ABSTRACT
One of the most compelling arguments against hedonism emerges from Aristotle’s analysis of pleasure, but it would be quite wrong to infer from this that Aristotle rejected hedonism outright. On the contrary, he agreed with the hedonists in believing pleasure to be a highly desirable aspect of life. Their mistake did not lie in valuing pleasure, but in a mistaken conception of what pleasure is. They thought of pleasure as an experience of a special kind produced by certain activities, an experience that explains why we value those activities, just as the fact that some activities cause us pain explains why we view them negatively. In other words, the hedonists construed pleasure as a kind of sensation, the positive counterpart to pain.
