•  12
    Emotions, Reasons, and Autonomy
    In Andrea Veltman & Mark Piper (eds.), Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 163-180. 2014.
    Personal autonomy is often taken to consist in self-government or self-determination. Personal autonomy thus seems to require self-control. However, there is reason to think that autonomy is compatible with the absence of self-control. Akratic action, i.e., action performed against the agent’s better judgement, can be free. And it is also plausible to think that free actions require autonomy. It is only when you determine what you do yourself that you act freely. It follows that akratic actions …Read more
  •  42
    Review: Emotion and Value. Edited by Sabine Roeser and Cain Todd (review)
    Analysis 77 (3): 675-678. 2017.
    © The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] is widely accepted that emotions have something to do with values. The major task of contemporary philosophy of emotion is to say precisely what that something is. How exactly are emotions related to evaluative properties? Unsurprisingly, there are various ways they may be related. First, emotions might themselves be bearers …Read more
  •  69
    Neo-Sentimentalism's Prospects
    In Carla Bagnoli (ed.), Morality and the Emotions, Oxford University Press. pp. 117. 2011.
    Neo-sentimentalism is the view that to judge that something has an evaluative property is to judge that some affective or emotional response is appropriate with respect to it. The difficulty in assessing neo-sentimentalism is that it allows for radically different versions. My aim is to spell out what I take to be its most plausible version. I distinguish between a normative version, which takes the concept of appropriateness to be normative, and a descriptive version, which claims that appropri…Read more
  •  35
    What’s the relation between values and reasons for action ? According to some all reasons are grounded in values. If one adds to this the thought that values themselves depend on non-evaluative or factual features of things, one gets what one can call after Jonathan Dancy the “layer-cake conception”. According to others, we should replace the layer-cake picture by what he calls the “buck-passing account of values” (Scanlon 1998). The main characteristic of this conception is that it denies that …Read more
  •  41
    La normativité des concepts évaluatifs
    Philosophiques 38 (1): 157-176. 2011.
    On admet en général qu’il y a deux sortes de concepts normatifs : les concepts évaluatifs, comme bon, et les concepts déontiques, comme devoir. La question que soulève cette distinction est celle de savoir comment il est possible d’affirmer que les concepts évaluatifs sont normatifs. En effet, comme les concepts déontiques semblent constituer le coeur du domaine normatif, plus le fossé entre les deux sortes de concepts est grand, moins il paraîtra plausible d’affirmer que les concepts évaluatifs…Read more
  •  16
    Review of "Balance and Refinement" (review)
    Mind 107. 1998.
    Review of Michael R. DePaul's "Balance and Refinement"
  •  156
    Emotion, motivation and action: The case of fear
    In Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, Oxford University Press. pp. 325-45. 2009.
    Consider a typical fear episode. You are strolling down a lonely mountain lane when suddenly a huge wolf leaps towards you. A number of different interconnected elements are involved in the fear you experience. First, there is the visual and auditory perception of the wild animal and its movements. In addition, it is likely that given what you see, you may implicitly and inarticulately appraise the situation as acutely threatening. Then, there are a number of physiological changes, involving a v…Read more
  • Faiblesse de la volonté et autonomie
    In René Lefebvre & Alonso Tordesillas (eds.), Faiblesse de la volonté et maîtrise de soi, Presses Universitaires De Rennes. pp. 191-203. 2009.
    Autonomy seems to require self-control. It also seems that acratic action results from a lack of self-control. Such actions would thus lack autonomy. However, there are reasons to think that acratic actions can be free. Since it is plausible to think that free actions necessarily are autonomous, one would have to conclude that acratic actions are autonomous. My aim is to evaluate the main solutions to this paradox.
  • Constructivism
    In David Sander & Klaus Scherer (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, Oxford University Press. 2009.
    Encyclopedia entry for Constructivism.
  •  103
    This paper replies to an argument due to Greenspan (1980) and to Morton (2002) against the view that emotions are perceptions of values. The argument holds that this view cannot make room for ambivalent emotions both of which are appropriate, such as when it is appropriate to feel fear and attraction towards something. This would make for a contradiction, for appropriate emotions are supposed to present things as they are. The problem, I argue, is that this line of thoughts forgets that things c…Read more