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In the very few studies examining adults' ability to recognize the different types of infants' cries, it has usually been concluded that experience is the prime factor which facilitates identification of the various types of cry. The present study explored the specific skill of the mother, irrespective of experience. Thirty six-mothers and 32 non-mothers were asked to identify hunger, pain and pleasure cries of infants. The non-mothers were pregnant women, 14 experienced in child care, 18 inexperienced; among the mothers, 17 had one infant and 29 had one infant and an older child. Mothers responded more accurately than non-mothers, and in comparison with both experienced and inexperienced non-mothers, they proved to have unique skills in dealing with infant cries.

An explanation to account for play behaviors which reflect the reenactment of an unpleasant event has been derived from the view that playful experiences serve to reduce anxiety. It has been suggested that play serves as a neutralizing medium by which young children manipulate a traumatic or anxiety‐inducing situation in an attempt to gain mastery over the event. Observations of young children at play have provided some anecdotal evidence, but as yet there has been no systematic investigation of the hypotheses drawn from the psychoanalytic paradigm. The present study induced a conflict situation in preschool children and compared their subsequent play behavior to a matched neutral group. Pre‐ and post‐physiological and behavioral measures of anxiety and emotional displeasure were taken, and durations of categories of play related to the source of the conflict were recorded. Results supported the view that play provides for the expression, and hence reduction, of an unpleasant event, in that the c...

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism contains noble sentiments and impressive trains of thought, but readers have generally not found it coherent. Mill at one point states, 'nothing is a good to human beings but in so far as it is either itself pleasurable, or a means of attaining pleasure or averting pain' 1 at another, 'the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned'.2 How can he possibly reconcile these two statements? My thesis in this paper is that almost from the beginning there has been a misunderstanding regarding what Mill means by quantity of pleasure and pain. Further, that with this misunderstanding cleared up, and with his conception of quality properly explicated, Mill's theory of utility will stand forth as a coherent teaching. Mill believes, in short, that there is no ultimate incompatibility between the greatest happiness of each, and the greatest happiness of all.

In Section I, the purely conceptual issue as to whether animals other than human beings, all or some, may possess rights is examined. This is approached via a consideration of the concept of a moral right, and by way of examining the claims of sentience, consciousness, capacities for pleasure and pain, having desires, possessing interests, self‐consciousness, rationality in various senses. It is argued that only beings possessed actually or potentially of the capacity to be morally self‐determining can be possessors of rights. In Section II, normative questions concerning the rights animals might possess if they were to be capable of possessing rights are discussed. The approach followed is that of considering the kinds of argument advanced in support of human rights, and whether these arguments, and the rights they are claimed to establish, are transferable to animals, and whether there are or might be specifically animal rights. In Section III the question of what is or could be the goal of one who reco...

SUMMARY It has been suggested that play is important to the young child as a means ofresolving a distressing experience. Pre-school children were observed as they exhibiteddistress on the first day of school. High- and low-anxiety children were allowedeither the opportunity for free play or participation in a story-reading session, eachof which was performed in either the presence or absence of peers. The anxiouschildren in the play condition were found to decrease in distress and their play wasmore solitary and imaginative in nature compared to other conditions. REFERENCESALEXANDER, F. (1958) A contribution to the theory of play. Psychoanal. Quart. 27, 175-193.BARNETT, L. A. and STORM, B. (1981) Play, pleasure and pain: the reduction of anxiety throughplay. Leisure Sci. 4, 161-175.CORTER, C. M., RHEINGOLD, H. L. and ECKERMAN, C. O. (1972) Toys delay the infant's followingofhis mother. Devi Psychol. 6, 138-145.DABBS, J. M., JOHNSON, J. E. and LEVENTHAL, H. (1968) Palmar sweating: a quick and simplemeasure./ exp. Psychol. 78,347-350.DOYLE, A., CONNOLLY, J. and RIVEST, L. (1980) The effect of playmate familiarity on the socialinteractions of young children. ChildDev. 51,217-223.ERIKSON, E. H. (1940) Studies in the interpretation of play: (1) Clinical observations of play dis-ruption in young children. Genet. Psychol. 22, 563-564.

(1989). Racked on the tyrant's bed: The politics of pleasure and pain and the Elizabethan sonnet sequences. Textual Practice: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 234-249.

