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The Puzzle of Good Bad MoviesThe Journal of Aesthetic Education 54 (3): 31-46. 2020.There are bad movies, and there are movies that are so bad that they are good. So-called good bad movies have received a lot of attention from critics and moviegoers in recent years. Many people, including those with good taste, are willing to invest their time and resources in watching and discussing them. In this paper, I will argue that the fact that aesthetically competent consumers of cinema are engaging with good bad movies challenges an intuitive assumption according to which a film merit…Read more
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95Sentimental Perceptualism and Affective ImaginationAnalysis. forthcoming.According to sentimental perceptualism, affect grounds evaluative or normative knowledge in a similar way to the way perception grounds much of descriptive knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel challenge to sentimental perceptualism. At the centre of the challenge is the assumption that if affect is to ground knowledge in the same way as perception does, it should have a function to accurately represent evaluative properties, and if it has that function, it should also have it in its futu…Read more
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8Prospects for epistemic generationism about memoryPhilosophy and the Mind Sciences 5. 2024.A source of epistemic justification can be either preservative or generative, in that it can either just preserve justification that was provided by some other source or generate justification on its own. This paper asks what is required for generationism about memory to be true and argues that there are rather demanding conditions that a case of memory justification needs to satisfy in order to count as epistemically generative in a substantive sense. By considering a parallel argument for epis…Read more
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365The Communicative Significance of Beliefs and DesiresDissertation, Universitatis Tartunesis. 2014.When we think about what others believe and want, we are usually affected by what we know about their attitudes. If I’m aware that another person believes something, I have an opportunity to agree or disagree with it. If I think that another person wants something, I can endorse or disapprove of her desire. The importance of such reactions to attributed beliefs and desires has thus far been overlooked in philosophy of mind where the focus has been on explanatory and predictive roles of attitude …Read more
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15Review of Taste: A Philosophy of Food, Sarah E. Worth. Reaktion books. 2021. (review)British Journal of Aesthetics 64 (2): 258-260. 2024.
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246Affective Forecasting and Substantial Self-KnowledgeIn Alba Montes Sánchez & Alessandro Salice (eds.), Emotional Self-Knowledge, Routledge. pp. 17-38. 2023.This chapter argues that our self-knowledge is often mediated by our affective self-knowledge. In other words, we often know about ourselves by knowing our own emotions. More precisely, what Cassam has called “substantial self-knowledge” (SSK), such as self-knowledge of one's character, one's values, or one's aptitudes, is mediated by affective forecasting, which is the process of predicting one's emotional responses to possible situations. For instance, a person comes to know that she is courag…Read more
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267On the Putative Epistemic Generativity of Memory and ImaginationIn Anja Berninger & Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination, Routledge. pp. 127-145. 2022.
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21Philosophy and the Art of Writing: Review of Richard Shusterman’s Routledge, 2022, 142 pages. ISBN 9780367354909 (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 10 (1): 89-93. 2023.As the editors of the series, New Literary Theory, proclaim in the preface of the book, the purpose of the series is to make more room in literary theory for playful and accessible approaches to li...
