Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van Zoonen

• Zoonen, Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van (2026). Pleasure and Illusion in Plato's Phaedo. In Aufderheide, Joachim & Erginel, Mehmet M. (Ed.), Plato’s Pleasures: Dialogue and Cognition. Brill. ISSN 9789004780996. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Bodily pleasures deceive the soul into confusing what is real. The hedonist's pursuit of pleasure is tantamount to carrying water in a sieve. Yet, the philosopher's life, Plato insists, is 729 times more pleasant than the tyrant's. Pleasure runs through the Platonic corpus as both the greatest threat to a good life and one of its defining marks. Plato engages this tension dialogue by dialogue. This volume brings together ten new essays by leading scholars on pleasure, organised around three themes: misleading pleasures, the cognitive complexity of pleasure, and pleasure in the good life. Together, they show why moral psychology is the indispensable framework for understanding what Platonic pleasure is and what it is worth.

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• Zoonen, Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van (2026). Savoring and Sifting: Platonic Reflections on Pleasure and the Good Life. Full text in Research Archive
• Zoonen, Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van (2026). False Pleasure and Psychic Disintegration in Plato's Tyrant. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The tyrannical personality plays a central role in Republic 9’s attempt to establish that only the just person—whose soul is healthy, integrated, and harmonious—lives a genuinely happy life. In the first apodeixis, Plato argues that the tyrannical soul is marked by fragmentation and disintegration, producing pervasive negative affect—grief, paranoia, regret—and depriving the person of inner freedom and autonomy. The second, and especially the third, apodeixisadvance a more radical thesis: that the tyrant’s pleasures are qualitatively inferior to the fully integrated, fully actualized agent. As Socrates puts it (587b9–10), “the tyrant will inevitably live most unpleasantly (ἀηδέστατα) and the king most pleasantly (ἥδιστα).” Yet this proposal has received strikingly little sustained analysis in the literature. In this paper, I offer a detailed and original interpretation of the claim and elucidate how it contributes to the Republic’s overarching argument. Toward the end of the third apodeixis, Socrates describes tyrannical pleasures as “untrue,” “spurious,” a “fake” or “simulacrum” of the real thing—“three times removed from true pleasure”—and comparable to a two-dimensional “plane figure” rather than a three-dimensional “solid figure.” Earlier, he had compared such pleasures to “trompe l’oeil paintings.” Tyrannical pleasures are inferior, I argue, because they are false or deceptive (pseudēs). The idea here, I suggest, is that these deceptive pleasureslack depth: they present an attractive phenomenal surface—at least from the blurry perspective of the tyrant—but fail to correspond appropriately to deeper, real features of the world. I consider several ways of fleshing out this notion of hedonic depth. Drawing on a stretch of argumentation developed earlier in the third apodeixis (583b1 – 585a7), I then suggest that the tyrant’s so-called pleasuresamount to nothing more than temporary relief from the pain his psychic disorder generates. They are not intrinsic or substantial pleasures at all, but fakes masquerading as their genuine counterparts. Tragically, the tyrant is in no position to recognize the impoverished quality of his affective life. He takes himself to be well of, hedonically speaking, but he is not. As the limiting case of psychological fragmentation, he suffers from two failures of rationality that explain why he is a stranger to himself when it comes to his pleasures. First, his conception of what counts as pleasure has progressively narrowed: due to a loss of discriminative capacity, he is no longer able to access what is genuinely rewarding or satisfying. Second, because his personality has been hijacked by the lowest part of the psyche, the power of logismos—the capacity to detect and reject false or misleading appearances—can no longer perform its proper function. This reading neatly explains why Plato calls the third apodeixis the “strongest and most decisive (μέγιστόν τε καὶ κυριώτατον, 583b6–7)” response to Thrasymachus’s challenge. If the tyrannical personality is deeply mistaken about his own hedonic experiences, then the hedonic basis for Thrasymachus’s flirtations with tyranny collapses: what he takes to be the most pleasant life is, in truth, less than fully pleasant.

• Zoonen, Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van (2026). Interview dagblad Trouw about meaning and existential issues in psychotherapy. [Journal]. Trouw . Full text in Research Archive
• Zoonen, Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van (2026). Savoring and Sifting. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Platonic reflections on pleasure and flourishing

• Zoonen, Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van (2025). When Feeling Good Goes Wrong: Platonic Insights Into Pleasure and Flourishing. Full text in Research Archive
• Zoonen, Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van (2025). Plate warned that some pleasures separate us from reality. Aeon. doi: https:/psyche.co/ideas/plato-warned-that-some-pleasures-separate-us-from-reality. Full text in Research Archive
• Zoonen, Derk Hilbrand Cornelis van (2025). Taught Summer School "Meaningful Leadership for a Better World" (Utrecht University). doi: https:/utrechtsummerschool.nl/courses/social-sciences/meaningful-leadership-for-a-better-world. Full text in Research Archive

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