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.This makes pleasure, as Brännmark concludes, a kind of prudential master-value even if it is not, pace hedonism, the onlygood there is.Theodore Scaltsas, in his chapter Mixed Determinates , also examines Aris-totle s concept of pleasure, though his exploration takes him in another direction.Scaltsas is concerned with a theme that he argues can be traced through differentdomains of Aristotle s thought: the anti-Platonic theme that the best state is not Introduction 17necessarily a pure one.Aristotle never makes this theme into an explicit principle,which helps to explain why it has evaded interpreters, who tend to share Plato sinstinct from the attractions of which Aristotle is working to free himself thatthe best state must be some unadulterated state of a transcendent being.WhatAristotle tells us, by contrast, is that even the pleasant by nature the trulypleasant cannot be found, even in the best human life, without some admixtureof pain and impurity.Aristotle tells us something parallel about the good andthe true: that the naturally good, the really good, is not found without someadmixture of the bad; and that the true what we really ought to believe isnot free of admixture with the false.This is surprising, since Aristotle says (for instance) that the pleasant that isnot by nature involves conflict; the contrast that we naturally expect is that the pleasant that is by nature will not involve conflict.Yet, Scaltsas argues, there isconflict even in the pleasant by nature ; but it is a different sort of conflict fromthe kind found in the incidentally pleasant and the apparently pleasant.On Scaltsas s interpretation, Aristotle makes room for this possibility by usingthe concept of being determinate (to hôrismenon) to characterize the real, the best,or what is by nature.His resolution is achieved by offering a very sophisticatedanalysis of the way that the determinate can, despite its determinateness,nevertheless admit of degrees.This allows for the determinate to be mixedwith its opposite (the bad, painful, or false), while differentiating this sort ofadmixture and conflict from the conflicts inherent in what is not by nature ,which is indeterminate.Thus the difference between conflict due to differentdegrees of determinacy and conflict due to indeterminacy is used by Aristotleto characterize the differences between the best states that can be achieved inthe moral and the cognitive domains from the worst states.The upshot is amoderation of the kind of ideal of life that it will be realistic for us to accept.IfAristotle as Scaltsas reads him is correct that, even in the best life possible for us,there is no chance of achieving complete freedom from the bad, the painful, orthe false, that puts limits on what kind of good life we ought to seek; though, ofcourse, as Scaltsas is careful to stress, this does not come near meaning that thereis no clear ideal of life to aim at at all.In a way, Talbot Brewer s chapter Three Dogmas of Desire concludesthe collection as Christopher Coope s began it: by taking some contemporaryorthodoxies and showing how they need to be questioned and can mostfruitfully be questioned by drawing on the deeper resources of the virtue-ethicaltradition. Virtue ethicists Brewer writes have done moral philosophy auseful service by deepening and enriching the reigning conception of moralpsychology.I believe that they can repeat this service in the case of the conceptof desire.Just as Coope s title and opening echoed Anscombe, so Brewer s title and open-ing echo Quine.Quine famously questioned two dogmas that are, or were, central 18 Timothy Chappellto modern empiricism.As his title indicates, Brewer s aim is to question three dog-mas about the nature of desire: three insufficiently questioned views about desire,which are central to contemporary Anglo-American ethics and action theory.The first dogma is a belief that desires are propositional attitudes; the second is thatdesires are distinguished from other propositional attitudes by direction of mind worldfit; the third is that any action can be explained as the product of a belief/desire pair.(With Brewer s attack on this third dogma, compare my own in Chapter 7
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