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It is well-known that modern strands of psychotherapy\u2014like  Beck\u2019s cognitive-behavioural therapy or Ellis\u2019 rational emotive  therapy\u2014have been influenced by the Stoics and their take on the nature  of emotions. It is not the world which causes our emotional upheaval, the Stoics and therapists propose, but how we construe the world through our mediating beliefs.  What  is rarely appreciated, though, is the fact that a precursor of this  cognitivist theory of human emotion can already be found in Plato\u2019s Philebus. Here Socrates offers a famous yet puzzling argument (between 36c3 and  41a4) according to which our anticipatory pleasures can be false (pseud\xeas). Most recent literature has focused on the source of these pleasures\u2019 alleged falsity: some scholars maintain that they  are false because they do not latch onto the world (e.g. D. Frede),  others think they are false because there is something evaluatively or  morally wrong with them (e.g. V. Harte). In this paper I want to  sidestep this long-standing debate and suggest that we can (and should)  excavate a cognitivist model of pleasure from this puzzling stretch of  text, as it were running in the background of the argument and making it  possible in the first place. On this model, I suggest, any human pathos centrally involves a doxa that  a state of affairs obtains and that this state of affairs is, somehow,  positively evaluatively charged for the person undergoing the affective  experience. Having this cognitivist model in view, we can examine how it  sheds light on the framing question of the Philebus\u2014what makes someone\u2019s life go best?\u2014and explore its promising therapeutic potential.