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67Against emotional modularityIn Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet (eds.), The modularity of emotions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 29-50. 2008.
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34The Natural Shiftiness of Natural KindsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (4): 561-580. 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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40Emotional TruthOxford University Press USA. 2011.The word "truth" retains, in common use, traces of origins that link it to trust, truth, and truce, connoting ideas of fidelity, loyalty, and authenticity. The word has become, in contemporary philosophy, encased in a web of technicalities, but we know that a true image is a faithful portrait; a true friend a loyal one. In a novel or a poem, too, we have a feel for what is emotionally true, though we are not concerned with the actuality of events and characters depicted. To have emotions is to c…Read more
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25Seizing the Hedgehog by the Tail: Taylor on the Self and AgencyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (3): 421-432. 1988.For those of us who are sympathetic to the research program of cognitive science, it is especially useful to face the deepest and sharpest critic of that program. Charles Taylor, who defines himself as a ‘hedgehog’ whose ‘single rather tightly related agenda’ fits into a very ancient and rather elusive debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism, may well be that critic. My ambition in this paper is to distill Taylor’s central objection to the cognitive science approach to agency and the self …Read more
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Comment on Research Outcome of Philosophy of Emotions in Recent Ten YearsPhilosophy and Culture 32 (10): 147-156. 2005.
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Rational homunculiIn Amélie Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons, University of California Press. 1976.
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73Biological IndividualityCroatian Journal of Philosophy 5 (2): 195-218. 2005.The question What is an individual? goes back beyond Aristotle’s discussion of substance to the Ionians’ preoccupation with the paradox of change -- the fact that if anything changes it must stay the same. Mere reflection on this fact and the common-sense notion of a countable thing yields a concept of a “minimal individual”, which is particular (a logical matter) specific (a taxonomic matter), and unique (an evaluative empirical matter). Individuals occupy space, and therefore might be dislodge…Read more
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6What 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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22Individualism and Local ControlCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 20 (sup1): 185-205. 1994.In both biology and psychology, the notion of an individual is indispensable yet puzzling. It has played a variety of roles in diverse contexts, ranging from philosophical problems of personal identity to scientific questions about the immunological mechanisms for telling ‘self’ from ‘non-self.’ There are notorious cases in which the question of individuality is difficult to settle — ant hill, slime mold, or beehive, for instance. Yet the notion of an individual organism, both dependent on and i…Read more
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61Existentialism as BiologyEmotion Review 2 (1): 76-83. 2010.Existentialism is compatible with a broadly biological vision of who we are. This thesis is grounded in an analysis of “concrete” or “individual” possibility, which differs from standard conceptions of possibility in that it allows for possibilities to come into being or disappear through time. Concrete possibilities are introduced both in individual life and by major transitions in evolution. In particular, the advent of ultrasociality and of language has enabled human goals to be formulated in…Read more
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72Review: The importance of being understood: Folk psychology as ethics (review)Mind 113 (449): 198-201. 2004.
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47Against Emotional ModularityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (sup1): 29-50. 2006.How many emotions are there? Should we accept as overwhelming the evidence in favour of regarding emotions as emanating from a relatively small number of modules evolved efficiently to serve us in common life situations? Or can emotions, like colour, be organized in a space of two, three, or more dimensions defining a vast number of discriminable emotions, arranged on a continuum, on the model of the colour cone?There is some evidence that certain emotions are specialized to facilitate certain r…Read more
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6Or Descriptive Task?In Peter Danielson (ed.), Modeling rationality, morality, and evolution, Oxford University Press. pp. 119. 1998.
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5The Rationality of EmotionPhilosophy and Culture 32 (10): 35-66. 1987.How should we understand the emotional rationality? This first part will explore two models of cognition and analogy strategies, test their intuition about the emotional desire. I distinguish between subjective and objective desire, then presents with a feeling from the "paradigm of drama" export semantics, here our emotional repertoire is acquired all the learned, and our emotions in the form of an object is fixed. It is pretty well in line with the general principles of rationality, especially…Read more
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13Evolution, Thinking, and RationalityIn Michael Ruse (ed.), Philosophy After Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Princeton University Press. pp. 289-300. 2009.
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151Truth, Authenticity, and RationalityDialectica 61 (3): 323-345. 2007.Emotions are Janus‐faced. They tell us something about the world, and they tell us something about ourselves. This suggests that we might speak of a truth, or perhaps two kinds of truths of emotions, one of which is about self and the other about conditions in the world. On some views, the latter comes by means of the former. Insofar as emotions manifest our inner life, however, we are more inclined to speak of authenticity rather than truth. What is the difference? We need to distinguish the cr…Read more
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Desire and timeIn Joel Marks (ed.), The Ways of Desire: New Essays in Philosophical Psychology on the Concept of Wanting, Precedent. 1986.
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30Review of David Pugmire, Sound Sentiments: Integrity in the Emotions (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (3). 2006.
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27The politics of mental illnessInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 15 (1-4): 187-202. 1972.