There Isnt The Pleasure Of Food Enough Summary

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Chloe Tong
10/10/14
PHIL 4300
Kaplan
Why isn’t the pleasure of food enough?
This article is explaining the issue of how people perceive food to be one of the least pleasurable things to worry about. The author explains that the amount of pleasure by eating and drinking is not as great as it seems (25). Based on this, the author believes that we should spend more time on other things that gives us pleasure and pay less attention to food. There are two different points of view in this article that support the argument that eating and drinking brings pleasure to people. The quantitative strand states that the amount of pleasure produced by eating and drinking are often over exaggerated. The qualitative strand states that the feeling of pleasure gotten from eating and drinking is not as great than the kind produced from other experiences.
Some questions were brought up in order to clear up any confusion about the discussion of quality and quantity of pleasure. When comparing quantity and quality, most people say that they get more pleasure from doing one thing than another (25). Another issue that was brought up was if we could separate the pleasures we get from eating and drinking and other pleasures. The author infers that the real difficulty people have is isolating the pleasures of food and the …show more content…

Plato discusses how eating and drinking and the pleasures of food aren’t pleasures worth having. They are merely disguised as false pleasures and are only reliefs of pain, which humans mistake for pleasure (32). An example of this is hunger. When we eat, it only satisfies our hunger or ‘relieves our pain’ temporarily. The author is not very fond of Plato’s arguments saying that the pain is relieved through the psychological urges for food rather than the physical want for it. The argument does not support the claim that pleasures of eating and drinking are not genuine

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