•  28
    Imagining Out of Hope
    Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.
    Both lay people and philosophers assume that hoping for something implies imagining it. According to contemporary philosophical accounts of hope, hope involves an element of imagination as input, part, or output of hope. However, there is no systematic view of the interaction between hope and the different processes constituting imagination. In this paper we put forward a view of (i) the kind of imaginings typically triggered by hopeful states, (ii) the nature of the interaction between hope and…Read more
  •  67
    Is the capacity to experience hope central to our ability to entertain desirable future possibilities in thought? The ability to project oneself forward in time, or to entertain vivid positive episodic future thoughts, is impaired in patients with clinical depression. In this article, I consider the causal relation between, on the one hand, the loss of the affective experience of hope in depressed patients, and on the other hand, the reduced ability to generate and entertain positive episodic fu…Read more
  •  105
    Pas de panique ?
    Les ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 16 (1): 4-17. 2021.
    In this essay, we tackle the misconception that panic is simply a state of being « overwhelmed by your fear. » Panic, in our view, is not an extreme fear that necessarily pushes the person into dysfunctional, counterproductive and irrational behaviors. On the contrary, as we will try to show here, it is an emotion in its own right that has its own cognitive and motivational functions. We will analyze panic here as a reaction to a danger perceived as major, imminent and without clear solution, in…Read more
  •  27
    The doxastic profile of the compulsive re-checker
    Philosophical Explorations 26 (1): 45-60. 2022.
    Checking is one of the most common compulsive actions performed by patients with Obsessive- compulsive disorder (OCD) (APA, 2013; Abramowitz, McKay, Taylor, 2008). Incessant checking is undeniably problematic from a practical point of view. But what is epistemically wrong with checking again (and again)? The starting assumption for this paper is that establishing what goes wrong when individuals check their stove ten times in a row requires understanding the nature of the doxastic attitude that …Read more
  •  12
    By manifesting dysfunctions of fundamental psychological mechanisms such as emotions, reasoning, and language, symptoms of mental disorders can inform us on their nature and functions. In this volume, Valentina Cardella and Amelia Gangemi bring together a collection of articles which draw from psychopathology in order to further our study of the human mind. Contributors include philosophers of mind and language, clinical psychologists, and a historian, all applying their respective methodologica…Read more
  •  311
    The aim of this collection is to show how work in the analytic philosophical tradition can shed light on the nature, value, and experience of anxiety. Contrary to widespread assumptions, anxiety is not best understood as a mental disorder, or an intrinsically debilitating state, but rather as an often valuable affective state which heightens our sensitivity to potential threats and challenges. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, learning about anxiety can be relevant for debates, no…Read more
  •  29
    According to contemporary philosophical accounts of hope, a hopeful emotion involves an element of imagination as input, part, or output of hope. A typical description of a hopeful episode often goes with mental imagery or immersion into the hoped-for scenario: as Ariel is hoping to win the dance competition on Saturday night, he projects himself in the scenario where he visualizes his name appearing on the screen display, quasi-hears the crowd cheering, feels proud, and starts thinking about th…Read more
  •  21
    The noetic feeling of confusion
    with Catherine Audrin
    Philosophical Psychology 35 (5): 757-770. 2022.
  •  25
    The doxastic profile of the compulsive re-checker
    Philosophical Explorations 26 (1): 45-60. 2022.
    Incessant checking is undeniably problematic from a practical point of view. But what is epistemically wrong with checking again (and again)? The starting assumption for this paper is that establishing what goes wrong when individuals check their stove ten times in a row requires understanding the nature of the doxastic attitude that compulsive re-checkers are in, as they go back to perform another check. Does the re-checker know that the stove is off, and is thus looking for more of what she al…Read more
  • By manifesting dysfunctions of fundamental psychological mechanisms such as emotions, reasoning, and language, symptoms of mental disorders can inform us on their nature and functions. In this volume, Valentina Cardella and Amelia Gangemi bring together a collection of articles which draw from psychopathology in order to further our study of the human mind. Contributors include philosophers of mind and language, clinical psychologists, and a historian, all applying their respective methodologica…Read more
  • My dissertation, entitled "The Anxious Inquirer: Emotions and Epistemic Uncertainty", concerns the relation between the epistemic attitude of doubt and the emotion of anxiety. In this dissertation, I propose a model of the affective architecture of doubt inspired in part by research in psychiatry on the persistent and recurring doubt of patients with Obsessive-compulsive disorder.
