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34Why think?: evolution and the rational mindOxford University Press. 2007.Introduction -- Function and destiny -- What's the good of thinking? -- Rationality, individual and collective -- Irrationality.
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5Style, Individuality, and Will: Some Naive Reflections on NietzscheInternational Studies in Philosophy 28 (3): 121-132. 1996.
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1Valuing Emotions (review)Dialogue 38 (1): 219-220. 1999.This book addresses both aspects of its punning title: it pleads with us to value emotions as indispensable to meaningful human life, and argues that emotions play an active role in the determination of value. The first issue is tackled with gusto. Indeed, as if to illustrate the role of the emotions in intellectual life, the tone is somewhat aggrieved, as if all but a few eccentrics in the philosophical establishment were expected to demur. Perhaps all books must pretend that their central thes…Read more
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73Biological IndividualityCroatian Journal of Philosophy 5 (2): 195-218. 2005.The question What is an individual? goes back beyond Aristotle’s discussion of substance to the Ionians’ preoccupation with the paradox of change -- the fact that if anything changes it must stay the same. Mere reflection on this fact and the common-sense notion of a countable thing yields a concept of a “minimal individual”, which is particular (a logical matter) specific (a taxonomic matter), and unique (an evaluative empirical matter). Individuals occupy space, and therefore might be dislodge…Read more
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73The Natural Shiftiness of Natural KindsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (4). 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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26Divided 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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96Rational animals: What the bravest lion won't riskCroatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (12): 365-386. 2004.I begin with a rather unpromising dispute that Nozick once had with Ian Hacking in the pages of the London Review of Books, in which both vied with one another in their enthusiasm to repudiate the thesis that some human people or peoples are closer than others to animality. I shall attempt to show that one can build, on the basis of Nozick’s discussion of rationality, a defense of the view that the capacity tor language places human rationality out of reach of a comparison with animals. The diff…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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17Review of Laurence Thomas: Living morally: a psychology of moral character (review)Ethics 101 (1): 185-187. 1990.
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27The politics of mental illnessInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 15 (1-4): 187-202. 1972.
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151Truth, 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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26Les émotions contemplatives et l’objectivité des valeursPhilosophiques 45 (2): 499-505. 2018.Ronald de Sousa
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49Is Contempt Redeemable?Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 1 (1): 23-43. 2019.In this essay, I will focus on the two main objections that have been adduced against the moral acceptability of contempt: the fact that it embraces a whole person and not merely some deed or aspect of a person’s character, and the way that when addressed to a person in this way, it amounts to a denial of the very personhood of its target.
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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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57Bashing 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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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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67Against emotional modularityIn Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet (eds.), The modularity of emotions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 29-50. 2008.
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19What 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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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 |