Christine Tappolet

As common experience confirms, procrastination seems not only possible, but widespread. However, procrastination should not be taken for granted. Often, the procrastinator harms herself knowingly. It thus clearly seems that such a person lacks the self-concern that usually characterises us. After having spelled out what procrastination is, and having explored its main varieties, I consider the relation between procrastination and risk-taking. After this, I discuss the implications of this phenomenon for the debates about personal identity. The upshot, I argue, is that reductionist accounts, according to which identity is a matter of psychological continuity, are in a better position as might have been thought.

Evaluative concepts and emotions appear closely connected. According to a prominent account, this relation can be expressed by propositions of the form ‘something is admirable if and only if feeling admiration is appropriate in response to it’. The first section discusses various interpretations of such ‘Value-Emotion Equivalences’, for example the Fitting Attitude Analysis, and it offers a plausible way to read them. The main virtue of the proposed way to read them is that it is well-supported by a promising account of emotions, namely the Perceptual Theory of Emotions, which emphasises the analogies between emotions and sensory perceptual experiences. The second section considers a worry about whether concepts such as admirable are really evaluative. It is maintained that even though the arguments used to show that thick terms and concepts are not inherently evaluative can be transposed to affective concepts, these arguments can be resisted. So there is no need to abandon the intuitive claim that affective concepts are inherently evaluative.

Pour contrer le scepticisme au sujet de la connaissance des valeurs, la plupart soutiennent avec John Rawls qu’une croyance comme celle qu’une action est bonne est justifiée dans la mesure où elle appartient à un ensemble de croyances cohérent, ayant atteint un équilibre réfléchi. Christine Tappolet s’inspire des travaux de Max Scheler et d’Alexius von Meinong pour défendre une conception opposée au cohérentisme. La connaissance des valeurs est affirmée dépendre de nos émotions, ces dernières étant conçues comme des perceptions des valeurs.

C an actions caused by emotions be free and autonomous? The so-called rationalist conception of autonomy denies this. Only actions done in the light of reflexive choices can be autonomous and hence free. I argue that the rationalist conception does not make room for akratic actions, that is, free and intentional actions performed against the agent’s best judgement. I then develop an account inspired by Harry Frankfurt and David Shoemaker, according to which an action is autonomous when it is determined by the agent’s most central cares, where cares are defined in terms of emotional dispositions.

In this paper, we consider the question of whether there exists an essential relation between emotions and wellbeing. We distinguish three ways in which emotions and wellbeing might be essentially related: constitutive, causal, and epistemic. We argue that, while there is some room for holding that emotions are constitutive ingredients of an individual’s wellbeing, all the attempts to characterise the causal and epistemic relations in an essentialist way are vulnerable to some important objections. We conclude that the causal and epistemic relation between emotions and wellbeing is much less strong than is commonly thought.

Moral platonism, the claim that moral entities are both objective and prescriptive, is generally thought to be a dead end. In an attempt to defend a moderate form of moral platonism or more precisely platonism about values, I first argue that several of the many versions of this doctrine are not committed to ontological extravagances. I then discuss an important objection due to John McDowell and developed by Michael Smith, according to which moral platonism is incoherent. I argue that objectivism is compatible with the claim that certain ways of being aware of values, namely those involving emotions, are motivating.

It is generally accepted that there are two kinds of normative concepts : evaluative concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. The question that is raised by this distinction is how it is possible to claim that evaluative concepts are normative. Given that deontic concepts appear to be at the heart of normativity, the bigger the gap between evaluative and deontic concepts, the less it appears plausible to say that evaluative concepts are normative. After having presented the main differences between evaluative and deontic concepts, and shown that there is more than a superficial difference between the two kinds, the paper turns to the question of the normativity of evaluative concepts. It will become clear that, even if these concepts have different functions, there are a great many ties between evaluative concepts, on the one hand, and the concepts of ought and of reason, on the other

The author maintains that the liberal argument advanced by Dworkin et al. implies a more general moral right, one that is not restricted to people in their terminal phase. The author then discusses Velleman's claim that this argument is subject to the following incoherence: invoking the idea that death is a benefit for a person implies that the person in question is endowed with a value that death would destroy. The author shows that the apparent plausibility of this counterargument is due to a confusion between different evaluative concepts.

Emotions have long been accused of all sorts of mischief. In recent years, however, many have argued that far from constituting an obstacle to reason and morality, emotions possess important virtues. According to a plausible conception, emotions would have a crucial cognitive function: they would consist in the perceptual experience of evaluative properties. To fear a dog, for instance, would consist in having the perceptual experience of the dog as fearsome. There has been and still is a lively debate about the plausibility of such a conception. A consideration that has been neglected, however, is that certain kinds of emotions, such as hatred, spite, envy or jealousy, appear to be less plausible candidates for such a revalorisation. What such nasty emotions make clear is that by contrast with seems true of sensory perceptions, emotions can be assessed in evaluative terms. This makes for an asymmetry between emotions and sensory perceptions, which threatens the argument by analogy that supports the claim that emotions are a kind of perceptual experiences. In this paper, I plan to account for this asymmetry within the general framework of the perceptual theory of emotions.

In his book Appearances of the Good, Sergio Tenenbaum has offered an impressive new defence of a classical account of practical reason, which marks him as heir to a philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle and Kant or, more recently, to Anscombe and Davidson. This account has come under heavy attack in the past twenty years, and it would be no exaggeration to say that it is now a minority view. This is at least so if one counts the number of living philosophers who deny that strict akratic action is possible. Tenenbaum claims that, minimally, his aim is to show that what he calls after Kant “the scholastic view” still merits a place in the philosophical landscape, and in this respect, it is clear that his enterprise is a success