Tom Cochrane

I defend the claim that the pleasure we take in beautiful things is a distal version of the reward we get from acquiring knowledge. I explain how this view fits a broader conception of aesthetic value that allows us to make sense of the evolution of our aesthetic practices. I compare my analysis of beauty with Panos Paris' three types of well-formedness: Functional well-formedness, categorical well-formedness and abstract well-formedness. In the final section of the chapter I evaluate to what extent the sense of beauty guides the practical acquisition of knowledge, referring to recent work on fittingness in the philosophy of science, and extending these ideas to the value of clarity in philosophical writing.

This is a review of philosophical approaches to music and emotion for the forthcoming 3rd edition of the Oxford Handbook of Music and Emotion edited by Patrik Juslin. The chapter begins by outlining the distinctive ways that philosophers approach issues about music, including the ancient question of whether music has an ethical influence. It is argued that this ancient question requires that the connection between pure instrumental music and emotions is clarified. The chapter then reviews philosophical work on musical expressivity, identifying four key concepts- arousal, resemblance, imagination, and metaphor- as core to current debates (with the imagination view currently dominant). It then turns to issues about emotion induction or arousal, explaining why formalists are sceptical about arousal before examining the mechanisms of expectation and emotional contagion. Finally, the chapter reviews some of the ways that philosophers have further developed issues about music and emotion by considering theories of extended cognition, musical virtues, and the way that music can promote social cohesion. The attached file is the author's preprint.

This is a textbook/popular introduction to the metaphysics of identity. It is centred around 12 science fiction stories, each of which explores some facet of the personal identity debate; cases like amnesia, teleportation, time travel, brain fission and mental fusion. Accompanying each story is a commentary that summarises the philosophical arguments. While the arguments are presented in a balanced way, the author ends up supporting a broadly animalist account, according to which we are essentially autonomous animals. This means that we persist so long as we maintain our animal bodies and its autonomous life-preservation distinct from other animals. We stop persisting if we are bodily fused with other animals, or if we lose our basic animal characteristics (for instance, if our bodies are gradually replaced by machine parts). Another point that the book makes is that thought experiments are essential for reasoning about the metaphysics of identity. Yet philosophers have often used thought experiments in an irresponsible way. For instance, philosophers such as Derek Parfit make appeals to brain transplants without thinking through their practical implications in any realistic detail. A collection of science fiction stories on these scenarios is thus important for getting us to think more carefully about these cases. Finally, the book has appendices which list science fiction stories and films relevant to personal identity, and a teacher's guide for a class centred around the metaphysics of identity. The attached file is a preprint version containing the contents list and introduction only.

This paper develops a mechanistic account of basic mental agency by identifying similarities between two of its major exemplars: endogenous attention and imagination. Five key similarities are identified: (i) that both capacities are driven by currently prioritised goals that are either person-level or apt to become person-level. (ii) that both deliver their outputs to the working memory (iii) that both range across all and only conceptual contents; (iv) that both proceed under the guidance of norms and/or habits; and (v) that both directly activate rather than inhibit content. These five features are consolidated by proposing that basic mental agency is essentially the power to call for conceptual content and hold it within our working memories.

The fear of death resists philosophical attempts at reconciliation. Building on theories of emotion, I argue that we can understand our fear as triggered by a de se mode of thinking about death which comes into conflict with our will to live. The discursive mode of philosophy may help us to avoid the de se mode of thinking about death, but it does not satisfactorily address the problem. I focus instead on the voluntary diminishment of one’s will to live. I argue that we can encourage a natural tendency for the will to live to decline as we approach death. I then consider two objections: Is not the will to live too fundamental for us to control? And even if we can control it, would not a declining will to live result in a general despair that it is better to resist? I argue that both of these objections can be overcome.

