•  230
    A Plea for Descriptive Social Ontology
    Synthese 202 (Special Issue: The Metametaphysi): 1-35. 2023.
    Social phenomena—quite like mental states in the philosophy of mind—are often regarded as potential troublemakers from the start, particularly if they are approached with certain explanatory commitments, such as naturalism or social individualism, already in place. In this paper, we argue that such explanatory constraints should be at least initially bracketed if we are to arrive at an adequate non-biased description of social phenomena. Legitimate explanatory projects, or so we maintain, such a…Read more
  •  5
    Determinables and Brute Similarities
    In Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday, Ontos Verlag. pp. 388-420. 2013.
  •  223
    In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socrati…Read more
  •  191
    Can one refute Berkeleyan phenomenalism by arguing that sensory objects seem mind-independent, and that, according to Berkeley, experience is to be taken at face value? Relying on Mackie’s recent discussion of the issue, I argue, first, that phenomenalism cannot be straightforwardly refuted by relying on perceptual or bodily experience of mind-independence together with the truthfulness of experience. However, I maintain, second that phenomenalism can be indirectly refuted by appealing to the bo…Read more
  •  356
    Efforts and their feelings
    with Juan Pablo Bermúdez
    Philosophy Compass 18 (1). 2022.
    Effort and the feeling of effort play important roles in many theoretical discussions, from perception to self-control and free will, from the nature of ownership to the nature of desert and achievement. A crucial, overlooked distinction within the philosophical and scientific literatures is the distinction between theories that seek to explain effort and theories that seek to explain the feeling of effort. Lacking a clear distinction between these two phenomena makes the literature hard to navi…Read more
  •  18
    L'enseignement viennois de Brentano a faconne les philosophies exactes du XXe siecle, au travers de ses eleves Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, Stumpf, Ehrenfels ou Marty. Si la theorie de l'intentionnalite, l'ontologie et la logique de Brentano ont fait l'objet de discussions approfondies, son anatomie d'une grande variete d'actes mentaux - choisir, hair, juger, percevoir, preferer, remarquer, savoir, sentir, souffrir, toucher, voir - demeure encore trop ignoree. Ce livre est consacre a cette anal…Read more
  •  305
    Defining Optimisms
    A Tribute to Ronald de Sousa, Edited by Julien Deonna, Christine Tappolet and Fabrice Teroni in 2022. 2022.
    To be optimistic, it is standardly assumed, is to have positive expectations. I here argue that this definition is correct but captures only one variety of optimism – here called factual optimism. It leaves out two other important varieties of optimism. The first – focal optimism – corresponds to the idea of seeing the glass half full. The second – axiological optimism – consists in the view that good is stronger than bad. Those three varieties of optimism are irreducible to each other and do n…Read more
  •  346
    The reactive theory of emotions
    European Journal of Philosophy 31 (3): 785-802. 2023.
    Evaluative theories of emotions purport to shed light on the nature of emotions by appealing to values. Three kinds of evaluative theories of emotions dominate the recent literature: the judgment theory equates emotions with value judgments; the perceptual theory equates emotions with perceptions of values, and the attitudinal theory equates emotions with evaluative attitudes. This paper defends a fourth kind of evaluative theory of emotions, mostly neglected so far: the reactive theory. Reactiv…Read more
  •  460
    Common Core Conformant Definitions for an Ontology of Commercial Exchange
    2nd International Workshop on Ontology of Social, Legal and Economic Entities (SoLEE). 2021.
    In “Toward an Ontology of Commercial Exchange” [11], we proposed human readable definitions for terms that are central to an ontology of commercial exchange. This paper furthers that project in two ways. First, the definitions have been modified to be compatible with the Common Core Ontologies (CCO). CCO is used in a wide variety of domains including the industrial and military domains. Having a commerce ontology compatible with CCO allows data about the exchange of goods relevant to those domai…Read more
  •  177
    Survenance et Fondation Morales
    In Ophélie Desmons, Stéphane Lemaire & Patrick Turmel (eds.), Manuel de Métaéthique, Hermann. pp. 271-306. 2019.