Despite extensive experience with opiates, not all users become dependent. This study of 51 users (12 females, 39 males) attempts to identify the kinds of controls they employed over their consumption. One third of the sample had been in a state of “drift” and had not found regulation to be necessary. A second group had developed rules to govern their consumption and to prevent loss of control. Just over one-quarter of the sample (14 respondents) had experienced episodes of dependence; the ways by which these episodes were overcome are described. A natural history model of opiate use has been developed from the use patterns and control styles found in the sample. By accident, I met a college acquaintance, who recommended opium. Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I heard of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a sound was opium at that time! What solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances! Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a mystic importance attached to minutest circumstances connected with the place, and the time, and the man (if man it was), that first laid open to me the paradise of opium-eaters. (De Quincey, 1822; 1966:197–198)

A syndrome is described which consists of three symptoms: a mood disturbance of fear and sadness, an inability to do anything useful, and an insensitivity to pain and pleasure. Since the fourth century this condition has been known as acedia. The arguments are reviewed for its distinction from mild depression. It is suggested that the condition may be due to a lack of satisfying work.

Emotions can be regarded as the manifestations of a system that realises multiple concerns and operates in an uncertain environment. Taking the concern realisation function as a starting point, it is argued that the major phenomena of emotion follow from considerations of what properties a subsystem implementing that function should have. The major phenomena are: the existence of the feelings of pleasure and pain, the importance of cognitive or appraisal variables, the presence of innate, pre-programmed behaviours as well as of complex constructed plans for achieving emotion goals, and the occurrence of behavioural interruption, disturbance and impulse-like priority of emotional goals. The system properties underlying these phenomena are facilities for relevance detection of events with regard to the multiple concerns, availability of relevance signals that can be recognised by the action system, and facilities for control precedence, or flexible goal priority ordering and shift. A computer progr...

satisfactory as illiberal speech. Orwell recognized this point when he noticed in his review of Hitler's Mein Kampf that the liberal "hedonistic attitude to life" fails to satisfy some of the irrepressible longings of the human soul, and leaves room for the kind of appeal made by Hitler.' There is an inherent weakness in liberal rhetoric which cuts it off from some of the sources of political conviction and community. This weakness can be understood by contrasting the teachings of that founding father or grandfather of liberalism, Thomas Hobbes, with the doctrines of his classical opposite, Aristotle. In a familiar passage in the first book of the Politics, Aristotle argues that what makes human beings political, in contrast to other gregarious species, is the natural fact that human beings alone have logos- thoughtful, selective reason and speech- which, unlike the mere vocal power of indicating pleasure and pain, is used for indicating the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the just and the unjust. Aristotle accepts this as a fact of life and tries to make the best of it. He sees that political conflicts arise out of conflicting opinions about what is advantageous and just. 1 The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. A. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols. (London, 1968), II: 29, cf. II: p. 168: "The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action."

When characterizing ta pathē in the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle claims that they are usually accompanied by perceptual pleasure or pain. He says:λέγω δ πάθη μν τ τοιατα, θυμν ϕόβον αἰδ πιθυμίαν, ὂλως οἶς ἒπεται ώς π τ πολὺ αἰσθητικ ήδον ἢ λύπη καθ' αὑτά.By affections I mean such things as anger, fear, shame, desire – in general anything which, as such, gives rise usually to perceptual pleasure and pain. (translation by Woods)

Cybernetics has an important application in Biology, particularly in explaining how the brain might work. The brain can best be considered as two organs and not one, grey matter and white matter, with different theories to explain the function of each. The current “living transistor theory” seems inadequate to explain the function of neurons which individually appear to feel pleasure and pain and might, therefore, obey some principle of selection of appropriate behaviour similar to that of evolution by natural selection. Finally, any consideration of how the brain treats knowledge demands some clear idea of what knowledge is and how it may be coded in chemical terms.

There is a prevailing tendency to read the first five chapters of Nicomachean Ethics Book 3, and 3.i in particular, as though they were narrowly, and the latter exclusively, concerned with moral and legal responsibility. At least one unfortunate consequence of this is that the ouk hekousion/akousion distinction tends to be ignored or dismissed as unsatisfactory; another is that inadequate accounts are given of acting under necessity (ananke). In this paper I aim to redress the balance by emphasising what I maintain is another concern of Aristotle's 3.i namely what is involved in acting and feeling in character.' As the opening sentence of 3.i reminds us, our topic is excellence of character or virtue that is that we are students of and virtue is concerned with actions and feelings.2 Book 2 has made some general remarks about the ways in which this is so. We become virtuous by doing virtuous actions (2.i) or rather, by doing actions that are in accordance with virtue or which are called just or temperate (2.iv) and vicious by doing vicious ones. The actions that produce virtue and vice also constitute the sphere of their activity, i.e. virtuous people do virtuous actions and vicious people vicious ones (2.ii). The feelings of pleasure and pain that accompany people's actions should be taken as a sign of their dispositions and, quite generally, virtue is concerned with the feelings, viz. with pleasures and pains (2.iii). Virtue operates in the field of actions and feelings, and to each virtue there correspond two vices, from which we may derive the general idea that, given one person with a virtue and two other people

