Desire and Feeling

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between desires and feelings such as pleasure and emotion. It explains how emotions bear on our desires in a manner that is consistent with desire-as-belief – our emotions affect our desires largely by directing our attention onto the reasons we have. It then discusses the influence of appetites and pleasure on desire – these things affect our desires because they affect the reasons we have. Moreover, the chapter argues that by understanding appetites and likings as distinct states from desires, desire-as-belief can make good sense of apparently non-rational variation in desire between people, and over time. The chapter goes on to explain how desire-as-belief can make good sense of ascetics who believe that they have no reasons to pursue pleasure. Finally, the chapter addresses the role that desires play in producing pleasure.