•  57
    Attention, Emotion, and Evaluative Understanding
    Philosophia 45 (4): 1749-1764. 2017.
    This paper assesses Michael Brady’s claim that the ‘capture and consumption of attention’ in an emotion facilitates evaluative understanding. It argues that emotional attention is epistemically deleterious on its own, even though it can be beneficial in conjunction with the right epistemic skills and motivations. The paper considers Sartre’s and Solomon’s claim that emotions have purposes, respectively, to circumvent difficulty or maximize self-esteem. While this appeal to purposes is problemati…Read more
  •  55
    Emotional Depth
    Philosophical Quarterly 68 (273): 779-800. 2018.
    Some philosophers hold that the depth of an emotion is a question of how embedded it is among the person’s other mental states. That means, the emotion is inter-connected with other states such that its alteration or removal would lead to widespread changes in the mind. This paper argues that it is necessary to distinguish two different concepts of embeddedness: the inter-connections could either be rational or causal. The difference is non-trivial. This paper argues that the rational approach c…Read more
  •  54
    Concerns and the Seriousness of Emotion
    Dialectica 71 (2): 181-207. 2017.
    Some philosophers have claimed that emotions are states of mind where an object is taken seriously. Seriousness, as this paper understands it, involves both a phenomenological change in attention and non-indifference towards an object. The paper investigates how contemporary theories of emotion can explain the seriousness of emotion. After rejecting explanations based on feeling, desire, and concern, the paper argues that the seriousness of an emotion can be explained as the manifestation of a c…Read more
  •  45
    Emotional Insight by Michael S. Brady (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 13 1-5. 2014.
    This review considers Michael Brady's account of the positive epistemic role of emotions. Brady claims that emotions can facilitate evaluative understanding because they "capture and consume" a person's attention. This review claims that there is a difference between emotions that are intrinsically productive of evaluative understanding and those are productive of evaluative understanding only because of the contribution of other, non-emotional states. Accordingly, Brady has not yet established …Read more
  •  22
    On Emotions: Philosophical Essays ed. John Deigh 2013. Oxford University Press (review)
    European Journal of Philosophy 24 (1): 307-312. 2016.
    This review begins with Solomon's philosophical orientation on emotions, which is summed up in the claim that emotions are value-laden. That is, emotions are about values, and in consequence, are valuable for their own sake. This review discusses aspects of this thesis in the context of essays by Laurence Thomas, Kathleen Higgins, Nancy Sherman, and Jerome Neu. Subsequently, the review discusses the essays by Robert C. Roberts and John Deigh to consider whether Solomon's own explanation of the …Read more
  •  21
    Verbal slips and the intentionality of skills
    Synthese 199 (1-2): 1521-1537. 2020.
    Many have thought that exercises of skill are intentional. The argument of the paper is that this thesis fails to account for important types of mistakes and errors. In what psychologists and linguists call “verbal slips with semantic bias”, a speaker mistakenly switches, reverses, or blends certain conceptual contents. Nevertheless, the speaker has successfully exercised an intellectual skill, insofar as her slip uses concepts in conformity to semantic and logical rules. To flesh out how one mi…Read more
  •  17
    Feeling in Character: Towards an Ethics of Emotion
    Dissertation, Syracuse University. 2013.
    This dissertation contends that emotions are subject to ethical assessment, not simply as motives or overt expressions, but in their own right. Emotions, I argue, are subject to assessment because they are aspects of a person's character. Specifically, emotions involve voluntary acts of attention, which are due to habituation. These acts show character by manifesting certain stable, deeply-held desires called 'concerns.' This view, dubbed 'Attentional Voluntarism,' is opposed to the prevalent vi…Read more