Ronald De Sousa

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 thesis is slightly scandalous, but by page 105, when the authors still insist that "the cognitive usefulness and importance of emotions have often not even been noticed," one begins to feel they protest too much.

Contemporary philosophers have paid increasing attention to the empirical research on emotions that has blossomed in many areas of the social sciences. In this paper, I first sketch the common roots of science and philosophy in Ancient Greek thought. I illustrate the way that specific empirical sciences can be regarded as branching out from a central trunk of philosophical speculation. On the basis of seven informal characterizations of what is distinctive about philosophical thinking, I then draw attention to the fact that scientific progress frequently requires one to make adjustments to the way its basic terms are conceptualized, and thus cannot avoid philosophical thought. The character of emotions requires attention from many disciplines, and the links among those disciplines inevitably require a broader philosophical perspective to be understood. Thus, emotion science, and indeed all of science, is inextricably committed to philosophical assumptions that demand scrutiny.

In a colloquium on “lyric philosophy,” this contribution records the efforts of an analytic philosopher to come to grips with questions that Jan Zwicky, who is both a fine poet and a subtle philosopher, has raised about anglophone analytic philosophy. The essay situates Zwicky between the analytic and Continental traditions in philosophy: like the best analytic philosophers, it is argued, she is enamored of clarity, but, like what is best in the Continental tradition, she demands of philosophy a deeper sense of meaning than philosophical analysts tend to do. It is from this unusual position that Zwicky is said to challenge the dogmas of the analytic tradition. Notable among those treated in this article are the belief that attributing literal meaning to anything but linguistic items is futile, belief in the possibility of distinguishing literal from metaphorical meaning, belief in the supremacy of argument over aphorisms, and belief in the importance of the “reductionist” program, which seeks to understand wholes in terms of their parts.

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 other reliable testimony, by the sole description: ‘Author of the Iliad and the Odyssey’. ‘Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey’ is therefore known a priori, hence necessarily true. There could not be another author of that name and claim to fame.In lectures delivered at Princeton in the Winter of 1970, Saul Kripke offered a lucid alternative to such theories.

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 the Emotivists — have appeared to reverse this hierarchy.” But those philosophers who refuse to join in the general denigration of emotion as irrational usually share the presupposition that the role of rationality is limited to the calculation of means. In so far as emotions are concerned with the determination of ends, they remain, on this view, beyond the pale of rationality. Modern decision theorists have worked out schemes to assess the rationality of desires, as well as actions, against the background of beliefs and other desires.1 But these schemes leave no room at all for emotions, except, by implication, as disrupters of the rational process.

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 conditions for the consistent ascription of belief--as opposed to rational belief. If there are no such conditions, all belief ascriptions must be treated as atomic: which is implausible. If there are some, they must be settled on before an account of consistency can be complete. The reason is simple: it is that we have beliefs about our own beliefs. A set of first order beliefs is consistent if they can all be true together; but it is a lesson of Moore's paradox that consistency of second-order beliefs requires additional constraints. If someone both believes that p and that he does not believe that p, the propositions he believes might all be true together, yet he is inconsistent. And the characterization of second order consistency will remain incomplete, so long as nothing is said about the consistency of first order belief ascriptions. Suppose someone says and believes: "I am inconsistent: I believe both p and ~p." This is "indefensible": but is it insight, or nonsense? Breast-beating of this sort is guaranteed success: something he believes is bound to be false. But that remains diagnostically frustrating: is he inconsistent because what he said is true, or on the contrary because it is inconsistent?

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 the individual, social, moral, or even species levels. I”ll adduce three considerations in support of that pessimistic view: The fallacy of adaptive fixation, the moral randomness of group selection, and the lack of fit between “natural norms” set up by evolution and those moral and social norms we would like philosophy to justify.

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 comprendre les avantages de la pensée réfléchie, il faut changer nos présupposés relatifs à la rationalité et reconnaître la multiplicité de ses dimensions. La rationalité ne nous sert pas seulement à avoir des croyances vraies et à agir de manière efficace dans un environnement changeant. Elle nous aide à gérer nos plaisirs et nos peines dans le temps et nous permet d'envisager des situations qui n'existent pas. En général, le statut de la rationalité comme ensemble de capacités ayant évolué dans le cours de l'histoire naturelle de notre espèce, passant des tropismes aux désirs et de la détection à la représentation, n'a pas été pris suffisamment au sérieux. Suivre ce processus d'évolution de la rationalité permet de comprendre comment elle est devenue une norme, mais aussi pourquoi il lui arrive aussi souvent d'échouer. Ronald de Sousa a profondément modifié nos façons de concevoir les émotions. Avec Évolution et rationalité, il pourrait avoir une influence aussi décisive sur nos façons de concevoir la rationalité.