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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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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.
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57Bashing the Enlightenment: A Discussion of Charles Taylor's Sources of the SelfDialogue 33 (1): 109. 1994.This is a Big Book from one of Canada's preeminent philosophers. It aims at nothing less than to define what characterizes modernity, and then to tell us what is wrong with it. Like many a Big Book, it is predictably full of interesting things, and equally predictably disappointing, not to say feeble, in some of the central theses for which it argues. But then what more, in philosophy, can we really expect? It's what we tell our students: you don't have to be right, and you don't have to make me…Read more
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17Paradoxical Emotion: On sui generis Emotional IrrationalityIn Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of will and practical irrationality, Oxford University Press. 2003.Weakness of will violates practical rationality; but may also be viewed as an epistemic failing. Conflicts between strategic and epistemic rationality suggest that we need a superordinate standard to arbitrate between them. Contends that such a standard is to be found at the axiological level, apprehended by emotions. Axiological rationality is sui generis, reducible to neither the strategic nor the epistemic. But, emotions are themselves capable of raising paradoxes and antinomies, particularly…Read more
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2Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, Love Online: Emotions on the Internet Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 24 (5): 311-313. 2004.