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LAURA SIZER, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by bloom, paul, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 70, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 394–397, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01531_2.x
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bloom, paul. How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010, 280 pp., $26.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.
Paul Bloom's How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like is an entertaining, wide‐reaching, and fast‐paced examination of the peculiar and everyday aspects of human pleasures. Aimed at general audiences, the book focuses on what science, in particular social, developmental, and evolutionary psychology, can tell us about our pleasures. Along the way, Bloom engages with philosophical ideas, enough to spark connections for knowledgeable readers, but not enough to divert from a broad and entertaining view of pleasure as a product of the peculiarities of our psychology and evolutionary history.
The main argument of the book is a defense of psychological essentialism, the claim that human beings believe that and behave as if things have invisible essences or hidden natures that make them the things that they are, and its application to understanding pleasure. Our tendency to essentialist thinking is the result of our evolutionary history and affects our thinking and behavior in ways both good and bad, apparent and hidden. In particular, he argues, this tendency plays a central role in determining what we like and why.