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40Aesthetic Disagreement with Oneself as AnotherEstetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 60 (2): 145-161. 2023.Can disagreement with my past self about aesthetic matters give a reason to reconsider my present aesthetic verdict and if it does, under what conditions? In other words, can such a disagreement be a sign of my failing in my present aesthetic judgement? In this paper, I argue that revising one’s judgement in response to disagreeing with one’s former self is appropriate but only when the former and the present self share the same aesthetic personality. The possibility of failure in one’s aestheti…Read more
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110Imagination as a generative source of justificationNoûs. forthcoming.One of the most exciting debates in philosophy of imagination in recent years has been over the epistemic use of imagination where imagination epistemically contributes to justifying beliefs and acquiring knowledge. This paper defends “generationism about imagination” according to which imagination is a generative source, rather than a preservative source, of justification. In other words, imagination generates new justification above and beyond prior justification provided by other sources. Aft…Read more
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153What Does Pleasure Want?Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1-17. forthcoming.Some philosophers and psychologists share an assumption that pleasure is by nature such that when an experience is pleasurable, an agent is motivated to continue having that experience. In this paper, I dispute this assumption. First, I point out how it does not make sense of the wanting-liking distinction in motivational neuroscience. Second, I present as a counterexample what I call’dynamic pleasure’ which does not motivate retaining one’s focus on the object of original experience but motivat…Read more
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64Self-Knowledge of Desire: When Inference Is Not EnoughInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (4): 381-398. 2022.According to inferentialism about self-knowledge of desire, the basic way in which we come to know what we want is through inference. In this paper, I argue that in a wide range of cases of knowing one’s desire, inference is insufficient. In particular, I look at two inferentialist models, one proposed by Krista Lawlor and the other by Alex Byrne and look at the challenges that they face in securing safe self-ascriptions. In response to these difficulties, I argue that we can explain how inferen…Read more
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138Knowing When to StopAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (1): 65-78. 2024.What are the conditions under which an agent has an aesthetic reason to stop appreciating something? In this paper, I argue that such a reason is dependent not only on the aesthetic properties of the object of appreciation but also on the hedonic state of the agent. Virtuous aesthetic agents who are responsive to aesthetic reasons need to be sensitive to hedonic changes in relation to the object and to recognise when these changes make it appropriate to sever one’s appreciative focus. The result…Read more
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21Politics of Folk Psychology: Believing what Others BelieveTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 36 (3): 361-374. 2021.In this paper, I argue that by attributing beliefs the attributer is pushed toward taking a stand on the content of those beliefs and that what stand they take partially depends on the relationship between the attributer and the attributee. In particular, if the attributee enjoys a higher social standing than the attributer, the latter is disposed to adopt the attributed belief, as long as certain other conditions are met. I will call this view the Adoption-by-Attribution model. Because of the n…Read more
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449How to keep up good appearances: Desire, imagination, and the goodEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 1147-1160. 2021.It is not uncommon to think that having a desire involves taking its object to be good in some sense. This idea has been developed in two directions: either toward a view that understands the positive evaluation in terms of a judgment or belief or a view according to which the relevant evaluation is perception-like. In this article, I defend a novel proposal that takes the positive evaluation of the object of desire to be a kind of imagining.
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490Desire's Own ReasonsJournal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (2): 259-277. 2022.In this essay I ask if there are reasons that count in favor of having a desire in virtue of its attitudinal nature. I call those considerations desire's own reasons. I argue that desire's own reasons are considerations that explain why a desire meets its constitutive standard of correctness and that it meets this standard when its satisfaction would also be satisfactory to the subject who has it. Reasons that bear on subjective satisfaction are fit to regulate desires through experience and ima…Read more
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112Aesthetics of Food PornCritica 53 (157): 123-146. 2021.Enticing food photography which stimulates its viewers’ cravings, often given a dismissive label “food porn,” is one of the most popular contents in contemporary digital media. In this paper, I argue that the label disguises different ways in which a viewer can engage with it. In particular, food porn enables us to engage in cross-modal gustatory imaginings of a specific kind and an image’s capacity to afford such imaginings can contribute to its artistic merit.
