Publications, etc.

Young, Christopher and Andrew Brook. 'Schopenhauer and Freud,' International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 1994 (75), 101-18. [This paper received the Miguel Prados award for best paper in Canadian Psychoanalysis from the Canadian Psychoanalytic Community.]

Young, Christopher and Andrew Brook. 'Schopenhauer,' in The Freud Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing. 2001.

Young, Christopher and D.S. Hutchinson. 'Recent work on MSS of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics,' remarks delivered at the University of Padua and the University of Venice in the Summer of 1998.

Young, Christopher and Andrew Brook. 'Schopenhauer,' forthcoming in The Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis. [This is a shorter version of the 'Schopenhauer' above.]

In Progress . . .

In the works are papers (at various stages) on self-interest, counterfactual stability in metaethical theories, the doctrine of double effect, and Just War Theory and the Iraq War.

Aristotelian Qualitativism about Pleasure

My thesis is on the topic of pleasure in Aristotle's ethics. I am intrigued by the question of how pleasure fits into the good life, and by the more specific question of how it fits into the good life, according to Aristotle.

Qualitativism about pleasure is the view that pleasures differ in quality, as well as merely in quantity. Type qualitativism is the view the pleasures differ in kind, that is, that they are distinguished intrinsically by features other than quantity. Value qualitativism is the view that pleasures differ in value according to the types of pleasure there are (that is, that the differences of value are not ultimately reducible either to quantitative or extrinsic features of the pleasure). Aristotle holds both varieties of qualitativism, and although his reasons for doing so are sometimes maddeningly, mind-bogglingly, graduate-career-destroyingly unclear, they are also fascinating and perhaps even helpful.

I begin with some philosophical scene-setting, looking first at the debate about pleasure in Plato and the early academy. I then turn to close exegesis, treating Aristotle's two very difficult treatments of pleasure (in Books VII and X) to careful scrutiny. A chapter on Aristotle's qualitativism about pleasure draws together some lessons about pleasure from the close textual work and subjects them to philosophical scrutiny. Finally, I conclude with a chapter on Aristotelian qualitativism about pleasure, that is, I attempt to develop a theory of qualitativism about pleasure that is broadly Aristotelian in spirit, but that avoid some of the obscurities and difficulties uncovered in the rest of the thesis.

This thesis is being produced under the patient supervision of Terry Irwin.

I will post chapters of my thesis as they become (barely) presentable. Please bear in mind that the chapters are in varying stages of development, and most will be extremely rough, lacking in proper footnotes, and so on.

Odds and Ends

See my letters page for a few letters I have written about political subjects.

After reading about, and teaching a little, applied game theory, I designed a card game (which you can find here) which is essentially a series of nested, iterated prisoner's dilemmas.

I have a strong interest in pedagogical theory. My first written foray into the subject is a short piece called "How to Teach 'Introduction to Applied Ethics'". The latest version can be found here.