•  614
    Emotions as Evaluative Feelings
    Emotion Review 1 (3): 248--55. 2009.
    The phenomenology of emotions has traditionally been understood in terms of bodily sensations they involve. This is a mistake. We should instead understand their phenomenology in terms of their distinctively evaluative intentionality. Emotions are essentially affective modes of response to the ways our circumstances come to matter to us, and so they are ways of being pleased or pained by those circumstances. Making sense of the intentionality and phenomenology of emotions in this way requires re…Read more
  •  469
    Love
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
    This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can lo…Read more
  •  345
    Love, Friendship, and the Self presents a reexamination of our common understanding of ourselves as persons in light of the phenomena of love and friendship. It argues that the individualism that is implicit in that understanding cannot be sustained if we are to understand the kind of distinctively personal intimacy that love and friendship essentially involve. For love is a matter of identifying with someone: sharing for his sake the concerns and values that make up his identity as the person h…Read more
  •  345
    The motivational problem is the problem of understanding how we can have rational control over what we do. In the face of phenomena like weakness of the will, it is commonly thought that evaluation and reason can always remain intact even as we sever their connection with motivation; consequently, solving the motivational problem is thought to be a matter of figuring out how to bridge this inevitable gap between evaluation and motivation. I argue that this is fundamentally mistaken and results in…Read more
  •  338
    Felt evaluations: A theory of pleasure and pain
    American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1): 13-30. 2002.
    This paper argues that pleasure and pains are not qualia and they are not to be analyzed in terms of supposedly antecedently intelligible mental states like bodily sensation or desire. Rather, pleasure and pain are char- acteristic of a distinctive kind of evaluation that is common to emotions, desires, and (some) bodily sensations. These are felt evaluations: pas- sive responses to attend to and be motivated by the import of something impressing itself on us, responses that are nonetheless simu…Read more
  •  308
    Friendship
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
    Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who we are as persons. Given this…Read more
  •  301
    Plural agents
    Noûs 42 (1). 2008.
    Genuine agents are able to engage in activity because they find it worth pursuing—because they care about it. In this respect, they differ from what might be called “mere intentional systems”: systems like chess-playing computers that exhibit merely goal-directed behavior mediated by instrumental rationality, without caring. A parallel distinction can be made in the domain of social activity: plural agents must be distinguished from plural intentional systems in that plural agents have cares and…Read more
  •  212
    How can we motivate ourselves to do what we think we ought? How can we deliberate about personal values and priorities? Bennett Helm argues that standard philosophical answers to these questions presuppose a sharp distinction between cognition and conation that undermines an adequate understanding of values and their connection to motivation and deliberation. Rejecting this distinction, Helm argues that emotions are fundamental to any account of value and motivation, and he develops a detailed a…Read more
  •  207
    Emotional reason how to deliberate about value
    American Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1): 1-22. 2000.
    Deliberation about personal, non-moral values involves elements of both invention and discovery. Thus, we invent our values by freely choosing them, where such distinctively human freedom is essential to our defining and taking responsibility for the kinds of persons we are; nonetheless, we also discover our values insofar as we can deliberate about them rationally and arrive at non-arbitrary decisions about what has value in our lives. Yet these notions of invention and discovery seem inconsist…Read more
  •  200
    Love, identification, and the emotions
    American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1): 39--59. 2009.
    Recently there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in love, resulting in a wide variety of accounts. Central to most accounts of love is the notion of caring about your beloved for his sake. Yet such a notion needs to be carefully articulated in the context of providing an account of love, for it is clear that the kind of caring involved in love must be carefully distinguished from impersonal modes of concern for particular others for their sakes, such as moral concern or concern gro…Read more
  •  191
    One central argument in favor of perceptual accounts of emotions concerns recalcitrant emotions: emotions that persist in the face of repudiating judgments. For, it is argued, to understand how the conflict between recalcitrant emotions and judgment falls short of incoherence in judgment, we need to understand recalcitrant emotions to be something like perceptual illusions of value, so that in normal, non-recalcitrant cases emotions are non-illusory perceptions of value. I argue that these argum…Read more
  •  191
    One central argument in favor of perceptual accounts of emotions concerns recalcitrant emotions: emotions that persist in the face of repudiating judgments. For, it is argued, to understand how the conflict between recalcitrant emotions and judgment falls short of incoherence in judgment, we need to understand recalcitrant emotions to be something like perceptual illusions of value, so that in normal, non-recalcitrant cases emotions are non-illusory perceptions of value. I argue that these argum…Read more
  •  176
    Accountability and some social dimensions of human agency
    Philosophical Issues 22 (1): 217-232. 2012.
