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44Perversion and DeathThe Monist 86 (1): 90-114. 2003.Philosophers like to warn against fools’ paradises: not places where fools can safely cavort, but rather conditions in which fools mistakenly think themselves happy. The warning presupposes that real and merely apparent happiness can be told apart. Of course that claim is not altogether disinterested, since philosophers have a professional investment in the distinction. Thus they have endorsed this or that attitude to death, holding up promises of ultimate comfort or threats of excruciating regr…Read more
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46The sociology of sociobiologyInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 4 (3). 1990.Abstract This paper turns the tables on the criticisms of sociobiology that stem from a sociological perspective; many of those criticisms lack cogency and coherence in such measure as to demand, in their turn, a psycho?sociological explanation rather than a rational justification. This thesis, after a brief exposition of the main ideas of sociobiology, is argued in terms of four of the most prominent complaints made against it. Far from embodying tired prejudices about the psychological and soc…Read more
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45Kinds of kinds: Individuality and biological speciesInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3 (2). 1989.
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49Fringe consciousness and the multifariousness of emotionsPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 8. 2002.Mangan draws his inspiration from James's account of fringe consciousness, but differs from James in focusing on something non-sensory, necessarily fuzzy, though not necessarily fleeting. A long tradition in philosophy has deemed non-sensory elements of consciousness to be indispensable to thought. But those, chiefly conceptual, forms of non-sensory fringe are not Mangan's focus. What then is Mangan talking about? This commentary envisages a number of possible answers, and tentatively concludes …Read more
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124Review of Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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18Does the eye know calculus? The threshold of representation in classical and connectionist modelsInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 5 (2). 1991.Abstract The notion of representation lies at the crossroads of questions about the nature of belief and knowledge, meaning, and intentionality. But there is some hope that it might be simpler than all those. If we could understand it clearly, it might then help to explicate those more difficult notions. In this paper, my central aim is to find a principled criterion, along lines that make biological sense, for deciding just when it becomes theoretically plausible to ascribe to some process or s…Read more
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C. G. PRADO, "Making Believe: Philosophical Reflections on Fiction" (review)Dialogue 26 (3): 595. 1987.
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54Prcis of “why think?” Evolution and the rational mindAmerican Journal of Bioethics 8 (5). 2008.This Article does not have an abstract
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Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, Love Online: Emotions on the Internet (review)Philosophy in Review 24 311-313. 2004.
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223Moral emotionsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 4 (2): 109-126. 2001.Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions…Read more
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71The mind's Bermuda Triangle: philosophy of emotions and empirical scienceIn Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (review)Philosophy in Review 11 138-139. 1991.
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13Evolution et rationalitéPresses universitaires de France. 2004.À quoi bon la pensée? Pour de nombreux chercheurs, inspirés par les théories évolutionnistes, la pensée réfléchie est utile à notre espèce. Elle lui confère des avantages importants et contribue à son succès reproductif. Pourtant ses avantages ne sont pas si évidents. La pensée ne figure ni dans les mécanismes de l'évolution qui ont façonné la vie, ni parmi les procédés dont se servent la plupart des organismes pour s'y maintenir. Dans Évolution et rationalité, Ronald de Sousa montre que, pour c…Read more
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309Restoring emotion's bad rep: the moral randomness of normsEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 2 (1): 29-47. 2006.Despite the fact that common sense taxes emotions with irrationality, philosophers have, by and large, celebrated their functionality. They are credited with motivating, steadying, shaping or harmonizing our dispositions to act, and with policing norms of social behaviour. It's time to restore emotion's bad rep. To this end, I shall argue that we should expect that some of the “norms” enforced by emotions will be unevenly distributed among the members of our species, and may be dysfunctional at …Read more
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Comments on Barbara S. Stengel: Thinking about Thinking: Wilfred Sellars' Theory on InductionPhilosophy of Education: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society 43 259-262. 1987.
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11Paradoxical emotionsIn Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of will and practical irrationality, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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1Valuing Emotions (review)Dialogue 38 (1): 219-220. 1999.This book addresses both aspects of its punning title: it pleads with us to value emotions as indispensable to meaningful human life, and argues that emotions play an active role in the determination of value. The first issue is tackled with gusto. Indeed, as if to illustrate the role of the emotions in intellectual life, the tone is somewhat aggrieved, as if all but a few eccentrics in the philosophical establishment were expected to demur. Perhaps all books must pretend that their central thes…Read more
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44Love: A Very Short IntroductionOxford University Press. 2015.Do we love someone for their virtue, their beauty, or their moral or other qualities? Are love's characteristic desires altruistic or selfish? Are there duties of love? What do the sciences tell us about love? In this Very Short Introduction, Ronald de Sousa explores the different kinds of love, from affections to romantic love.
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66Is art an adaptation? Prospects for an evolutionary perspective on beautyJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2). 2004.
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4Epistemic FeelingsMind and Matter 7 (2): 139-161. 2009.Somewhere along the course of evolution, and at some time in any one of us on the way from zygote to adult, some forms of detection became beliefs, and some tropisms turned into deliberate desires. Two transitions are involved: from functional responses to intentional ones, and from non-conscious processes to conscious ones that presuppose language and are powered by neocortical re- sources. Unconscious and functional mental processes remain and constitute an 'intuitive' system that collaborates…Read more
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37Comment: Language and Dimensionality in Appraisal TheoryEmotion Review 5 (2): 171-175. 2013.The proliferation of dimensions of appraisal is both welcome and worrying. The preoccupation with sorting out causes may be somewhat otiose. And the ubiquity of emotions in levels of processing raises intriguing problems about the role of language in identifying and triggering emotions and appraisals