Society & Culture
It is well-known that modern strands of psychotherapy—like Beck’s cognitive-behavioural therapy or Ellis’ rational emotive therapy—have been influenced by the Stoics and their take on the nature of emotions. It is not the world which causes our emotional upheaval, the Stoics and therapists propose, but how we construe the world through our mediating beliefs. What is rarely appreciated, though, is the fact that a precursor of this cognitivist theory of human emotion can already be found in Plato’s Philebus. Here Socrates offers a famous yet puzzling argument (between 36c3 and 41a4) according to which our anticipatory pleasures can be false (pseudês). Most recent literature has focused on the source of these pleasures’ alleged falsity: some scholars maintain that they are false because they do not latch onto the world (e.g. D. Frede), others think they are false because there is something evaluatively or morally wrong with them (e.g. V. Harte). In this paper I want to sidestep this long-standing debate and suggest that we can (and should) excavate a cognitivist model of pleasure from this puzzling stretch of text, as it were running in the background of the argument and making it possible in the first place. On this model, I suggest, any human pathos centrally involves a doxa that a state of affairs obtains and that this state of affairs is, somehow, positively evaluatively charged for the person undergoing the affective experience. Having this cognitivist model in view, we can examine how it sheds light on the framing question of the Philebus—what makes someone’s life go best?—and explore its promising therapeutic potential.