This project aims to shed new light on the intertwining of desire, pleasure, and value. Desires indeed appear to be the driving force behind most, if not all, of our intentional actions. For this reason, they have long been thought to be reducible to motivations, that is, to dispositions to act. However, a growing number of scholars have pointed out the limitations of this conventional viewpoint. Notably, it fails to account for non-motivating desires, such as the desire that it be a nice day, which does not trigger action because its fulfilment does not hinge on the desiring individual. But how is desire to be understood philosophically, if not in terms of its capacity to initiate action? My first aim in this project is to address this question by introducing the “hedonic improvement” approach, according to which a desire is fundamentally a “promise of pleasure”: to desire is to anticipate the pleasure that the realization of what is desired will yield.
My second aim is to emphasize that this approach opens up new insights into our value experiences: I thus argue that desiring a particular event, like the end of a drought, constitutes an experience of its “goodness”. The project unfolds in three eight-month phases. The first phase examines the premises of the “hedonic improvement” conception of desire in the works of Christian von Ehrenfels (a member of the "Brentano School"), which, despite their profundity, have remained largely overlooked. The second phase aims at enhancing von Ehrenfels’s proposal to make the “hedonic improvement” conception a fully robust theory of desire, in particular by exploring comprehensively the nature of the hedonic anticipation it involves. Finally, the third part of the project demonstrates how this theory provides the groundwork for “axiological conativism”, namely the claim that values are experienced in desires.