Hadis Farokhi

Major depressive disorder is a complex and challenging condition that significantly impacts an individual’s motivation. The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the motivational psychology of people with this condition. To achieve this purpose, first, I will critically analyze two possible accounts of motivation in depression, namely, the Humean and the phenomenological accounts. Subsequently, I will propose an account of why people with depression appear to be demotivated, drawing insights from a prevalent treatment of this condition, known as Mindfulness-based therapy. I propose that what might look like a lack of motivation is a misdirected form of motivation, where the individual is stuck in a cycle of trying to solve perceived problems that exist primarily within their own mind. This internal focus leaves little room for responding to or engaging with other aspects of their environment, such as positive stimuli, which leads to the outward appearance of demotivation.

According to a well-established view of desire satisfaction, a desire that p is satisfied iff p obtains. Call this the 'standard view'. The standard view is purely semantic, which means the satisfaction condition of desires is placed in the truth of the embedded proposition that indicates the content of the desire. This paper aims to defend the standard view against two frequently discussed problems: the problem of underspecification and desires conditional on their own persistence. The former holds that the standard view cannot capture the specific ways of desire satisfaction. The latter holds that the standard view does not provide sufficient conditions for the satisfaction of desires conditional on their own persistence. To address the first problem, I will disambiguate different interpretations of desire ascriptions using de re/de dicto distinction. My argument to address the second problem rests on the disambiguation of different senses of satisfaction: semantic and agent.