Why do we dislike and wish to avoid pain and suffering? Why do we prefer pleasure to pain? There are three answers to be considered. (1) We have a reason for wanting pleasure and for shunning pain. Our normal attitudes are guided by some rational insight about the nature of pleasurable and painful experiences. (2) Pleasure and pain do not in themselves provide any reason for wanting the one and shunning the other. It is just a brute contingent fact about our constitution that we are disposed to want and seek pleasure and dislike and avoid pain. (3) That pleasure is wanted and pain unwanted is a simple tautology. The attitudes towards the experience enter into the definition of 'pleasure' and 'pain'. A 'pleasant' experience is defined as a wanted experience and a 'painful' experience is defined as an unwanted one. We will be discussing philosophers who have held the second and third positions. I defend the first position.

Mill himself claimed on a variety of occasions that all his moral and social thought derived from the principle of utility: that is, that in the determination of all personal or public decisions the only consideration to which weight should be attached is the resultant balance of pleasure and pain. Of recent years it has become conventional to set aside these professions and to regard Mill's moral and social thought as partially grounded in values that are quite independent of and at times inconsistent with utility: values such as liberty or self-development. The argument of, for instance, On Liberty must, it is argued, be based on such a commitment. [P. xiii]

The term "value" has a wide range of current usage in philospohy and the sciences. Descriptively, a man's "values" may refer to all his attitudes for-oragainst anything. His values include his perferences and avoidances, his desireobjects and aversion-objects, his pleasure and pain tendencies, his goals, ideals, interests and disinterests, what he takes to be right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, his approvals and disapprovals, his criteria of taste and standards of judgment, and so forth. Parallel to this descriptive usage lies the realm of normative usage. Men not merely have values; they also make value judgments assessing their values. For in every self-conscious choice that the individual makes, in every creative act as well as every criticism, whether economic, moral, aesthetic, or any other, there are assumptions about what is desirable as well as desired, preferable as well as preferred, appropriate standards as well as functioning standards, and so forth. The same is true of social decisions, even as embedded in the normal functioning of social institutions and agencies.

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LocKE'S writings have lately received some extensive coverage at the hands of Cambridge University Press and Allen and Unwinl-extensive rather than comprehensive if only because his epistemological theory is largely, though certainly not entirely, ignored. The emphasis lies rather upon his educational, economic, and political contributions. When one considers the enormous amount of extant literature concerned exclusively with the Essay, such emphasis seems not untimely. One of the more original contributions to the general corpus is contained in the collection of essays edited by John Yolton. In this paper,2 Hans Aarsleff devotes some careful attention to the problem of how knowledge of natural law is achieved-a problem to some extent highlighted in recent years by the publication of the hitherto unknown Essays on the Law of Nature. In the fourth of these essays, Locke had maintained that the law of nature could be perceived by means of the light of nature which, in turn, amounted to the combined functioning of reason and the senses. But this turned out to be far more complex than the terminology suggested: our senses provide us with knowledge of the world, sufficient in itself to warrant the inference to a designer, which is God; and our knowledge of the content of natural law is parasitic upon prior knowledge of God's intentions. This was both a cumbersome and an intellectualist account, and for that reason obviously not capable of explaining how 'most men' (and all men in principle) come by their knowledge of natural law. Aarsleff argues that the ultimate answer to this epistemological difficulty is to be found, in its most complete form, in the second edition of the Essay, and more particularly in Locke's hedonism. The truth of the matter is, if Aarsleff is correct, that our experience of, and reflection upon, pleasure and pain (forms of punishment and reward) provide us more directly with the requisite knowledge; for pleasure and pain have the effect of inducing and inhibiting certain forms of action respectively. This view also requires the religious hypothesis, since only in a Godordered world can one take pleasure and pain to be the infallible guides they are claimed to be; but this interpretation of Locke does have the merit of rendering natural law more readily and universally accessible. There is in fact a reference to this function of pleasure and pain in the fourth of the Essays on the Law of Nature, but it appears to be an isolated occurrence and suggests that at this stage Locke had not fully developed this line of thought. It remains remarkable, certainly, that the whole matter receives no explicit mention in the Second Treatise (where one would perhaps most expect to see the argument deployed), but here one can only suppose that he has taken it for granted. At any rate, Aarsleff's carefully documented analysis is persuasive, and leaves little room for doubt as to what Locke's intentions were. It is noticeable that there is no acknowledgement of the connection between Locke's hedonism and the knowability of natural law in Professor Seliger's equally scholarly work; and, perhaps as a result, Seliger spends much time defending the claim that for Locke natural law was at least partially knowable by all men. The defence is primarily directed against Richard R. Cox and Leo Strauss both of whom suggest that Locke is not convinced of the knowability of natural law. 3 There is no doubt that