  •  39
    For creatures like us, entertaining possible future scenarios of how our life might play out is often accompanied or “charged” with emotions like hope and anxiety. What will interest me in this article is whether the epistemic profile of hope and anxiety, and in particular the fact that they are directed at uncertain outcomes, might pose a threat to the stability of their valence. Hope and anxiety are not emotions which relate us to evaluative properties of actual events, they relate us to evalu…Read more
  •  20
    Everyday anxious doubt
    Synthese 200 (3): 1-19. 2022.
    In this article I examine the role of anxiety in our motivation to reassess our epistemic states, by taking as a starting point a proposal put forward by Levy, according to which anxiety is responsible for the ruminations and worries about threatening possibilities that we sometimes get caught up into in our everyday life. Levy’s claim is that these irrational persistent thoughts about possible states of affairs are best explained by anxiety, rather than by beliefs, degrees of belief, or other m…Read more
  •  683
    How does doubt come about? What are the mechanisms responsible for our inclinations to reassess propositions and collect further evidence to support or reject them? In this paper, I approach this question by focusing on what might be considered a distorting mirror of unreasonable doubt, namely the pathological doubt of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals with OCD exhibit a form of persistent doubting, indecisiveness, and over-cautiousness at pathological levels (Rasmus…Read more
  •  410
    From Habits to Compulsions: Losing Control?
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 28 (2): 163-171. 2021.
    In recent years, there has been a trend in psychiatry to try and explain disorders of action in terms of an over-reliance on the habitual mode of action. In particular, it has been hypothesized that compulsions in obsessive-compulsive disorder are driven by maladaptive habits. In this paper, I argue that this view of obsessive-compulsive disorder does not fit the phenomenology of the disorder in many patients and that a more refined conceptualization of habit is likely to be helpful in clarifyin…Read more
  • Les termes que nous utilisons pour décrire notre vie affective ont changé au fil des siècles. Un changement notoire est celui qui a mené d’une conception de l’affectivité centrée autour des “passions” à un discours basé sur l' “émotion” comme catégorie psychologique centrale (Dixon 2003, Rorty 1982). Ainsi, alors que la référence à des désordres émotionnels est omniprésente dans les manuels de psychopathologie, le concept de passion a largement disparu du glossaire psychiatrique.…Read more
  •  3
    Darker sides of guilt: The case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
    In Corey Maley & Bradford Cokelet (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Guilt, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2019.
    Why do thoughts involving harm and damage trigger guilt in certain individuals and not in others? The significance of this question comes into view when considering the medical and psychological literature on patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Patients with OCD feel guilt in response to having certain recurring, negative thoughts whose content evoke scenarios of harm and damage. This, however—at least in most readings of what those thoughts consist of—is puzzling. The transition …Read more
  •  1128
    Epistemic Anxiety, Adaptive Cognition, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
    Discipline Filosofiche 2 (Philosophical Perspectives on Af): 137-158. 2018.
    Emotions might contribute to our being rational cognitive agents. Anxiety – and more specifically epistemic anxiety – provides an especially interesting case study into the role of emotion for adaptive cognition. In this paper, I aim at clarifying the epistemic contribution of anxiety, and the role that ill-calibrated anxiety might play in maladaptive epistemic activities which can be observed in psychopathology. In particular, I argue that this emotion contributes to our ability to adapt our co…Read more