, Manchester, later the same year. This exhibition was set to a specially created audio score by Alexander Roberts, a.k.a. Kepier Widow. Conceived as a sound track, recordings of the space were manipulated, and the data processed in response to the environment. Participating artists were: Richard Baker, Robin Megannity, Louise Giovanelli, Brian Mountford, Eilis Otway, Evie O’Connor, Tom Palin, Wayne Robinson, Alex Roberts, Edgar Soprans and Dylan Thomas

Seeing pain and pleasure on self and others: behavioural and psychophysiological reactivity in immersive virtual reality

Studies have explored behavioral and neural responses to the observation of pain in others. However, much less is known about how taking a physical perspective influences reactivity to the observation of others' pain and pleasure. To explore this issue we devised a novel paradigm in which 24 healthy participants immersed in a virtual reality scenario observed a virtual: needle penetrating (pain), caress (pleasure), or ball touching (neutral) the hand of an avatar seen from a first (1PP)- or a third (3PP)-person perspective. Subjective ratings and physiological responses [skin conductance responses (SCR) and heart rate (HR)] were collected in each trial. All participants reported strong feelings of ownership of the virtual hand only in 1PP. Subjective measures also showed that pain and pleasure were experienced as more salient than neutral. SCR analysis demonstrated higher reactivity in 1PP than in 3PP. Importantly, vicarious pain induced stronger responses with respect to the other conditions in both perspectives. HR analysis revealed equally lower activity during pain and pleasure with respect to neutral. SCR may reflect egocentric perspective, and HR may merely index general arousal. The results suggest that behavioral and physiological indexes of reactivity to seeing others' pain and pleasure were qualitatively similar in 1PP and 3PP. Our paradigm indicates that virtual reality can be used to study vicarious sensation of pain and pleasure without actually delivering any stimulus to participants' real body and to explore behavioral and physiological reactivity when they observe pain and pleasure from ego- and allocentric perspectives

Pleasure as self-discovery

This paper uses readings of two classic autobiographies, Edmund Gosse’s Father & Son and John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, to develop a distinctive answer to an old and central question in value theory: What role is played by pleasure in the most successful human life? A first section defends my method. The main body of the paper than defines and rejects voluntarist, stoic, and developmental hedonist lessons to be taken from central crises in my two subjects’ autobiographies, and argues for a fourth, diagnostic lesson: Gosse and Mill perceive their individual good through the medium of pleasure. Finally, I offer some speculative moral psychology of human development, as involving the waking, perception, management, and flowering of generic and individual capacities, which I suggest underlies Gosse and Mill’s experiences. The acceptance of one’s own unchosen nature, discovered by self-perceptive pleasure in the operation of one’s nascent capacities, is the beginning of a flourishing adulthood in which that nature is fully developed and expressed

Read for pleasure poster

Poster campaign for casual books students can read for pleasure that are available at the Mugar Library

Mice Hemizygous for a Pathogenic Mitofusin-2 Allele Exhibit Hind Limb/Foot Gait Deficits and Phenotypic Perturbations in Nerve and Muscle.

Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 2A (CMT2A), the most common axonal form of hereditary sensory motor neuropathy, is caused by mutations of mitofusin-2 (MFN2). Mitofusin-2 is a GTPase required for fusion of mitochondrial outer membranes, repair of damaged mitochondria, efficient mitochondrial energetics, regulation of mitochondrial-endoplasmic reticulum calcium coupling and axonal transport of mitochondria. We knocked T105M MFN2 preceded by a loxP-flanked STOP sequence into the mouse Rosa26 locus to permit cell type-specific expression of this pathogenic allele. Crossing these mice with nestin-Cre transgenic mice elicited T105M MFN2 expression in neuroectoderm, and resulted in diminished numbers of mitochondria in peripheral nerve axons, an alteration in skeletal muscle fiber type distribution, and a gait abnormality