VER since the discovery of the successful empirical method of the natural sciences, the normative fields have been seriously challenged. Ethics, aesthetics, and theology have felt themselves obliged to advance or retreat; and the former movement has not been as successful as the latter. The reply of ethics to the scientific method has been twofold. On the one hand, it has declared itself irrevocably normative and announced its subject matter to be inherently incommensurable. On the other hand, it has been opened to empirical inquiry, but on a subjective basis only. We shall ignore the first claim, which can best be confuted by doing what it asserts cannot be done, and concentrate on the second. Under the aegis of an implicit nominalistic ontology, all empirical ethics have assumed that "empirical" in this context must mean "subjective." What this resulted in is too well known to require repetition. Subjective ethics eventually reduces to some simple criterion, such as pleasure and pain. The attempt to equate pleasure-pain with good-evil was sure to be a failure. Not all pleasures are good, not all pains evil. The calculus of pleasure-pain was an excellent calculus and led to impossible results because of the poor quality of the abstractions which had been poured into it. One simply cannot expect the machine to make good frankfurters out of bad meat. Such absurdities have seemed to those who defended the normative view of ethics to be an excellent argument for their case and not an instance of the premature application of the mathematical treatment to a subject matter which had not been sufficiently abstracted to be ready for it. The story does not end here, and the search for an empirical ethics goes on. For the fact is that we simply cannot consider ethics as a branch of pure theoretic knowledge, like logic or mathematics, because it does have an empirical content. It wears a qualitative aspect which is present in experience. Where, then, did the subjectivistic empiricists go wrong? There are two answers to this question. The first comes from the analysis of experience. We are confronted not only with experience as an act but also with the content of the act. In short, we do not experience the act of experience itself but something else. The content of experience as given is what we call the datum. It is in the attempt to discover a reliable element in knowledge that we seek to separate the experience which does change from the datum which to some extent at least does not. When we have moral experiences, the situation is not appreciably altered. We have, let us say, feelings of morality; but there must be something objective which corresponds to the feelings; there must, in other words, be something moral which we feel, else our feelings would be altogether misleading. Thus we can assume that the datum of experience is just as empirical as the experience itself. Perhaps the error of subjectivity has

A NEW and more explicit approach to Field Theory was commenced by Francis Ysidro Edgeworth in 1881. His Mathematical Psychics was a conscious attempt to formulate the Field Analogy with respect to Utility Theory. 'The conception of a man as a pleasure-machine may justify and facilitate the employment of mechanical terms and mathematical reasoning in social science." Edgeworth was attracted by the problem of many bodies in dynamics and by the calculus of variations.2 (Walras' mathematical orientation was towards sectors of the classical calculus.) Edgeworth admired Lagrange, Hamilton, and Maxwell3 who, with the aid of their 'generalised co-ordinates' solved the great problems of maxima. He recognised a magnificent analogy to the human tendency to ' accumulate pleasure under existing conditions'. He devised his model of indifference maps on the pattern of fields of forces and established the fundamental analogy for conditions of equilibrium. 'The direction in which X will prefer to move, the line of force or line of preference, as it may be termed, is perpendicular to the line of indifference.'4 (The mathematical and geometrical parallelisms inherent in this statement were not formalised by Edgewortl.) The most significant advance, consciously drawn by Edgeworth from Field Theory, was his formulation of Utility as a function with several independent variables. Utility depends upon the combination of commodities in one's possession just as the potential function depends on the configurations of all co-ordinates. In 1871, ten years prior to Edgeworth, Stanley Jevons 5 already formulated economics as the ' calculus of pleasure and pain '. The' Hedonimetry' of Edgeworth opened a more accomplished phase in the progress of

