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20Individualism 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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59Existentialism 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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44Against 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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5Or Descriptive Task?In Peter Danielson (ed.), Modeling Rationality, Morality, and Evolution, Oxford University Press. pp. 119. 1998.
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4The 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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148Truth, 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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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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30Review of David Pugmire, Sound Sentiments: Integrity in the Emotions (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (3). 2006.
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25The politics of mental illnessInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 15 (1-4): 187-202. 1972.
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56Bashing 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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13Paradoxical 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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8What 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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2Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, Love Online: Emotions on the Internet Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 24 (5): 311-313. 2004.
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2The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics (review)Mind 113 (449): 198-201. 2004.
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13Introspection as the Rosetta stone: Millstone or fifth wheel?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (3): 428-429. 1982.
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1Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 11 (2): 138-139. 1991.
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40Emotion and self-deceptionIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Amelie O. Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. 1988.
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49Critical Notice of Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotions (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 9 (2): 335-350. 1979.
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40Perversion 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