The treatment of pleasure by philosophers of Classical Greek Antiquity has got a bad rap. Anscombe thought them “baffled by” pleasure (Intention §40). Platonic and Aristotelian discussions of pleasure do raise several puzzles. However, rather than being a sign of ancient confusion, these puzzles reflect the fact that Plato, Aristotle, and the hedonists with whom they engage, approach pleasure from an unexpected direction. Rather than theorize pleasure from the inside, whether as sensation, feeling, or attitude, they do so, as my title has it, from the outside in. The project of my lecture will be to explain this suggestion and their outside-in approach to pleasure, and to argue that it is worth taking seriously.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Professor Verity Harte (Yale) is the George Eastman Professor at Oxford for the 2025–2026 academic year.
Verity Harte is the George A. Saden Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Yale University. Her research focus is the philosophical thought and writings of Plato, especially, and of Aristotle, with more general interests in the history of philosophy throughout the period of Greco-Roman Antiquity. The philosophical topics that she has written on most frequently fall under the general headings of metaphysics, epistemology, and moral and philosophical psychology. She is often interested in points of contrast and of comparison between ancient and contemporary approaches to topics in these areas.
Her main research project at present concerns Plato’s Philebus, on which she is (very slowly) writing a monograph for the Cambridge University Press series Studies in the Dialogues of Plato (series editor: Mary Margaret McCabe). She has additional research projects underway concerning Plato’s Republic, dialectical knowledge in late Plato and its metaphysical underpinnings, memory, and pleasure.