Ethical notions such as good and bad, are often treated as though they were ‘symmetric’ in the sense of having the same moral ‘weight’, one in a positive the other in a negative sense. I argue that they are in fact ‘asymmetric’ and that the negative members of such pairs of notions are more fundamental and definite, logically speaking, and operationally more important than the positive members. Detailed arguments are given to show this for some non‐moral notions, such as life and death, health and illness; some semi‐moral notions such as pleasure and pain; and finally for the moral notions of happiness, benevolence, right, and good and their negative counterparts. One of the intentions of the article is to show that a systematic view of such asymmetries may have consequences for one's view of the proper or desirable structure of a general theory of ethics: norms stating prohibitions and norms stating permissions will be seen to be, in a sense defined in the text, more fundamental and important than norms ...

I HAVE recently been editing a life story of an American Indian which I recorded in the field. I have hoped that this could be an introduction to the culture as well as to the events of an individual's life, and so I was prepared to furnish explanatory notes to fill in gaps and to clarify statements and references that might be obscure to the reader who was not a specialist. This exercise, which turned out to be much more extensive and demanding than I had anticipated, forced me to do a good deal of thinking about the relation of the narrator of the life story to his culture and, by extension, about the relation of the human being and culture in general. I knew that a good many able scholars had concerned themselves with this problem area before me, and so I turned to the literature for stimulation and information. I became very much interested in a set of premises about the matter which I believe had its earliest full expression in the works of William Sumner and soon thereafter entered the anthropological literature. These publications are too voluminous to review exhaustively, but I would like to summarize enough of the material to give a clear indication of the direction of thought it represents, and then I should like to offer a few reflections of my own. Although his book Folkways was published in 1906, William Graham Sumner tells us in his preface that he used its concepts and data for lecture material as early as 1885. If this is the case, the tenets advanced by this prominent cultural sociologist are now nearly 80 years old. Yet they must seem remarkably current to the contemporary cultural anthropologist, for they anticipate and parallel much that he is asked to accept today. Sumner begins his book with these ringing words: "If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts. Every moment brings necessities which must be satisfied at once. Need was the first experience, and it was followed at once by a blundering effort to satisfy it" (1906:2). I call attention to the haste and complete confidence with which Sumner subordinates the intellectual to the practical and behavioral. How then did man move to satisfy his needs? How, indeed, did he recognize his needs? In answer Sumner leans heavily on social or cultural Darwinism. I quote: "Pleasure and pain, on the one side and the other, were the rude constraints which defined the line on which efforts must proceed. The ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain is the only psychical power which is to be assumed. Thus ways of doing things were selected, which were expedient. They answered the purpose better than other ways, or with less toil and pain. Along the course on which efforts were compelled to go, habit, routine, and skill

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Gambling, a $50 billion annual business and a source of sporadic pleasure and pain for at least one-fourth and most likely well over one-half of the adult residents of the United States, is rarely looked at by behavioral scientists. The authors studied participants in legally organized poker palaces in California, with particular attention to the role of the elderly. A personally distributed questionnaire produced 29 usable responses, approximately half from persons over age 65. Analysis indicated that all except one of the older players expect to lose, while most of the younger players expect to win. Additional results are presented and an interpretation based upon locus of control is made.

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IN PHRONESIS vol. 5 no i. Fr. Kenny produces some objections to an article of mine in the preceding number on the discussion of false pleasure in the Philebus (36c-4ib), and offers an alternative interpretation. On one point I think he may be right, and that is where he objects to the way I connected the first type of false pleasure with the second or third. I am not sure about this. The fact that Socrates allows his analysis (44a4 seq) to apply to present pleasures does not show that his concern is not with anticipatory ones, (as witness 39c); and the passage at 44a4 is part of a discussion whose points are to be used of people who, in great pain, consider release from it a pleasure. It must be admitted, however, that while there is mention of anticipation in that passage Socrates has become more interested in the concomitance of pain and pleasure and there is an almost imperceptible slide from talk of false to talk of mixed pleasures. For the rest, I think Fr. Kenny is largely wrong. I cannot treat of all his arguments, so I shall first make a few points about the analogy of pleasure and belief, then some on the importance of the Mcypoipo;, and finally bring out an important underlying issue on Plato's general theory of pleasure which, I think, predisposes each of us to his own interpretation. This last issue I shall not argue, but merely show its importance.

