The Pleasures of Reason in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Hedonists

James Warren is a Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is the author of Epicurus and Democritean Ethics (2002), Facing Death: Epicurus and his Critics (2004) and Presocratics (2007), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (2009) and, with Frisbee Sheffield, The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy (2014). He has published articles on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy.

• 1. Introduction: the pleasures of reason; 2. Plato on the pleasures and pains of knowing; 3. Aristotle on the pleasures of learning and knowing; 4. Epicurus and Plutarch on pleasure and human nature; 5. Measuring future pleasures in Plato's Protagoras and Philebus; 6. Anticipation, character, and piety in Plato's Philebus; 7. Aristotle on the pleasures and pains of memory; 8. Epicureans and Cyrenaics on anticipating and recollecting pleasures; 9. Epilogue.

'Warren perfects the virtues exemplified in J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure, thanks to his historical accuracy, his subtle analysis of metaphors and analogies (consider, paradigmatically, the weighing and measuring of pleasures and pains in his chapter 5) and of other literary elements in the works he reads. He treads carefully whenever needed, and nurtures the sensitivity for aesthetic enjoyments, although they go beyond the scope of this inquiry. Consequently, I highly recommend this book to all specialists in ancient philosophy as well as budding ancient philosophy students. Both groups will benefit from experiencing anew, or for the first time, the understanding that trailblazing contributions do not emerge primarily from proposing a new exegesis of this or that line of text.' Georgia Mouroutsou, Bryn Mawr Classical Review