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Not only have Siri Leknes and Irene Tracey, two neuroscientists who study pain and pleasure, concluded that pain and reward processing involve many of the same regions of the brain, but also that the functional relationship lies in that pain decreases pleasure and rewards increase analgesia, which is the relief from pain. [8]
While the pursuit of pleasure formed the focal point of the philosophy, this was largely directed to the "static pleasures" of minimizing pain, anxiety and suffering. From this understanding, Epicureans concluded that the greatest pleasure a person could reach was the complete removal of all pain, both physical and mental. [ 52 ]
Discussions in philosophy of mind concerning qualia has given rise to a body of knowledge called philosophy of pain, [1] which is about pain in the narrow sense of physical pain, and which must be distinguished from philosophical works concerning pain in the broad sense of suffering. This article covers both topics.
Both philosophers and psychologists are interested in methods of measuring pleasure and pain to guide decision-making and gain a deeper understanding of their causes. A common approach is to use self-report questionnaires in which people are asked to quantify how pleasant or unpleasant an experience is.
Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." [6] [7] He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism.
Momentary pleasure, preferably of a physical kind, is the only good for humans. [14] When it comes to pain, the Cyrenaics held the opinion that pain that occurs suddenly is more difficult to endure than pain that can be foreseen. [15] However, some actions that give immediate pleasure can create more than their equivalent of pain.
Aristotle did not include a sense of pain when he enumerated the five senses; he, like Plato before him, saw pain and pleasure not as sensations but as emotions ("passions of the soul"). [3] Alternatively, Hippocrates believed that pain was caused by an imbalance in the vital fluids of a human.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a known Lacanian theorist, has adopted the term in his philosophy; it also plays an important role in the work of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. In his 1973 literary theory book The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes divides the effects of texts into two: plaisir (translated as "pleasure") and jouissance ...