Whereas some critics were most concerned with the mechanisms mediating effect, others focussed their attention on the nature of the satisfiers and annoyers to which reference is made in Thorndike's law. Although Spencer and Bain, in whose tradition Thorndike continued, frankly invoked pleasure and pain as agents responsible for the fixation and elimination of responses, Thorndike's law has been a law of effect, not affect. He carefully defines satisfiers and annoyers in terms independent of subjective experience and report. "By a satisfying state of affairs is meant one which the animal does nothing to avoid, often doing such things as to attain and preserve it. By a discomforting state of affairs is meant one which the animal avoids and abandons," Although admittedly free of hedonism, such a definition of satisfiers and annoyers has faced another serious difficulty: the danger of circularity. The critic may easily reword the definition to read: "The animal does what it does because it does it, and it does not do what it does not do because it does not do it." This reductio ad ads^/-rd^^m is probably not entirely fair, but it points up the danger of the definition in the absence of an independent determination of the nature of satisfiers and annoyers. The satisfying or annoying nature of a state of affairs can usually be determined ful ly only in the course of a learning experiment and cannot then be invoked as a causal condition of learning without circularity. In their experimental work Thorndike and his associates have made no significant attempts to establish the satisfying or annoying nature of their rewards and punishments independently of the learning experiment (19, p. 496).

MR PRESIDENT, I was searching for a literary allusion with which I might start tonight which should, as it were, bridge the two cultures. I could think of nothing better than that phrase in the Phaedo in which Socrates draws attention to the fact that pleasure and pain are almost always inextricably interwoven in human experience. Certainly my feeling at this moment is great pleasure and honour at being asked to do what I am doing; but there is, too, great pain at my own inadequacy. I have, indeed, been wondering why I was asked. Is it as that curious phenomenon, the Vice-Chancellor of a non-existent university? Many of you will be all too familiar with professors who have no students. But a Vice-Chancellor without a university is even more curious. Is it as a schoolmaster?

The concepts of pleasure and good, both separately and in their relation to one another, have for centuries been a favourite and fruitful subject of philosophical discussion. The contrasting concepts of pain and evil, however, though by no means entirely neglected, have been, and still are, less popular among philosophers. The reason for this disparity is not altogether clear. The title of a recent autobiography, “Philosophers lead sheltered lives,” might support the explanation that philosophers are (no doubt very properly) reluctant to write on matters of which they have little or no first-hand knowledge. Pleasure and good, it may be said, form part of their own personal experience: but their academic seclusion has little place for either pain or evil. A more serious reason is the assumption, often made but rarely defended, that, since pain and pleasure, evil and good, are in some sense pairs of “opposites,” a full discussion of all four concepts is unnecessary. The nature of pain, it is thought, can easily be inferred from the nature of pleasure, and that of evil from that of good. But even if this were true, it ought not to be taken for granted; the belief (it is more often implicit than explicit) that these concepts are symmetrically disposed opposites ought to be held (if at all) only after an investigation into all of them. And in fact the belief is not true. It does not need profound insight or observation to see that we cannot (as some of the utilitarians once thought) construct a simple hedonic scale on which pleasure appears as a plus, and pain as a minus quantity. Contemporary hedonists have often paid more attention to the psychological complexities involved in this problem than did their classical predecessors. A. L. Hilliard, for example, distinguishes carefully between pain and unpleasantness. Pain he describes as a sensitivity, “correlated with the excitation of specific receptors in the nervous system”: unpleasantness is an affectivity (i.e. roughly, an emotion) to which physiological correlates, though they must be assumed to exist, have not yet been discovered.

People regulate their emotions not only for hedonic reasons but also for instrumental reasons, to attain the potential benefits of emotions beyond pleasure and pain. However, such instrumental motives have rarely been examined outside the laboratory as they naturally unfold in daily life. To assess whether and how instrumental motives operate outside the laboratory, it is necessary to examine them in response to real and personally relevant stimuli in ecologically valid contexts. In this research, we assessed the frequency, consistency, and predictors of instrumental motives in negative emotion regulation in daily life. Participants (N = 114) recalled the most negative event of their day each evening for 7 days and reported their instrumental motives and negative emotion goals in that event. Participants endorsed performance motives in approximately 1 in 3 events and social, eudaimonic, and epistemic motives in approximately 1 in 10 events. Instrumental motives had substantially higher within- than between-person variance, indicating that they were context-dependent. Indeed, although we found few associations between instrumental motives and personality traits, relationships between instrumental motives and contextual variables were more extensive. Performance, social, and epistemic motives were each predicted by a unique pattern of contextual appraisals. Our data demonstrate that instrumental motives play a role in daily negative emotion regulation as people encounter situations that pose unique regulatory demands. (PsycINFO Database Record

