This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.

Ancient Egyptian ideas about sex changed over time in close relation to changes in gender power relations. The comprehensive overview of textual and iconographic sources in this chapter indicates that discourses on sex did exist. Desirable bodies were either depicted or described in poetry. Pleasures could be sought in different sexscapes such as e.g., houses, gardens, streets, festivals, marshes and bathhouses. Festival sex had long history and was connected to the celebration of the return of the wondering Sun Eye goddess. She was pacified through consumption of alcohol and sexual intercourse. Sex-work is also attested, but its closer regulation through taxation does not predate Roman occupation. This is also the period when classical authors such as Strabo, formed the orientalist trope of sacred prostitution in Egyptian temples. However, contrary to this trope, sex is rarely depicted in state sponsored art and is found in media such as ostraca or rock art. Similarly, same-sex intercourse is attested throughout Egyptian history but rarely depicted. Passivity in intercourse between men was looked down upon. It even served as a metaphor to designate enemies of Egypt. Sexual violence was punishable but easily confused with adultery, putting women in precarious positions.

Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

This chapter aims to disentangle some the different views that have often been associated with the term ‘pessimism’. This includes the claims that (1) there is no historical progress; (2) this world is the worst of all possible worlds; (3) happiness is impossible; and (4) life is not worth living. The last thesis is identified as the central concern of the ‘pessimism dispute’, and three different justifications for it are presented. The final section of the chapter considers the expression of pessimism throughout human history and culture, with special attention paid to Schopenhauer’s analysis of religion.

How to theorise the pleasure of thinking? Psychoanalysis is the rare discipline of psychology that has accounted for the pleasure of thinking. Chapter 3 follows a historical presentation of psychoanalysis; it first presents how, when founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud theorised thinking and its pleasure, an experience he obviously himself had. The chapter then explores the two next generations of psychoanalysts. It thus focuses on two post-war authors, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, who, in very contrasting ways, give us elements to further understand psychic activity and its pleasures. Finally, it examines the work of contemporary theoreticians who, building on Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, turn their interests to the modalities of thinking and, with it, allude also to pleasure (André Green), whether in sublimation (Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor), daydreaming (Thomas Ogden), or the pleasure of insights.

Many people have had the experience of thinking with pleasure, or of the pleasure of thinking, but can we substantiate the idea that thinking can be pleasurable? This first chapter explores non-psychological productions to search for evidence of the pleasure of thinking in the visual arts, in philosophy – mainly in the writings of Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt - and in the self-writing of a few authors, among them Sigmund Freud and the novelist Chaim Potok. This enables to identify five modalities of the pleasure of thinking. The chapter then poses the theoretical frame for the book, a sociocultural and developmental psychology, and highlights its ontological and epistemological axioms. Two concepts are defined: on the one hand, the concepts of thinking, including reasoning, sense-making, and daydreaming; on the other hand, the concept of pleasure. The methodology used for the book is then exposed – an abductive integration of theoretical work with the secondary analysis of existing work and of data collected in our past work. The outline of the volume is finally presented.

In descriptions of the interior drama of the wager, or of the game, or of the convoluted sequence of emotions suddenly untethered and allowed free expression, we see not only the ways that gambling generated emotional intensity in players, but also how it invited closely detailed descriptions of the ways emotions were experienced. Play and the creation of Blanc-style casinos created a social space and a set of images of gambling that provided Europeans from differing backgrounds a common language of emotion that was developed through a discussion of the ways that emotion was contained and expressed in the environment of the casino, an entity typically described as being passionless.

This chapter takes a fresh look at the marionette image introduced by Plato in a famous passage of Book 1 of the Laws, as he undertakes to explain the bearing of self-rule upon virtue (644b–645e). I argue that the reader of the passage is first offered a cognitive model of a unitary self, presided over by reasoning – which prompts bafflement in the Athenian Visitor’s interlocutors. The marionette image then in effect undermines that model, by portraying humans as passive subjects of contrary controlling impulses determining their behaviour. Finally the image is complicated and in the end transcended by reintroduction of reasoning as a special kind of divinely inspired impulse, with which one must actively cooperate if animal impulses are to be mastered. I examine the way Plato’s reference at this point to law (where there is a key translation problem) should be understood to bear upon the nature of the reasoning in question. In conclusion, I comment on what light is thrown by the marionette passage on self-rule, as we have been promised.

Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.

