ABSTRACT
I am adopting a broadly Aristotelian view of pleasure in the sense of regarding pleasure as a felt quality of an activity which indicates that the activity’s aim is apparently satisfied. The problem we confront, if we are to develop a theory that is neither Philistine nor iconoclastic, is to explain how cognition itself can have an aim satisfiable not merely, as Aristotle believed, in intellectual contemplation but in cognitive acts more generally, including perception. The easier course, certainly, is the Philistine one of resorting to an indirect explanation of aesthetic pleasures.