Este artigo relata uma pesquisa quantitativa realizada com uma amostra de 40 participantes de um total de 241 funcionários lotados no serviço de limpeza pública, pertencentes a uma empresa terceirizada prestadora de serviços de limpeza e manutenção junto à Prefeitura do Município de Alagoinhas-BA. A pesquisa teve como finalidade investigar as vivências de prazer/sofrimento no ambiente de trabalho, a partir das dimensões organização de trabalho e relações socioprofissionais. Como instrumento de coleta de dados, foi utilizada a Escala de Avaliação do Contexto de Trabalho (EACT) e a Escala de Indicadores de Prazer e Sofrimento no Trabalho (EIPST), cuja análise fora feita através da técnica da estatística descritiva, com o propósito de mensurar as percepções compartilhadas dos agentes de limpeza pública sobre o contexto de trabalho em que estão inseridos e as suas vivências de prazer e sofrimento no trabalho. Para o processamento dos resultados, foi aplicado o pacote estatístico SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science), em que os dados obtidos foram sistematizados através de tabelas e de gráficos. Os resultados indicam que os agentes de limpeza pública estão sujeitos às contradições do contexto de trabalho, que geram prazer e sofrimento ao mesmo tempo, e que favorecem o uso eficaz de estratégias de defesa, evitando, assim, o adoecimento, embora a saúde possa estar sujeita a riscos em caso de falha dessas defesas. This paper reports a quantitative study done with a sample of 40 participants from a total of 241 employees who work in the public cleaning service, belonging to a cleaning and maintenance service in the municipality of Alagoinhas-BA. The paper had as purpose to investigate the experiences of pleasure / pain in the workplace, from the dimensions organization of work and socio-professional relationships. The Evaluation of Work Context Scale (EACT) and the Indicators of Pleasure and Pain at Work Scale (EIPST) were used to collect data, whose analysis was done by the technique of descriptive statistics, with the purpose of measuring the shared perceptions of the public cleaning agents about the work context in which they live, and their experiences of pleasure and pain at work. For the processing of the results, we applied the statistical package SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science), in which the data were systematized in tables and graphs. The results indicate that the cleaning agents are subject to public contradictions in the work context, which generates pleasure and pain while promotes the efficient use of defense strategies, thus preventing illness, although they may be subject to health risks in case of failure of these defenses. Este artículo relata una investigación cuantitativa realizada con una muestra de 40 participantes de un total de 241 empleados que actúan en el servicio de limpieza pública, pertenecientes a una empresa tercerizada prestadora de servicios de limpieza y mantenimiento en el Ayuntamiento del Municipio de Alagoinhas-BA. La investigación tuvo como finalidad investigar las vivencias de placer/sufrimiento en el ambiente de trabajo, desde las dimensiones organización de trabajo y relaciones socio profesionales. Como instrumento de recolección de datos, fue utilizada la Escala de Evaluación del Contexto de Trabajo (EACT) y la Escala de Índices de Placer y Sufrimiento en el Trabajo (EIPST), cuyo análisis fue realizado a través de la técnica de la estadística descriptiva, con el propósito de medir las percepciones compartidas de los agentes de limpieza pública sobre el contexto de trabajo en el que están insertos y sus vivencias de placer y sufrimiento en el trabajo. Para el procesamiento de los resultados, fue aplicado el paquete estadístico SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science), en que los datos obtenidos fueron sistematizados a través de tablas y de gráficos. Los resultados indican que los agentes de limpieza pública están sujetos a las contradicciones del contexto de trabajo, que generan placer y sufrimiento al mismo tiempo, y que favorecen el uso eficaz de estrategias de defensa, evitando, así, la enfermedad, aunque la salud pueda estar sujeta a riesgos en caso de fallo de esas defensas.

The human body is the most common object of pictorial representation in western art and its representations trigger a vast range of experiences from pain to pleasure. The goal of this study was to investigate brain activity triggered by paintings of male and female body images exemplifying conditions associated with pleasure or pain. Our findings show participant-general as well as gender specific brain activity for either the pain or the pleasure conditions. Although our participants were fully aware that they were viewing artworks, the inferior parietal lobule - known for its role in the perception of emotional body images - and the somatosensory cortex related to touch were selectively active for female body paintings in all participants in the pleasure conditions. As regards gender we observed that the sight of female bodies activated the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex in males, an area known to subserve autonomic arousal. In contrast, in females the sight of the male body activated reward and control related parts of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. This study supports the notion that some basic evolutionary processes operate when we view body images, also when they are cultural heritage paintings far removed from daily experience. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