Introduction: Young people are experiencing an escalating global mental health crisis, intensified by the effects of COVID-19, cultural disconnection, and the limited fit of conventional clinical models with diverse populations. While biomedical and psychological models remain essential, they often underplay the symbolic, sensory, and relational dimensions of emotional life. This review explores how young people interpret and regulate their mental health through expressive, symbolic, and sonic practices. It proposes that the Culture-as-Practice (CAP) framework can complement existing approaches by offering a more integrated understanding of how cultural participation supports wellbeing. Methods: A narrative review informed by the CAP framework, which extends the Culture-as-Interaction (CAI) model, was conducted to evaluate how participatory cultural practices function as affective technologies. Literature published between 2010 and 2025 was systematically identified from five databases and screened using PRISMA-informed protocols. Data were analyzed thematically with CAP and CAI constructs. Two case studies–Whānau Ora (New Zealand) and Giving Emotions Meaning through Arts and Health (GEMAH) (Pakistan and Australia)–were selected to illustrate how CAP explains mechanisms through which cultural participation supports emotional wellbeing. Results: Participatory arts such as music, storytelling, and ritual were found to serve as cultural technologies that foster emotional regulation, identity coherence, and social connection. Sonic and symbolic practices created co-regulatory fields of belonging, effects often absent in conventional clinical models. CAP aligned with these findings by offering a theoretical lens to explain why such practices work, reframing them as structured culture as affective technologies rather than incidental engagement. Discussion: Culture-as-Practice provides more than an alternative to biomedical models. It offers an explanatory framework for why participatory, culturally grounded practices support youth mental health and wellbeing. By positioning emotional regulation as relationally and symbolically scaffolded, CAP highlights opportunities for integrating creative and communal practices into trauma-informed, culturally resonant interventions across schools, communities, and clinical settings.

Perceptual-control theory offers a physically reductive way to account for teleology or goal-directedness, ranging from the initial emergence of life, to creatures capable of regulating their own consciousness. This broad framework motivates key aspects of the perceptual-control model including the flexibility of behaviour, the hierarchy of aims or values, and the links between control and affective states. In this way, perceptual control theory integrates the psychological constants of representation, evaluation, and action.

In this article, we investigate how the concept of Care Biography and related concepts are understood and operationalised and describe how it can be applied to advancing our understanding and practice of holistic and person‐centred care. Walker and Avant's eight‐step concept analysis method was conducted involving multiple database searches, with potential or actual applications of Care Biography identified based on multiple discussions among all authors. Our findings demonstrate Care Biography to be a novel overarching concept derived from the conjunction of multiple other concepts and applicable across multiple care settings. Concepts related to Care Biography exist but were more narrowly defined and mainly applied in intensive care, aged care, and palliative care settings. They are associated with the themes of Meaningfulness and Existential Coping, Empathy and Understanding, Promoting Positive Relationships, Social and Cultural Contexts, and Self‐Care, which we used to inform and refine our concept analysis of Care Biography. In Conclusion, the concept of Care Biography, can provide a deeper understanding of a person and their care needs, facilitate integrated and personalised care, empower people to be in control of their care throughout their life, and help promote ethical standards of care.

It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for action. This view allows me to flesh out the global workspace theory of consciousness, as well as some of the phenomenal characteristics of conscious experience.

This paper develops a mechanistic account of basic mental agency by identifying similarities between two of its major exemplars: endogenous attention and imagination. Five key similarities are identified: i) that both capacities are driven by currently prioritised goals that are either person-level or apt to become person-level. ii) that both deliver their outputs to the working memory iii) that both range across all and only conceptual contents; iv) that both proceed under the guidance of norms and/or habits; and v) that both directly activate rather than inhibit content. These five features are consolidated by proposing that basic mental agency is essentially the power to call for conceptual content and hold it within our working memories.

If we were to connect two individuals’ brains together, how would this affect the individuals’ conscious experiences? In particular, it is possible for two people to share any of their conscious experiences; to simultaneously enjoy some token experiences while remaining distinct subjects? The case of the Hogan twins—craniopagus conjoined twins whose brains are connected at the thalamus—seems to show that this can happen. I argue that while practical empirical methods cannot tell us directly whether or not the twins share conscious experiences, considerations about the locality of content processing in the brain entails that they most likely do so.