    On entend par survenance moral la thèse selon laquelle, nécessairement, si deux entités sont parfaitement similaires en ce qui concerne toutes leurs propriétés non-morales, elles sont parfaitement similaires en ce qui concerne leurs propriétés morales. En dépit de son apparente simplicité, cette définition pose de nombreux problèmes. Ainsi, alors que la survenance morale est souvent présentée comme l’une des rares thèses faisant consensus en philosophie, il s’avère à y regarder de près que son i…Read more
  •  175
    Touch seems to enjoy some epistemic advantage over the other senses when it comes to attest to the reality of external objects. The question is not whether only what appears in tactile experiences is real. It is that only whether appears in tactile experiences feels real to the subject. In this chapter we first clarify how exactly the rather vague idea of an epistemic advantage of touch over the other senses should be interpreted. We then defend a “muscular thesis”, to the effect that only the e…Read more
  •  466
    Realism's Kick
    In Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau & Friedrich Stadler (eds.), The Philosophy of Perception: Proceedings of the 40th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, De Gruyter. pp. 39-57. 2019.
    Samuel Johnson claimed to have refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone. It is generally thought that Johnson misses the point of Berkeley's immaterialism for a rather obvious reason: Berkeley never denied that the stone feels solid, but only that the stone could exist independently of any mind. I argue that Johnson was on the right track. On my interpretation, Johnson’s idea is that because the stone feels to resist our effort, the stone seems to have causal powers. But if appearances are to be take…Read more
  •  1
    Le Plaisir
    In Julien A. Deonna & Emma Tieffenbach (eds.), Petit Traité des Valeurs, Edition D’ithaque. pp. 214-222. 2018.
    I argue that pleasure is not only necessarily good, but also essentially so. Part of the nature of pleasure is to be (personally, finally) good.
  •  32
    Resolve is always effortful
    with Bastien Gauchot
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.
    Ainslie argues there are two main kinds of willpower: suppression, which is necessarily effortful, and resolve, which is not. We agree with the distinction but argue that all resolve is effortful. Alleged cases of effortless resolve are indeed cases of what Ainslie calls habits, namely stable results of prior uses of resolve.
  •  280
    De l'Optimisme
    Chroniques Universitaires 2019 58-73. 2019.
  •  244
    Bitter Joys and Sweet Sorrows
    In C. Tappolet, F. Teroni & A. Konzelmann Ziv (eds.), Shadows of the Soul: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Emotions, Routlege. pp. 58-73. 2018.
    We sometimes experience pleasures and displeasures simultaneously: whenever we eat sfogliatelle while having a headache, whenever we feel pain fading away, whenever we feel guilty pleasure while enjoying listening to Barbara Streisand, whenever we are savouring a particularly hot curry, whenever we enjoy physical endurance in sport, whenever we are touched upon receiving a hideous gift, whenever we are proud of withstanding acute pain, etc. These are examples of what we call " mixed feelings ". …Read more
  •  744
    Suffering Pains
    In Jennifer Corns & Michael S. Brady David Bain (ed.), Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value and Normativity, Routledge. pp. 76-100. 2020.
    The paper aims at clarifying the distinctions and relations between pain and suffering. Three negative theses are defended: 1. Pain and suffering are not identical. 2. Pain is not a species of suffering, nor is suffering a species of pain, nor are pain and suffering of a common (proximate) genus. 3. Suffering cannot be defined as the perception of a pain’s badness, nor can pain be defined as a suffered bodily sensation. Three positive theses are endorsed: 4. Pain and suffering are categorically …Read more
  •  388
    Rom Harré thinks that the Emergence–Reduction debate, conceived as a vertical problem, is partly ill posed. Even if he doesn’t wholly reject the traditional definition of an emergent property as a property of a collection but not of its components, his point is that this definition doesn’t exhaust all the dimensions of emergence. According to Harré there is another kind (or dimension) of emergence, which we may call—somewhat paradoxically—“horizontal emergence”: two properties of a substance are…Read more
  •  284
    Brentanian Continua
    Brentano Studien 16 229-276. 2018.