This chapter examines the ‘Critical sublime’ as developed by Kant in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in his Kritik der Urteilskraft. It interprets Kant as adumbrating three features that later become central tropes of the Romantic characterization of sublimity: the sense that its source and ultimate value lie beyond everyday experience; that it involves the subject, rather than any external object, as the immediate and direct object of consciousness; and that the paradigmatically natural phenomena and their qualities that ostensibly excite the experience are less important than the contemplative relationship one takes to them. Consideration of each in turn gives the chapter its narrative structure and divides it into three main sections, ‘Transcendence and the Phenomenal Self’, ‘The Moral Subject Within’, and ‘The “Objects” of Nature and Art’. The discussion concludes with a brief observation on the proto-Romantic sentiment that Kant expresses in his view of poetry and the arts.

What do people care about? Psychological work on well-being has long emphasized (1) happiness, sometimes described as “pleasure,” and (2) eudaimonia, sometimes described as “flourishing” and associated with a sense of purpose or meaning. More recent work has explored (3) “psychological richness,” understood to call for a diversity of experiences and perspectives, including experiences that challenge and alter one’s preferences and values. This work is directly relevant to certain admittedly rare decisions that might alter our “core” – our conception of our identity and what we care most about. As examples, consider a decision to become a monk, to change one’s nationality, to have a child, or to get divorced. “Opting” situations raise serious challenges for decision theory, because one’s preferences and values cannot be held constant. If people’s preferences would be different depending on whether they opt, which choice is best? The right choice, I suggest, requires a shift from preference satisfaction to welfare. To decide whether to opt, people must ask: What would make their lives better? That question immediately leads to another one: What is the right conception of welfare? That might be a hard question, but it is the correct one; pleasure, purpose, and psychological richness are relevant to the answer.

It is standardly believed that Aristotle thinks that there are two kinds of happiness, one corresponding to intellectual contemplation and the other corresponding to ethically virtuous activities, and the former kind is superior to the latter. This is the Duality Thesis. It is notoriously problematic and does not follow from anything that Aristotle has said to that point. It also prevents solving the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness. Interpreters have felt forced to affirm the Duality Thesis by its apparent textual inescapability. However, the apparent claim depends on supplying “happy” or “happiest” from the previous sentence, as is standard among translators and interpreters. I argue for an alternative supplement that commits Aristotle to a much less problematic and unexpected position.

Value is commonly divided into the intrinsic – what is good (or bad) “in itself” – and the instrumental, what is valuable as a means. This chapter describes two kinds of “value in itself.” The first comprises experiences of certain rewarding kinds; the second comprises objects of experience having intrinsic properties in virtue of which these objects can be central in intrinsically valuable experiences. This threefold conception – of intrinsic, inherent, and instrumental values – is explained, illustrated, and enhanced by accommodating contributory value, yielding a multi-dimensional value theory. Hedonism is shown to be more plausible than generally realized but also too narrow. In showing this, the valuational pluralism of the chapter is extended to include intrinsic moral value as a distinct kind, and the organic character of value, inherent as well as intrinsic, is illustrated and clarified; and the organicity of inherent value is shown also to apply to reasons for action.

This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

This chapter examines two versions of hedonist theories of the life worth living, one rather pessimistic, adopted by the Cyrenaics, particularly Hegesias, another more optimistic, adopted by the Epicureans. Both these approaches tend to diminish the gap between the best possible life and a life at least barely worth living, though they do so in converse directions. According to Hegesias, the best possible life falls to the level of a life just barely worth living, that is, a life in which there is no more pain than pleasure. According to the Epicureans, the threshold of a life at least barely worth living is raised to the proximity of the best possible life. A happy life, that is, a life of pleasure, must be a philosophical life, since only philosophy can guarantee freedom from disturbance. But freedom from disturbance is also required for a life worth living, so that a life is not worth living unless it is guided by philosophy, with the important caveat that a progress in philosophy, or the promise of such a progress, is sufficient for a worthwhile life.

This book presents a new understanding of what ‘making’ means and argues for the centrality of crafting as a way of making sense of the world and the place of law, media, and politics within it. When Elaine Scarry recounted the great range of candidates that have been put forward for the category ‘artefacts’, she noted as possibilities that ‘nation states are fictions (in the sense of created things), the law is a created thing, a scientific fact (many argue) is a constructed thing’. Peter Goodrich writes similarly that ‘a significant part of the substantive law is comprised of fabulae, stories, plays, fabrications, images and fictions’. This book takes such possibilities seriously and considers how the notion of manufactured truth can inform our understanding of the tradition of making judgments in law and the trend of making judgments in society at large.