    What is responsible agency? I want to consider two perspectives we might take in thinking about responsibility, what we might call an inner and an outer perspective. The inner perspective is that of the agent herself, involving her having and exercising (or failing to exercise) certain agential capacities and so choosing and controlling her actions. The outer perspective is that from which we assess someone’s conduct and—crucially—her will as a matter of holding her to account. In each case, res…Read more
  •  159
    The import of human action
    In Jesus Aguilar & Andrei Buckareff (eds.), Philosophy of Action, Automatic Press/vip. pp. 89--100. 2009.
    My central philosophical concern for many years has been with what it is to be a person. Of course, we persons are agents, indeed agents of a special sort, so understanding personhood has of course led me to think about that special sort of agency. Yet my background in the philosophy of mind leads me to think that any account of this special sort of agency must appeal to psychological capacities that are themselves grounded in an account of the relation between the mind and the body. Here I have…Read more
  •  125
    In a remarkable series of papers, Haugeland lays out what is both a striking interpretation of Heidegger and a compelling account of objectivity and truth. Central to his account is a notion of existential commitment: a commitment to insist that one's understanding of the world succeeds in making sense of the phenomena and so potentially to change or give up on that understanding in the face of apparently impossible phenomena. Although Haugeland never gives a clear account of existential commitm…Read more
  •  103
    Freedom of the heart
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 (2): 71--87. 1996.
    Philosophical accounts of freedom typically fail to capture an important kind of freedom—freedom to change what one cares about—that is central to our understanding of what it is to be a person. This paper articulates this kind of freedom more clearly, distinguishing it from freedom of action and freedom of the will, and gives an account of how it is possible. Central to this account is an understanding of the role of emotions in determining what we value, thus motivating a rethinking of the imp…Read more
  •  101
    Responsibility and Dignity: Strawsonian Themes
    In Carla Bagnoli (ed.), Morality and the Emotions, Oxford University Press. pp. 217-34. 2011.
    Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” usefully connected the concepts of freedom and responsibility with the reactive attitudes, but there has been some controversy concerning both the nature of that connection and what the reactive attitudes are. I shall argue—tentatively and speculatively—that we can best understand the reactive attitudes by seeing them as individually presupposing and jointly constituting both our respect for persons and the dignity to which that respect is responsive. Co…Read more
  •  67
    The Emotions (review)
    Philosophical Review 111 (1): 132-135. 2002.
    Peter Goldie’s The Emotions is a fascinating account distinguished by its originality and breadth. Throughout, the account is well grounded in sound common sense, as Goldie lets his careful and sensitive interpretation of the phenomena drive his theory rather than the other way around.
  •  65
    It is somewhat striking that two interrelated elements of Hume's account of causation have received so little attention in the secondary literature on the subject. The first is the distinction of causation into the natural and the philosophical relations: Although many have tried to give accounts of why Hume presents two definitions of causality, it is often not clear in these accounts that the one definition is of causality as a natural relation and the other is of causality as a philosophica…Read more
  •  55
    Integration and fragmentation of the self
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (1): 43--63. 1996.
    To identify oneself with something is for it to be a source of meaning and worth in one's life. Normally such identification is constituted by a certain holistic rational pattern both in one's judgments and will and in one's emotions and desires. However, one's identity can be fragmented into conflicting sources of meaning when the pattern in one's judgments becomes disconnected from that in one's emotions. By analyzing these kinds of fragmentation, I articulate some of the rational connections …Read more
  •  54
    The Significance of Emotions
    American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (4): 319-331. 1994.
