Sofia Livi

This paper argues that the Kodak Carousel pitch in Mad Men functions as a piece of “television-philosophy” that articulates the nature of nostalgia. By situating Donald Draper’s speech within psychological and philosophical debates on emotions, the paper shows how Mad Men exemplifies nostalgia’s intentional structure—memory, imagination, and desire fused in a bittersweet attitude. Through Draper’s slideshow, visuals, and sound, the series highlights the dual role of nostalgia in identity: fostering self-continuity, esteem, and connection, while also masking existential fracture.

During the last decade we have witnessed a stagnated debate on the epistemic nature of emotion with two clear factions: those who defend that emotions are epistemically akin to perception and those who deny it. In this paper I propose a way out of that impasse. Based on Sosa’s distinction, I propose that there are animal and reflective evaluative knowledge in both of which emotion’s play a non-superfluous epistemic role. On the one hand, we can devise an externalist version of perceptualism immune to traditional objections. On the other hand, we not only can but should complement that externalist position with an account of reflective evaluative knowledge, used by non-perceptualist to attack traditional, internalist versions of perceptualism. Thus, perceptualism and non-perceptualism do not disagree with each other, they are just offering an analysis of different epistemic achievements, which have different epistemic statuses and different epistemic requirements.

It has been recently proposed that our evaluations of the relative adequacy of unreflective skilled action ought to be grounded in sociocultural normativities; that is, with respect to what is standardly done according to general practice or custom. This paper claims that the normative dimension of unreflective skilled action ought to be understood too in terms of a formal temporality, according to which an unreflective skilled action is adequate iff it fulfils the subdoxastic preferences of the acting agent. More precisely, this position, inspired by an analysis of early Heideggerian phenomenology and modern-day neuroscience, positions the formal-temporal dimension of the normativity of unreflective skilled action as more fundamental than the sociocultural dimension of normativity for multiple reasons, without reducing the normativity of said behaviour to this agent-centred level.