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25The politics of mental illnessInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 15 (1-4): 187-202. 1972.
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25Emotional Knowledge and the Emotional A Priori: Comments on Rick A. Furtak's Knowing EmotionsJournal of Philosophy of Emotion 1 (1): 106-112. 2019.In the following comments, I will raise no major objection to Furtak’s main line of argument. My questions are essentially requests for clarification. They focus on three key expressions: first, the “unified” character of emotional agitation and intentionality; second, the unique “mode of cognition” claimed for emotions; and third, the “emotional a priori.”
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24Les émotions contemplatives et l’objectivité des valeursPhilosophiques 45 (2): 499-505. 2018.Ronald de Sousa
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24Divided Minds and Successive Selves (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (2): 492-495. 2000.This book's dedication reads “to the man I married.” The phrase is a nice incitement to reflect on the book's topic: is the man she married identical with her present husband? Does the dedication imply a subtle reproach? a note of resignation before the inevitable fact that the man I married cannot be the one I'm married to? By the end of her book, Radden concludes that we can't get away from “normative demands of individuality” that remain anchored to common sense. The challenge she takes up is…Read more
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22Who Needs Values When We Have Valuing? Comments on Jean Moritz Müller, The World-Directedness of Emotional FeelingEmotion Review 14 (4): 257-261. 2022.Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 4, Page 257-261, October 2022. Müller argues that the perceptual or “Axiological Receptivity” model of emotions is incoherent, because it requires an emotion to apprehend and respond to its formal object at the same time. He defends a contrasting view of emotions as “Position-Takings" towards “formal objects”, aspects of an emotion's target pertinent to the subject's concerns. I first cast doubt on the cogency of Müller's attack on AR as begging questions about t…Read more
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21Individualism 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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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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17Rational analysis: Too rational for comfort?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3): 492-492. 1991.
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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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17A Third Front in PhilosophyCommon Knowledge 20 (2): 223-234. 2014.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…Read more
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17What Philosophy Contributes to Emotion SciencePhilosophies 7 (4): 87. 2022.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 dr…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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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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13Introspection as the Rosetta stone: Millstone or fifth wheel?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (3): 428-429. 1982.
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10What 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