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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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67Against emotional modularityIn Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet (eds.), The modularity of emotions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 29-50. 2008.
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47Against 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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18What 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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45The sociology of sociobiologyInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 4 (3). 1990.Abstract This paper turns the tables on the criticisms of sociobiology that stem from a sociological perspective; many of those criticisms lack cogency and coherence in such measure as to demand, in their turn, a psycho?sociological explanation rather than a rational justification. This thesis, after a brief exposition of the main ideas of sociobiology, is argued in terms of four of the most prominent complaints made against it. Far from embodying tired prejudices about the psychological and soc…Read more
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33The Natural Shiftiness of Natural KindsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (4): 561-580. 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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2The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics (review)Mind 113 (449): 198-201. 2004.
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43Seizing the Hedgehog by the Tail: Taylor on the Self and AgencyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (3): 421-432. 1988.For those of us who are sympathetic to the research program of cognitive science, it is especially useful to face the deepest and sharpest critic of that program. Charles Taylor, who defines himself as a ‘hedgehog’ whose ‘single rather tightly related agenda’ fits into a very ancient and rather elusive debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism, may well be that critic. My ambition in this paper is to distill Taylor’s central objection to the cognitive science approach to agency and the self …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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17Rational analysis: Too rational for comfort?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3): 492-492. 1991.
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54Prcis of “why think?” Evolution and the rational mindAmerican Journal of Bioethics 8 (5). 2008.This Article does not have an abstract
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14Paradoxical 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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41Perversion 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
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219Moral emotionsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 4 (2): 109-126. 2001.Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions…Read more
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43Kinds of kinds: Individuality and biological speciesInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3 (2). 1989.
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14Introspection as the Rosetta stone: Millstone or fifth wheel?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (3): 428-429. 1982.
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22Individualism 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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66Is art an adaptation? Prospects for an evolutionary perspective on beautyJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2). 2004.
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152I_— _Ronald de SousaAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 247-263. 2002.Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions; belief-like stat…Read more
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35Comment: Language and Dimensionality in Appraisal TheoryEmotion Review 5 (2): 171-175. 2013.The proliferation of dimensions of appraisal is both welcome and worrying. The preoccupation with sorting out causes may be somewhat otiose. And the ubiquity of emotions in levels of processing raises intriguing problems about the role of language in identifying and triggering emotions and appraisals
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61Existentialism 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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224I_— _Ronald de SousaAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 247-263. 2002.The word "truth" retains, in common use, traces of origins that link it to trust, troth, and truce, connoting ideas of fidelity, loyalty, and authenticity. The word has become, in contemporary philosophy, encased in a web of technicalities, but we know that a true image is a faithful portrait; a true friend a loyal one. In a novel or a poem, too, we have a feel for what is emotionally true, though we are not concerned with the actuality of events and characters depicted. To have emotions is to c…Read more
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University of Toronto, St. George CampusDepartment of Philosophy
Institute for the History and Philosophy of ScienceRetired faculty
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Philosophy, Misc |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
Philosophy, Misc |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Emotions |