Hedonism: Pleasure as a Philosophical Principle from Aristippus to Epicurus and Utilitarianism
Of all the answers that philosophy has offered to the question “what is the good?”, few have been as intuitive — or as widely misunderstood — as that of hedonism: pleasure is the supreme good. In everyday usage the word conjures images of excess and indulgence, Roman banquets and moral abandon. But philosophical hedonism is something else entirely: a millennia-old ethical tradition that begins with Aristippus of Cyrene in the fifth century BCE, reaches its most refined form in Epicurus, and re-emerges in modernity as the cornerstone of Bentham’s and Mill’s utilitarianism. ...