for the good of that other man, is to the moral detriment of the spectator. There may also be a reference in this judgment to the probability of passive and occasional enjoyment turning into an active creation of occasions for enjoyment; i.e., in the course of time the doctor who takes pleasure in the pain he cannot avoid inflicting will start inflicting uncalled-for pain so that he may enjoy it. The spectator will have become executor, or rather spectator-cum-executor. The ultimate ground of the "harming of a sentient being" seems then to lie not in the amount or nature of the pain inflicted but in the degradation of one sentient being into the means of procuring pleasure or profit for another sentient being. This holds irrespective of whether the "degradation" in question implies painful or pleasurable sensations for the sufferer, the person degraded. Once again, pleasure and pain have been found to be interchangeable without affecting the moral standing of a situation. "Pain" and "pleasure" then, harboring no moral elements in their intrinsic nature, are not moral values, and therefore the judgments "Pain is evil," Pleasure is good" being intuitive judgments cannot be ethical judgements.

In earlier dialogues, such as the Phaedo, Socrates concerns himself with the life that frees the soul from the corporeal, while in the Philebus he inquires into the composition of the good life. Are both lives the same? Freedom from the corporeal is of central importance to Socrates because the corporeal is subject to change and decay. As such, it is not that which most truly is, and therefore is in a sense illusory. If one is to become free from the corporeal, one must turn away from the corporeal by engaging in the search for truth, for that which most truly is. In the life of philosophy this enterprise is undertaken. The art of philosophizing is the art of dying, of dying to the corporeal. The Phaedo advocates such a life, and at the same time, it along with other earlier dialogues, seems to associate pleasure and pain with the corporeal. In the search for truth, one moves beyond the bodily experience of pleasure and pain to the immortality resulting from action and dialectic. This seems perplexing, for one ordinarily would think that pleasure ought to be an element found in the good life. What precisely is to be done about pleasure? Is it to be totally excluded from the life of philosophy? Is it to be excluded from the good life? Is excluding it from the one the same as excluding it from the other? We can effectively answer these questions by turning to the Philebus, for there we discover that Plato's treatment of pleasure and pain is not so simple—or simplistic— as might initially be supposed. If we were to compare the Philebus with an earlier dialogue such as the Phaedo, we might initially be tempted to claim that the latter is the more "beautiful" of the two and therefore the more "pleasing." But for Plato, it is the Philebus with its appeal to dialectic, its slight use of imagery, and its almost total abandonment of myth which is truly the more appealing. Why? Because it recognizes explicitly what the Phaedo recognizes only implicitly through its aesthetic appeal to the senses, namely, that the good life

Johnson attacks Jenyns’s Inquiry, observes Joseph Wood Krutch in Samuel Johnson, ‘not with weapons drawn from the armoury of Christian orthodoxy but logic of the sort Jenyns himself wished to use’.1 And indeed, Johnson’s procedure is to show, with exemplary precision, the extent to which Jenyns’s arguments founder on conceptual difficulties of their own making. These arguments not only fail to preserve the metaphysical opposition between plenitude and vacuity but point to the conclusion that the principles of continuity and hierarchy can only be conceived in terms of the chasms they sought to exclude. Yet Johnson proves unwilling to use the contradictions inherent in Jenyns’s reasoning as a pretext for constructing a new speculative synthesis capable of explaining the nature of evil more adequately. On the contrary, his strategy is to employ these contradictions in a way that by its nature is opposed to conceptual systematic thought. To register the force of Johnson’s critique would thus involve much more than simply confronting Jenyns’s ramshackle edifice with yet another instance of post-Newtonian system-building. Indeed, there is good reason to suppose that Johnson would have regarded such an exercise in system-building as merely the restoration of the same hierarchical antitheses of good and evil, truth and falsehood, pleasure and pain, on a new footing.

This paper summarizes the major strengths and weaknesses of current psychiatric nosology, and then discusses various forms of masochistic behavior as one illustration of how psychoanalysis can contribute to the continuing evolution of psychiatric nosology. Masochistic behavior is separated into behavior in which there is a predominantly conscious link between pleasure and pain, and behavior in which that link is predominantly unconscious. Both categories are further separated into normal and pathological forms. The current diagnostic category of dysthymic disorder is then discussed, with consideration given to the contribution that psychoanalysis can make toward the clarification and delineation of this heterogeneous diagnostic category.