    Brentano’s theory of continuity is based on his account of boundaries. The core idea of the theory is that boundaries and coincidences thereof belong to the essence of continua. Brentano is confident that he developed a full-fledged, boundary-based, theory of continuity1; and scholars often concur: whether or not they accept Brentano’s take on continua they consider it a clear contender. My impression, on the contrary, is that, although it is infused with invaluable insights, several aspects of …Read more
  •  1188
    Towards a Definition of Efforts
    Motivation Science 3 (3): 230-259. 2017.
    Although widely used across psychology, economics, and philosophy, the concept ofeffort is rarely ever defined. This article argues that the time is ripe to look for anexplicit general definition of effort, makes some proposals about how to arrive at thisdefinition, and suggests that a force-based approach is the most promising. Section 1presents an interdisciplinary overview of some chief research axes on effort, and arguesthat few, if any, general definitions have been proposed so far. Section…Read more
  •  184
    A quick, but inconclusive, way to defend generous realism is to rely on the reciprocal conceptual dependency between component and resultant forces. Conceptually, there cannot be component without compounds, nor compounds, or resultants, without components. If there are only component forces, then they are not really component ; and if there are only resultant forces then there are not really resultant.
  •  140
    Assumption: Sensory modalities are individuated by their proper objects. Hearing is the direct perception of sounds, sight the direct perception of colours, etc. Objection: There is no single type of proper sensibles in the case of touch (temperature, solidity, hardness, humidity, texture, weight, vibration...). Answer : 1. accept to distinguish the sense of pressure (touch strictly speaking) from the sense of temperature. 2. argue that pressures are the direct perceptual objects through which o…Read more
  •  194
    The aim of this paper is to give a description of the objects of the sense of touch. Those objects, it is argued, are forces, rather than flesh deformation, solidity or weight. Tangible forces, basically tensions and pressures, are construed as symmetric and non-spatially reducible causal relations. Two consequences are drawn: first, the perception of heat and cold falls outside the sense of touch; second, muscular sense (together with a large part of proprioception) falls inside the sense of to…Read more
  •  249
    Les cinq sens, le sens commun et les sensibles communs
    Swiss Philosophical Preprints. 2008.
    Le sens commun distingue le corps de l’esprit. Il considère par exemple que les désirs et les souvenirs sont des phénomènes mentaux alors que les sons et les courants d’air sont des phénomènes physiques. Au sein de l’esprit, il distingue diverses facultés mentales : il considère par exemple que l’imagination est distincte de la volonté, qui est elle-même distincte de la perception. Au sein de la faculté perceptive, il distingue cinq sens : l’odorat, le goût, la vue, le toucher et l’ouïe. Cette d…Read more
  •  341
    Our thesis is that there is a notion of justification, corresponding to the active exercise of a competence in order to attain truth, whose value is explained neither by reliabilism, nor by the usual versions of credit theory.
  •  126
    Why Colours Don't Resist
    Swiss Philosophical Preprints. 2008.
    Thèse de la résistance : l’expérience de la résistance est une condition nécessaire de notre idée d’un monde extérieur.
  •  223
    The Irreducibility of Pleasure to Desire
    Swiss Philosophical Preprints. 2008.
    One common answer to the question of the unity of pleasures is to try to define pleasantness by appealing to a kind of mental states whose unity is less questionable. Desires have been conceived as the best candidates for this unifying role. Indeed, one way of classifying the preceding options concerning the definition of pleasantness, is to constrast conative (or motivational) theories of pleasure with non conative ones. Conative theories of pleasure are often considered as one homogeneous type…Read more
  •  131
    The Self-­World Dualism and Neutral Monism
    Swiss Philosophical Preprints. 2008.
    The claim to be defended may be called phenomenological neutral monism: phenomenological neutral monism about perception (or selfless perception): ordinary perception does not intrinsically present us with the distinction between itself and its objects, that is, with the fact that its objects exist (or seem to exist) independently of the perceptual act.
  •  183
    The Phenomenology of Mind­-Independence
    Swiss Philosophical Preprints. 2008.
    I shall defend the view that the experience of resistance gives us a direct phenomenal access to the mind-independence of perceptual objects. In the first part, I address an objection against the very possibility of experiencing mind-independence. The possibility of an experience of mind-independence being secured, I argue in the second part that the experience of resistance is the kind of experience by which we access mind-independence.