Wenjin Liu

In Plato’s _Philebus_, Socrates argues that some pleasures depend for their pleasantness on a felt contrast with pain, whereas others do not. The former are ‘mixed’, and the latter are ‘pure’. He claims that there are pure pleasures associated with learning. But his account of these pleasures is puzzling: it appears to conflict with Plato’s other representations of learning as uncomfortable, it often relies on ambiguous, metaphorical language, and it claims, without explanation, that these pleasures are available only to ‘the very few’. This paper resolves these puzzles by reconstructing the psychic basis of the pure pleasures of learning. It argues that Socrates understands learning as the act of putting in memory, which is enabled by the soul’s powers of memory and recollection. Memory and recollection enable the soul to have representational content present to mind and to enjoy having that content in mind without also being aware of pain. The painlessness of this psychic act has to do with Socrates’ conception of the structure of knowledge: only purely theoretical forms of expertise, which Socrates identifies as highly elite, allow for the representational contents of memory to be separate from the soul’s awareness of its or the body’s needs. The paper concludes with a discussion of the metaphysics of process in the dialogue and its significance for the paper’s interpretation for the pure pleasures of learning.

This article examines Aristotle's model of deliberation as inquiry (zêtêsis), arguing that Aristotle does not treat the presumption of open alternatives as a precondition for rational deliberation. Deliberation aims to uncover acts that are up to us and conducive to our ends; it essentially consists in causal mapping. Unlike the comparative model presupposed in the literature on deliberation, Aristotle's model can account for the virtuous agent's deliberation, as well as deliberation with a view to “satisficing” desires and deliberation that fails to uncover any expedient course of action. Aristotle's account of the constraints governing rational deliberation is furthermore not incompatibilist—for all Aristotle says, we may deliberate rationally despite being committed to the truth of determinism

This paper explores the structural mismatch problem between physical and phenomenal properties, where the similarity relations we experience among phenomenal properties lack corresponding relations in the physical domain. I introduce a new understanding of this problem via the Uniformity Principle: for any set of dimensions used to determine phenomenal similarities, there must be a consistently applied set of physical dimensions generating the same pattern of similarity relations. I then assess the potential of recent machine learning models, specifically graph neural networks, to resolve this problem, as proposed by Epstein. By examining how these models generate sensory maps, I argue that the dimensions they adopt violate the Uniformity Principle in two ways: impure dimensions, where subjective responses affect the physical dimensions used, and non-uniform dimensions, where the applied dimensions vary inconsistently. These issues show that current machine learning models fail to establish a systematic correspondence between physical and phenomenal properties.