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73The Natural Shiftiness of Natural KindsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (4). 1984.The Philosophical search for Natural Kinds is motivated by the hope of finding ontological categories that are independent of our interests. Other requirements, of varying importance, are commonly made of kinds that claim to be natural. But no such categories are to be found. Virtually any kind can be termed 'natural' relative to some set of interests and epistemic priorities. Science determines those priorities at any particular stage of its progress, and what kinds are most 'natural' in that s…Read more
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26Les émotions contemplatives et l’objectivité des valeursPhilosophiques 45 (2): 499-505. 2018.Ronald de Sousa
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33"Emotion" by William Lyons (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1): 142-149. 1984.
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17L'erotismeIn Julien A. Deonna & Emma Tieffenbach (eds.), Petit Traité des Valeurs, Edition D’ithaque. pp. 132-139. 2018.
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22
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Modelos conexionistas: consecuencias para la ciencia cognitivaAnálisis Filosófico 9 (2): 183. 1989.
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46Kripke on Naming and NecessityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (3): 447-464. 1974.Some wag reported the following story: Scholars have recently established that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not, after all, written by Homer. They were actually written by another author, of the same name.The majority of current theories of naming and reference, including ones as divergent in other respects as those of Russell and Searle, would rule this story impossible. They would do so on roughly these grounds: the sense and reference of the name ‘Homer’ is determined, given the absence of …Read more
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12What Can’t We Do with Economics?Journal of Philosophical Research 22 197-209. 1997.Ainslie’s Picoeconomics presents an ingenious theory, based on a remarkably simple basic law about the rate of discounting the value of future prospects, which explains a vast number of psychological phenomena. Hyperbolic discount rates result in changes in the ranking of interests as they get closer in time. Thus quasi-homuncular “interests” situated at different times compete within the person. In this paper I first defend the generality of scope of Ainslie’s model, which ranges over several p…Read more
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168Twelve varieties of subjectivityIn M. Larrazabal & P. Miranda (eds.), Twelve Varieties of Subjectivity: Dividing in Hopes of Conquest, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2002.
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135The rationality of emotionsDialogue 18 (1): 41-63. 1979.Ira Brevis furor, said the Latins: anger is a brief bout of madness. There is a long tradition that views all emotions as threats to rationality. The crime passionnel belongs to that tradition: in law it is a kind of “brief-insanity defence.” We still say that “passion blinds us;” and in common parlance to be philosophical about life's trials is to be decently unemotional about them. Indeed many philosophers have espoused this view, demanding that Reason conquer Passion. Others — from Hume to th…Read more
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48How to Give a Piece of Your Mind: Or, the Logic of Belief and AssentReview of Metaphysics 25 (1). 1971.Nothing seems to follow strictly from 'X believes that p'. But if we reinterpret it to mean: 'X can consistently be described as consistently believing p'--which roughly renders, I think, Hintikka's notion of "defensibility"--we can get on with the subject, freed from the inhibitions of descriptive adequacy. But defensibility is neither necessary nor sufficient for truth: it tells us little, therefore, about the concept of belief on which it is based. It cannot, in particular, specify necessary …Read more
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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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124Review of Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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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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C. G. PRADO, "Making Believe: Philosophical Reflections on Fiction" (review)Dialogue 26 (3): 595. 1987.
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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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Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, Love Online: Emotions on the Internet (review)Philosophy in Review 24 311-313. 2004.