<b>Philebus by Plato</b>&nbsp;(/f?'li?b?s/; occasionally given as&nbsp;<i><b>Philebos</b></i>;&nbsp;Greek:&nbsp;&Phi;?&lambda;&eta;&beta;&omicron;&sigmaf;) is a&nbsp;Socratic dialogue&nbsp;written in the 4th century BC by&nbsp;Plato. Besides&nbsp;Socrates&nbsp;(the main speaker) the other interlocutors are Philebus and Protarchus.<br /><br />Philebus, who advocates the life of physical pleasure (hedonism), hardly participates, and his position is instead defended by Protarchus, who learnt argumentation from&nbsp;Sophists. Socrates proposes there are&nbsp;<i>higher pleasures</i>&nbsp;(such as those of the mind) as well as lower ones, and asks if the best life isn&#39;t one that optimally mixes both.<br /><br />Manuscripts of the work give it the subtitle &quot;<i>peri hedones, ethikos</i>&quot; (&quot;ethics/moral concerning pleasure&quot;) implying that its topic is &quot;concerning pleasure&quot; and it is a work on&nbsp;ethics&nbsp;&mdash; that is, the question of what way of life is best. However &quot;there are large parts in the dialogue that deal with&nbsp;dialectics&nbsp;and&nbsp;ontology&nbsp;but have nothing to do with pleasure and ethics, or if so, only indirectly&quot;.