•  20
    What is Distinctive of Film Emotions?
    Emotion Review 15 (4): 380-393. 2023.
    Film emotions are genuine emotions whose formation and development is affected by conflictive factors. Whereas their arousal, similar to that of real-life emotions, is disproportionately strengthened by the cinematographic medium, their subsequent course is both weakened and interrupted. Their objects, which I view as members of our personal emotional world (not in terms of their supposed fictionality, as often assumed), are also proper intentional objects of emotions: our fear is about the shar…Read more
  •  24
    Descartes’ Dog: a Clock with Passions?
    Philosophia 46 (1): 101-130. 2018.
    Although much has been written on Descartes’ thought on animals, not so much has originated in, or has taken full account of, Descartes’ views on emotions. I explore here the extent to which the latter can contribute to the debate on whether he embraced, and to which extent, the doctrine of the bête machine. I first try to show that Descartes’ views on emotions can help offer new support to the skeptical position without necessarily creating new tensions with other central aspects of his philoso…Read more
  •  20
    The Aesthetic Value of Film
    The Journal of Aesthetic Education 57 (2): 36-53. 2023.
    Abstract:I defend that the distinctive object of our aesthetic evaluation of films is the full emotional experience, taken as a unified whole, that we go through as we watch a film and that I call the viewer's film emotional life. The aesthetic value itself—the positive quality we perceive in the experience of having had a certain film emotional life—is in the significance we experience in that film emotional life insofar as it contributes to the discovery and the exploration of the viewer's hum…Read more
  •  6
    Cartesian Passions
    Journal of Philosophical Research 41 401-438. 2016.
  •  59
    Our Everyday Aesthetic Evaluations of Architecture
    British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (4): 393-412. 2019.
    I argue that our everyday evaluations of architecture are primarily evaluations of spaces and, in particular, of their inhabitability— that is, whether they serve or can serve to the realization of our individual ideal of life. Inhabitability is not only a functional criterion but an aesthetic one as well. It is aesthetic insofar as the evaluations about inhabitability include evaluations about the quality of the experience of actually doing something in —or simply occupying—a particular space. …Read more
  •  21
    I argue in this paper that Descartes's goal with his doctrine of the continuous recreation of the world is to offer a unified and ultimate causal explanation for the possibility of motion and duration in the world, the permanence of created things, and the continuation of their motion and duration. This unified explanation seems to be the only one which, according to Descartes, satisfies the two basic requirements any ultímate cause should meet: the cause must be active and not being in motion i…Read more
  •  43
    Cartesian Passions: Our (Imperfect) Natural Guides Towards Perfection
    Journal of Philosophical Research 41 401-438. 2016.
    I defend that Cartesian passions are a function—in fact, the only function—of the mind-body union responsible for guiding us in the pursuit of our (natural) perfection, a perfection that we increase by joining goods that our nature deems to be so. This view is in conflict, on one hand, with those (a majority) who have emphasized either the epistemic or survival role of our passions and, on the other and more precisely, with a recent proposal according to which Cartesian passions should not be ev…Read more
  •  32
    The Function and Intentionality of Cartesian Émotions
    Philosophical Papers 44 (3): 277-319. 2015.
    A study of what Descartes calls émotions in his Passions of the Soul suggests that, rather than just a theory of passions—as Descartes himself explicitly claims to be proposing—he was in practice putting forward a more comprehensive theory of passions-émotions, a unified theory which would be closer to what today should properly be called Descartes’ theory of emotions. I try here to make explicit the grounds of this unity by showing that émotions both fit within the functional account Descartes …Read more
  •  45
    Descartes’ Theory of (Human and Animal) Passions
    Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 16 85-105. 2008.
  •  75
    Avempace, Projectile Motion, and Impetus Theory
    Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (4): 521-546. 2003.
    This paper provides a historical reevaluation of the originality and implications of Avempace's critique of Aristotle's causal explanation of the motion of projectiles. It also offers a serious revision of the place which has usually been assigned to Avempace in the history of science. The views regarding projectiles defended in Avempace's Arabic commentary are in sharp opposition to the anti-Aristotelian Avempace that was known in the Medieval West through Averroes. Avempace's commentary reveal…Read more