Introduction

What is the human good: pleasure or intelligence? The hedonist Philebus holds the first, Socrates defends the second. In the course of the argument both discover that the best life is neither pure pleasure nor pure thought but a rightly proportioned mixture of the two. It is the only late dialogue in which Socrates is the main speaker, and its analysis of the kinds of pleasure, of true and false pleasures, and of limit and the unlimited shaped Aristotle's ethics and every later discussion of happiness.