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Which is the good life: pleasure or wisdom? Philebus, who says almost nothing, has argued for pleasure, and his friend Protarchus defends it against Socrates, who argues for knowledge and thought. Dividing all things into the limited, the unlimited, their mixture and its cause, and examining kinds of pleasure, true and false, pure and mixed, Socrates concludes that the best life is a mixture of both, ordered by measure and proportion, with wisdom ranked higher than pleasure.
Context and significance
One of Plato's late dialogues, the Philebus is a careful study of pleasure that influenced Aristotle's treatment of it in the Nicomachean Ethics. The translation comes from Benjamin Jowett's collected Dialogues of Plato. Read Plato's Gorgias.
About the author
Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was born into an aristocratic family in Athens and became the devoted student of Socrates. After his teacher's trial and execution in 399 BC, he travelled, returned to Athens and founded the Academy, a school that lasted for centuries and counted Aristotle among its students.
Almost all his writings are dialogues in which Socrates questions his fellow citizens about justice, love, knowledge and the soul, from the Apology to the Symposium and the Republic. Known to Arab philosophers as Aflatun, he was read closely by al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd, and Western philosophy has been called a series of footnotes to him.