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78Being Familiar with What One WantsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (4): 690-710. 2020.Self‐ascriptions of desire seem to differ in their epistemic security. There are easy cases in which a sincere self‐ascription immediately counts as knowledgeable, and there are hard cases in which it is an open question whether an agent actually knows that they have the desire that they take themselves to have. In this paper, I suggest an explanation according to which whether a self‐ascription of desire is easy or hard depends on whether one is familiar with the content of the self‐ascribed de…Read more
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72Vividness as a natural kindSynthese 199 (1-2): 3023-3043. 2020.Imaginings are often characterized in terms of vividness. However, there is little agreement in the philosophical literature as to what it amounts to and how to even investigate it. In this paper, we propose a natural kind methodology to study vividness and suggest treating it as a homeostatic property cluster with an underlying nature that explains the correlation of properties in that cluster. This approach relies on the empirical research on the vividness of mental imagery and contrasts with …Read more
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95The Puzzle of Good Bad MoviesJournal of Aesthetic Education 54 (3): 31-46. 2020.There are bad movies, and there are movies that are so bad that they are good. So-called good bad movies have received a lot of attention from critics and moviegoers in recent years. Many people, including those with good taste, are willing to invest their time and resources in watching and discussing them. In this paper, I will argue that the fact that aesthetically competent consumers of cinema are engaging with good bad movies challenges an intuitive assumption according to which a film merit…Read more
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129Active desirePhilosophical Psychology 32 (6): 945-968. 2019.Desire is commonly understood as a mental state in relation to which we are passive. Since it seems to arise in us spontaneously, without antecedent deliberation, it also seems to constitute a paradigmatic type of mental state which is not up to us. In this paper, I will contest this idea. I will defend a view according to which we can actively shape our desires by controlling the way in which we imagine their contents. This view is supported both by behavioral and neural data which indicate tha…Read more
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72There is Something about the Image: A Defence of the Two-Component View of ImaginationDialectica 72 (1): 121-139. 2018.According to the two-component view of sensory imagination, imaginative states combine qualitative and assigned content. Qualitative content is the imagistic component of the imaginative state and is provided by a quasi-perceptual image; assigned content has a language-like structure. Recently, such a two-component view has been criticized by Daniel Hutto and Nicholas Wiltsher, both of whom have argued that postulating two contents is unnecessary for explaining how imagination represents. In thi…Read more
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132Imaginative resistance as imagistic resistanceCanadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (5): 684-706. 2017.When we are invited to imagine an unacceptable moral proposition to be true in fiction, we feel resistance when we try to imagine it. Despite this, it is nonetheless possible to suppose that the proposition is true. In this paper, I argue that existing accounts of imaginative resistance are unable to explain why only attempts to imagine the truth of moral propositions cause resistance. My suggestion is that imagination, unlike supposition, involves mental imagery and imaginative resistance arise…Read more
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37Pleasures of the Communicative ConceptionGrazer Philosophische Studien 90 (1): 253-272. 2014.In this paper, I criticize Christopher Gauker’s approach to the attributions of desire which identi es them with commands on behalf of others. ese are sup- posed to be needed in situations wherein such commands have to be quali ed in some way. I argue that his account doesn’t manage to make explicit the need for the concept of desire, and I defend my alternative according to which desires are related to our understanding of how commands on a person’s behalf relate to her subjective satisfaction…Read more
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65Beliefs and Desires: from Attribution to EvaluationPhilosophia 45 (1): 359-369. 2017.The ability to attribute beliefs and desires is taken by many to be an essential component of human social cognition, enabling us to predict, explain and shape behaviour and other mental states. In this paper, I argue that there are certain basic responses to attributed attitudes which have thus far been overlooked in the study of social cognition, although they underlie many of the moves we make in our social interactions. The claim is that belief and desire attributions allow for the possibili…Read more
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25Mental State Attribution for InteractionismStudia Philosophica Estonica 9 (1): 184-207. 2016.Interactionists about folk psychology argue that embodied interactions constitute the primary way we understand one another and thus oppose more standard accounts according to which the understanding is mostly achieved through belief and desire attributions. However, also interactionists need to explain why people sometimes still resort to attitude ascription. In this paper, it is argued that this explanatory demand presents a genuine challenge for interactionism and that a popular proposal whic…Read more
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66Without pretense: a critique of Goldman’s model of simulationPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (3): 561-575. 2015.In this paper I criticize Alvin Goldman's simulation theory of mindreading which involves the claim that the basic method of folk psychologically predicting behaviour is to form pretend beliefs and desires that reproduce the transitions between the mental states of others, in that way enabling to predict what the others are going to do. I argue that when it comes to simulating propositional attitudes it isn't clear whether pretend beliefs need to be invoked in order to explain relevant experimen…Read more