Ronald De Sousa

This chapter uses a discussion of linguistic density to revisit the ancient feud between poetry and philosophy. The poet embraces suggestion, symbolism, polysemy, and metaphor, and this places the poet’s preferred use of language at a pole almost exactly opposite the philosopher’s, which privileges clarity of expression, modestly in delivery, and writing that has an apparent subject or point. But there are powerful reasons for thinking that the difference between the creative labour of poet and philosopher is not nearly as pronounced as we might think. Each, the chapter shows, is concerned with truth, each aims at providing fresh vision, and each has an essential but surprisingly hesitant relationship to language.

Weakness of will violates practical rationality; but may also be viewed as an epistemic failing. Conflicts between strategic and epistemic rationality suggest that we need a superordinate standard to arbitrate between them. Contends that such a standard is to be found at the axiological level, apprehended by emotions. Axiological rationality is _sui generis_, reducible to neither the strategic nor the epistemic. But, emotions are themselves capable of raising paradoxes and antinomies, particularly when the principles they embody involve temporality. They constitute an ultimate court of appeal, yet their biological origin allows little hope that these antinomies can be resolved.

Any theory of practical irrationality necessarily imposes a division of labour between an account of the agent's intentional states and how these are formed, and an account of how these intentional states get applied in particular circumstances to choose a particular action. Nevertheless, questions that concern the content of the agent's beliefs and desires are still routinely lumped together with questions that deal with the way the agent chooses in the light of these beliefs and desires. This generates a number of pseudoproblems. Seeks to clarify some of them, by considering the internal structure of decision theory.

Weakness of will violates practical rationality; but may also be viewed as an epistemic failing. Conflicts between strategic and epistemic rationality suggest that we need a superordinate standard to arbitrate between them. Contends that such a standard is to be found at the axiological level, apprehended by emotions. Axiological rationality is sui generis, reducible to neither the strategic nor the epistemic. But, emotions are themselves capable of raising paradoxes and antinomies, particularly when the principles they embody involve temporality. They constitute an ultimate court of appeal, yet their biological origin allows little hope that these antinomies can be resolved.

In this urbane and witty book, Ronald de Sousa disputes the widespread notion that reason and emotion are natural antagonists. He argues that emotions are a kind of perception, that their roots in the paradigm scenarios in which they are learned give them an essentially dramatic structure, and that they have a crucial role to-play in rational beliefs, desires, and decisions by breaking the deadlocks of pure reason.The book's twelve chapters take up the following topics: alternative models of mind and emotion; the relation between evolutionary, physiological, and social factors in emotions; a taxonomy of objects of emotions; assessments of emotions for correctness and rationality; the regulation by emotions of logical and practical reasoning; emotion and time; the mechanism of emotional self-deception; the ethics of laughter; and the roles of emotions in the conduct of life. There is also an illustrative interlude, in the form of a lively dialogue about the ideology of love, jealousy, and sexual exclusiveness.Ronald de Sousa teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto. A Bradford Book.

I begin with a rather unpromising dispute that Nozick once had with Ian Hacking in the pages of the London Review of Books, in which both vied with one another in their enthusiasm to repudiate the thesis that some human people or peoples are closer than others to animality. I shall attempt to show that one can build, on the basis of Nozick’s discussion of rationality, a defense of the view that the capacity tor language places human rationality out of reach of a comparison with animals. The difference rests, paradoxically, on the human capacity tor irratianality. Irrationality depends on the capacity tor language, which allows the detachment of explicit thoughts from their underlying dynamic implementation; these, in turn, condition the essential disputability of principles of rationality. That is what places every human potentially -- if not actually -- on the other side of an unbridgeable gulf that separates us from other animals.

Why it's OK to Be Amoral argues that self-righteous moralism has replaced religion as a source of embattled and gratuitous certainties. High-minded moral convictions invoke the authority of sacred moral truths; but there are no such truths. In reality, moral passions are rooted in atavistic emotional dispositions and arbitrary social conventions. While public and private discourse is saturated with guilt, shame, and righteous indignation, professional philosophers, under cover of clever argumentation, promote the utopian idea that all practical questions have uniquely right answers-providing that you adopt the right moral principles. But their justifications for those principles appeal to contested "foundations," among which no rational adjudication is possible. Moreover, because there are two discrepant ways of understanding motivation, our access to agents' true reasons is never sufficiently reliable to warrant moral praise or blame. Finally, every agent has a wide diversity of reasons for action; yet moralists claim that some reasons trump all others, because they are "moral" reasons. Since these too must be grounded in facts, that amounts to double counting some reasons. Having exposed these aspects of the institution of morality, this book suggests that if we cannot abstain altogether from moralising, we can at least try to use it against itself.

[Ronald de Sousa] Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions; belief-like states, by contrast, are digital representations. I argue that the gravest problem-objectivity-is not insurmountable. /// [Adam Morton ] It is accuracy rather than truth itself that is valuable. Emotional truth is a dubious though attractive notion, but emotional accuracy is much easier to make sense of. My approach to accuracy goes via an account of what makes a story accurate. Stories can be accurate but not true, and emotions can be accurate whether or not they are true. The capacity for emotional accuracy, for emotions that fit a person's situation, is an aspect of emotional intelligence, which is as important an aspect of rational human agency as the intelligent formation of beliefs and desires

This book's dedication reads “to the man I married.” The phrase is a nice incitement to reflect on the book's topic: is the man she married identical with her present husband? Does the dedication imply a subtle reproach? a note of resignation before the inevitable fact that the man I married cannot be the one I'm married to? By the end of her book, Radden concludes that we can't get away from “normative demands of individuality” that remain anchored to common sense. The challenge she takes up is to articulate the intuitions evoked by a wide spectrum of questions about unity and disunity of the person, both diachronic and synchronic. The latter include the dramatic case of Multiple Personality Syndrome or MPD, but also milder cases of dissociation. Radical amnesia, personality changes including those brought about by religious conversions, and disintegration of personality consequent on senile dementia suggest disunity through time. In all cases, Radden opts for a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium, though she rightly notes that “drawing philosophical conclusions from empirical descriptions, on the one hand, and contributing philosophical distinctions and theories to an understanding of those facts, on the other, [are] fraught with methodological dangers.”

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 4, Page 257-261, October 2022. Müller argues that the perceptual or “Axiological Receptivity” model of emotions is incoherent, because it requires an emotion to apprehend and respond to its formal object at the same time. He defends a contrasting view of emotions as “Position-Takings" towards “formal objects”, aspects of an emotion's target pertinent to the subject's concerns. I first cast doubt on the cogency of Müller's attack on AR as begging questions about the temporal characteristics of perceptual events. I then argue that Müller's version of PT is not radical enough. On my attitudinal view, formal objects are not values but natural properties that justify specific affective or behavioral responses. Values are constituted only by a negotiated social aggregation of individual evaluative attitudes.