How To Pursue Happiness?

Philebus is an important dialogue of Plato’s works.Its theme can be generally summarized as "ηπε(?), but its real intention has always become the focus of the academic debates because of the ambiguity of the argument and thought procedures in the dialogue. With a general awareness of the issue of the paideia and aiming at connecting of ancient and modern wisdom, the author endeavors a new Chinese translation of Philebus, based on my careful reading of the Greek text edited by Badaham, Poste, Bury and others. Then, I have done a detailed research on this dialogue. This research is consisted of two parts. The first part deals with the methodology and ontology in this dialogue, and the second part deals with Plato’s treatment of pleasure.Part one deals with One and Many Problem of Philebus. If Socrates wants to exhaust the possibility in criticising hedonism, his strategy must be specially designed, since pleasure seems to be the self-evident Good and has been defended by many sophists. Plato needs various weapons. During the process of the argument of Philebus, we see successively the reference to problems of one and many, the Gods-Given Way, the four class of beings, the issue of false pleasure. These are all the focus of my dissertation。It can be further divided into three parts. Firstly, I discuss the one and many problem appearing in the passage of 15bI-8. Then I deal with the Gods-given way. Finally I investigate the four classes of being, which is Plato’s ontology.The second part is about Plato’s discussion of pleasure. As philosophical discussion is at the same time soul-purifying, I follow the repeating of the theme of pleasure. Based on a careful research of the ancient and modern literature, this part deals with three questions. (1) In response to the heated debate of interpretation, I argue that Plato did propose a basic explanatory model of pain and pleasure, i.e. the perceived destruction and replenishment. (2) The false pleasure is the harshest criticism Plato has made on pleasure. However, due to the vagueness of the argument, though many scholars pay much attention to it, it has still caused hot debates. In this part, I firstly focuses on the false anticipatory pleasures of the Philebus’ 36c-41d. It involves the reason of Protachus’s refusing of false pleasure, different ways of interpretations. Good-Man argument and the connection of false and bad. I also analyze the false pleasure of overestimation in the passage of 41a-42c and the dour person’s pleasure in the passage of 42c-44c. (3)I discuss in detail the process argument which is based on the above model of pleasure. I analyze the criticism of Aristotle. Aristotle did not sympathize with Plato in terms of this theory. On the contrary, he adopts new technical words to explain pleasure.