Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 April 2024
Kant adopts and transforms the views on pleasure found both in the empirical psychology of the Wolffian tradition as well as those of critics of this tradition like Crusius. The latter proposed that pleasure in an object results from the satisfaction of a desire or interest while the former conceived of pleasure as the perception of an object’s perfection. Mendelssohn’s analysis of pleasure combined aspects of both views and led to a characterization of the feeling as a preference we have to maintain the representation of an object in our mind when it satisfies our interest in perfection. We find this explication in the third Critique under the title of a “transcendental definition” of pleasure, that is, a definition of an empirical concept that employs only pure concepts of the understanding. The definition, together with the assumption that faculties have interests, leads to the principle that pleasure consists in the satisfaction of such interests.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.