This book defends Aestheticism- the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. I ground my account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as ‘objectified final value’, which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious.

In this paper I present an account of musical arousal that takes into account key demands of formalist philosophers such as Peter Kivy and Nick Zangwill. Formalists prioritise our understanding and appreciation of the music itself. As a result, they demand that any feelings we have in response to music must be directed at the music alone, without being distracted by non-musical associations. To accommodate these requirements I appeal to a mechanism of contagion which I synthesize with the expectation-based arousal mechanism proposed by Leonard Meyer. This account connects musical expressivity and arousal in a way that formalists have rejected, but I argue that it provides the best explanation of our observations of listener responses while also focusing on the music itself.

This paper identifies a tension between the commitment to forming rationally justified emotions and the happy life. To illustrate this tension I begin with a critical evaluation of the positive psychology technique known as ‘gratitude training’. I argue that gratitude training is at odds with the kind of critical monitoring that several philosophers have claimed is regulative of emotional rationality. More generally, critical monitoring undermines exuberance, an attitude that plays a central role in contemporary models of the happy life. Thus, prominent notions of what it takes to maintain emotion rationality and what it takes to maintain happiness are in tension. To resolve this tension, I argue that some people have good reason to depreciate critical monitoring—even while maintaining the requirement of emotion rationality that we be sensitive to facts about how our concerns are faring.

A summary of The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States is presented: I claim that a convincing account of the emotions requires a rethink of how the mind as a whole is structured. I provide this reconceptualization by introducing a fundamental type of mental concept called “valent representation" and then systematically elaborating this fundamental type in stages. In this way, accounts are provided of the various sorts of affective states ranging from pains and pleasures to character traits.

In this book, Tom Cochrane develops a new control theory of the emotions and related affective states. Grounded in the basic principle of negative feedback control, his original account outlines a new fundamental kind of mental content called 'valent representation'. Upon this foundation, Cochrane constructs new models for emotions, pains and pleasures, moods, expressive behaviours, evaluative reasoning, personality traits and long-term character commitments. These various states are presented as increasingly sophisticated layers of regulative control, which together underpin the architecture of the mind as a whole. Clearly structured and containing numerous diagrams and examples to illustrate the discussion, this study draws on the latest research from fields including philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and will appeal to readers interested in the philosophy and cognitive science of emotion.

I claim that the significance of comic works to influence our attitudes is limited by the conditions under which we find things funny. I argue that we can only find something funny if we regard it as norm-violating in a way that doesn’t make certain cognitive or pragmatic demands upon us. It is compatible with these conditions that humour reinforces our attitude that something is norm-violating. However, it is not compatible with these conditions that, on the basis of finding it funny, we come to reject some existing attitude. Such a rejection would require that we recognize our attitude as norm-violating in a way that has pragmatic force. Thus if a humorous work reveals the absurdity of something, we can either find it funny and not have our attitudes significantly influenced, or else be significantly influenced but not find it funny.

The author proposes a dimensional model of our emotion concepts that is intended to be largely independent of one’s theory of emotions and applicable to the different ways in which emotions are measured. He outlines some conditions for selecting the dimensions based on these motivations and general conceptual grounds. Given these conditions he then advances an 8-dimensional model that is shown to effectively differentiate emotion labels both within and across cultures, as well as more obscure expressive language. The 8 dimensions are: (1) attracted—repulsed, (2) powerful—weak, (3) free—constrained, (4) certain—uncertain, (5) generalized—focused, (6) future directed—past directed, (7) enduring—sudden, (8) socially connected—disconnected.

I defend the claim that fictional narratives provide cognitive benefits to readers in virtue of helping them to understand character. Fictions allow readers to rehearse the skill of selecting and organizing into narratives those episodes of a life that reflect traits or values. Two further benefits follow: first, fictional narratives provide character models that we can apply to real-life individuals (including ourselves), and second, fictional narratives help readers to reflect on the value priorities that constitute character. I defend the plausibility of these cognitive benefits against certain worries raised by Gregory Currie and Peter Goldie.