    We must distinguish between a capacity for goal-directedness of a sort found in chess-playing computers and a capacity for robust desire, which involves finding there being something in favor of the relevant course of action in light of its significance to the subject. Existing accounts of desire, especially those given in terms of instrumental rationality, either ignore or presuppose such significance, in both cases failing to give an adequate account of robust desire. My positive thesis in thi…Read more
  •  53
    Self-love and the structure of personal values
    In Verena Mayer & Mikko Salmela (eds.), Emotions, Ethics, and Authenticity, John Benjamins. pp. 11--32. 2009.
    Authenticity, it is plausible to suppose, is a feature of one's identity as a person---of one's sense of the kind of life worth living. Most attempts to explicate this notion of a person's identity do so in terms of an antecedent understanding of what it is for a person to value something. This is, I argue, a mistake: a concern is not intelligible as a value apart from the place it has within a larger identity that the value serves in turn to constitute; to assume otherwise is to risk leaving ou…Read more
  •  47
    Integration and Fragmentation of the Self
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (1): 43-63. 2010.
    My thesis in this paper is that although one normally identifies with something by virtue of a certain holistic rational pattern both in one's judgments and will and in one's emotions and desires, in certain cases one's judgments and one's emotions can be largely separate sources of one's identity and hence of meaning in one's life. These cases, however, are cases of irrationality in which, roughly, the pattern in one's judgments and will has become disconnected from the pattern in one's emotion…Read more
  •  47
    Love as Intimate Identification
    Philosophic Exchange 40 (1): 20--37. 2009.
    It is widely acknowledged that love is a distinctively intimate form of concern in which we in some sense identify with our beloveds; it is common, moreover, to construe such identification in terms of the lover’s taking on the interests of the beloved. From this starting point, Harry Frankfurt argues that the paradigm form of love is that between parents and infants or young children. I think this is mistaken: the kind of loving attitude or relationship we can have towards or with young childre…Read more
  •  47
    My aim is to understand at least some of the non-instrumental reasons we can have for action in a way that can provide a satisfying non-egoist account of 'social actions' - actions undertaken for the sake of others. I do this in part by presenting, in terms of a discussion of the rationality of emotions, an account of what it is for something to have import to an agent . I then extend this account to include our caring about others as agents, in part by revealing the way in which one's emotional…Read more
  •  43
    Hate, Identification, and Othering
    American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (3): 289-310. 2023.
    This paper argues that hate differs from mere disliking in terms of its “depth,” which is understood via a notion of “othering,” whereby one rejects at least some aspect of the identity of the target of hate, identifying oneself as not being what they are. Fleshing this out reveals important differences between personal hate, which targets a particular individual, and impersonal hate, which targets groups of people. Moreover, impersonal hate requires focusing on the place hate has within particu…Read more
  •  40
    Communities of respect are communities of people sharing common practices or a (partial) way of life; they include families, clubs, religious groups, and political parties. This book develops a detailed account of such communities in terms of the rational structure of their members' reactive attitudes, arguing that they are fundamental in three interrelated ways to understanding what it is to be a person. First, it is only by being a member of a community of respect that one can be a responsible…Read more
  •  39
    The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (review)
    Philosophical Review 111 (1): 132-135. 2002.
    Peter Goldie’s The Emotions is a fascinating account distinguished by its originality and breadth. Throughout, the account is well grounded in sound common sense, as Goldie lets his careful and sensitive interpretation of the phenomena drive his theory rather than the other way around.
  •  17
    Language, Thought, and Consciousness: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 50 (2): 391-391. 1996.
    Peter Carruthers' main thesis is that "Human conscious thinkings achieve their status as such by virtue of consisting of deployments of natural language sentences in imagination, which are then made available in short-term memory to be thought about in turn". In arguing for this thesis, he defends a cognitive conception of language, which "accords a central place to natural language within our cognition" against a communicative conception of language, according to which language is merely a mean…Read more