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443The Rationality of EmotionMIT Press. 1987.In this urbane and witty book, Ronald de Sousa disputes the widespread notion that reason and emotion are natural antagonists.
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279Restoring emotion's bad rep: the moral randomness of normsEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 2 (1): 29-47. 2006.Despite the fact that common sense taxes emotions with irrationality, philosophers have, by and large, celebrated their functionality. They are credited with motivating, steadying, shaping or harmonizing our dispositions to act, and with policing norms of social behaviour. It's time to restore emotion's bad rep. To this end, I shall argue that we should expect that some of the “norms” enforced by emotions will be unevenly distributed among the members of our species, and may be dysfunctional at …Read more
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221I_— _Ronald de SousaAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 247-263. 2002.The word "truth" retains, in common use, traces of origins that link it to trust, troth, and truce, connoting ideas of fidelity, loyalty, and authenticity. The word has become, in contemporary philosophy, encased in a web of technicalities, but we know that a true image is a faithful portrait; a true friend a loyal one. In a novel or a poem, too, we have a feel for what is emotionally true, though we are not concerned with the actuality of events and characters depicted. To have emotions is to c…Read more
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219Moral emotionsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 4 (2): 109-126. 2001.Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions…Read more
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168Twelve varieties of subjectivityIn M. Larrazabal & P. Miranda (eds.), Twelve Varieties of Subjectivity: Dividing in Hopes of Conquest, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2002.
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151I_— _Ronald de SousaAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 247-263. 2002.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 stat…Read more
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148Truth, Authenticity, and RationalityDialectica 61 (3): 323-345. 2007.Emotions are Janus‐faced. They tell us something about the world, and they tell us something about ourselves. This suggests that we might speak of a truth, or perhaps two kinds of truths of emotions, one of which is about self and the other about conditions in the world. On some views, the latter comes by means of the former. Insofar as emotions manifest our inner life, however, we are more inclined to speak of authenticity rather than truth. What is the difference? We need to distinguish the cr…Read more
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126The rationality of emotionsDialogue 18 (1): 41-63. 1979.Ira Brevis furor, said the Latins: anger is a brief bout of madness. There is a long tradition that views all emotions as threats to rationality. The crime passionnel belongs to that tradition: in law it is a kind of “brief-insanity defence.” We still say that “passion blinds us;” and in common parlance to be philosophical about life's trials is to be decently unemotional about them. Indeed many philosophers have espoused this view, demanding that Reason conquer Passion. Others — from Hume to th…Read more
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124Review of Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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109Moral EmotionsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 4 (2). 2001.Emotions can be the subject of moral judgments; they can also constitute the basis for moral judgments. The apparent circularity which arises if we accept both of these claims is the central topic of this paper: how can emotions be both judge and party in the moral court? The answer I offer regards all emotions as potentially relevant to ethics, rather than singling out a privileged set of moral emotions. It relies on taking a moderate position both on the question of the naturalness of emotions…Read more
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96Rational animals: What the bravest lion won't riskCroatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (12): 365-386. 2004.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 diff…Read more
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86The Natural Shiftiness of Natural KindsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (4). 1984.The Philosophical search for Natural Kinds is motivated by the hope of finding ontological categories that are independent of our interests. Other requirements, of varying importance, are commonly made of kinds that claim to be natural. But no such categories are to be found. Virtually any kind can be termed 'natural' relative to some set of interests and epistemic priorities. Science determines those priorities at any particular stage of its progress, and what kinds are most 'natural' in that s…Read more
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72Review: The importance of being understood: Folk psychology as ethics (review)Mind 113 (449): 198-201. 2004.
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72Biological IndividualityCroatian Journal of Philosophy 5 (2): 195-218. 2005.The question What is an individual? goes back beyond Aristotle’s discussion of substance to the Ionians’ preoccupation with the paradox of change -- the fact that if anything changes it must stay the same. Mere reflection on this fact and the common-sense notion of a countable thing yields a concept of a “minimal individual”, which is particular (a logical matter) specific (a taxonomic matter), and unique (an evaluative empirical matter). Individuals occupy space, and therefore might be dislodge…Read more
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66The mind's Bermuda Triangle: philosophy of emotions and empirical scienceIn Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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65Is art an adaptation? Prospects for an evolutionary perspective on beautyJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2). 2004.
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65Kripke on Naming and NecessityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (3): 447-464. 1974.Some wag reported the following story: Scholars have recently established that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not, after all, written by Homer. They were actually written by another author, of the same name.The majority of current theories of naming and reference, including ones as divergent in other respects as those of Russell and Searle, would rule this story impossible. They would do so on roughly these grounds: the sense and reference of the name ‘Homer’ is determined, given the absence of …Read more
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64Against emotional modularityIn Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet (eds.), The modularity of emotions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 29-50. 2008.
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61How to Give a Piece of Your MindReview of Metaphysics 25 (1): 52-79. 1971.Nothing seems to follow strictly from 'X believes that p'. But if we reinterpret it to mean: 'X can consistently be described as consistently believing p'--which roughly renders, I think, Hintikka's notion of "defensibility"--we can get on with the subject, freed from the inhibitions of descriptive adequacy. But defensibility is neither necessary nor sufficient for truth: it tells us little, therefore, about the concept of belief on which it is based. It cannot, in particular, specify necessary …Read more
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61Existentialism as BiologyEmotion Review 2 (1): 76-83. 2010.Existentialism is compatible with a broadly biological vision of who we are. This thesis is grounded in an analysis of “concrete” or “individual” possibility, which differs from standard conceptions of possibility in that it allows for possibilities to come into being or disappear through time. Concrete possibilities are introduced both in individual life and by major transitions in evolution. In particular, the advent of ultrasociality and of language has enabled human goals to be formulated in…Read more
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56Bashing the Enlightenment: A Discussion of Charles Taylor's Sources of the SelfDialogue 33 (1): 109. 1994.This is a Big Book from one of Canada's preeminent philosophers. It aims at nothing less than to define what characterizes modernity, and then to tell us what is wrong with it. Like many a Big Book, it is predictably full of interesting things, and equally predictably disappointing, not to say feeble, in some of the central theses for which it argues. But then what more, in philosophy, can we really expect? It's what we tell our students: you don't have to be right, and you don't have to make me…Read more
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54Prcis of “why think?” Evolution and the rational mindAmerican Journal of Bioethics 8 (5). 2008.This Article does not have an abstract