This book proposes and defends a new theory of emotional experience. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, with links to contemporary philosophy of mind, it argues that emotional experiences are sui generis states, not to be modelled after other mental states – such as perceptions, judgements, or bodily feelings – but given their own analysis and place within our mental economy. More specifically, emotional experiences are claimed to be feelings-towards-values.

For a century at least, parties have been central to the study of politics. Yet their typical conceptual reduction to a network of power-seeking elites has left many to wonder why parties were ever thought crucial to democracy. This book seeks to retrieve a richer conception of partisanship, drawing on modern political thought and extending it in the light of contemporary democratic theory and practice. Looking beyond the party as organization, the book develops an original account of what it is (...) to be a partisan. It examines the ideas, orientations, obligations, and practices constitutive of partisanship properly understood, and how these intersect with the core features of democratic life. Such an account serves to underline in distinctive fashion why democracy needs its partisans, and puts in relief some of the key trends of contemporary politics. (shrink)

Much contemporary philosophy of emotion has been in broad agreement about the claim that emotional experiences have evaluative content. This paper assesses a relatively neglected alternative, which I call the content-priority view, according to which emotions are responses to a form of pre-emotional value awareness, as what we are aware of in having certain non-emotional evaluative states which are temporally prior to emotion. I argue that the central motivations of the view require a personal level conscious state of pre-emotional value (...) awareness. However, consideration of extant suggestions for the relevant type of evaluative state shows them all to be problematic. As such, I conclude that at present we do not have a persuasive formulation of the content-priority view, and that to get one defenders of the view need to specify which version they are committed to and defend it against the criticisms raised. (shrink)

I start with a brief look at what the classic British intuitionists (Ewing, Broad, Ross) had to say about the relation between judgment and emotion. I then look at some more recent work in the intuitionist tradition and try to develop a conception of moral emotion as a form of practical seeming, suggesting that some moral intuitions are exactly that sort of emotion. My general theme is that the standard contrast between intuition and emotion is a mistake and that intuitionism (...) can happily accommodate the results of recent work in empirical moral psychology. (shrink)

A theology aims to explain the nature of God. A metatheology investigates more fundamental issues concerning how to structure such an intellectual endeavor. This book examines where it is best to start the project of theology in the hope of offering a defensible metatheory from which a complete and elegant theology can be developed.

Knowledge ascriptions are contrast-sensitive. One natural explanation for this is that the knowledge relation is contrastive ( s knows that p rather than q ). But can the binary view of knowledge ( s knows that p ) explain contrast-sensitivity? I review some of the linguistic data supporting contrast-sensitivity, and critique the three main binary explanations for contrast-sensitivity. I conclude that the contrast-sensitivity of knowledge ascriptions shows that knowledge is a contrastive relation.

The history of phenomenology, and its absence, in American philosophy. Phenomenology and so-called “continental philosophy” receive scant attention in most American philosophy departments, despite their foundational influence on intellectual movements such as existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. In Inventing Philosophy’s Other, Jonathan Strassfeld explores this absence, revealing how everyday institutional practices played a determinative role in the development of twentieth-century academic discourse. Conventional wisdom holds that phenomenology’s absence from the philosophical mainstream in the United States reflects its obscurity or even (...) irrelevance to America’s philosophical traditions. Strassfeld refutes this story as he traces phenomenology’s reception in America, delivering the first systematic historical study of the movement in the United States. He examines the lives and works of Marjorie Grene, Alfred Schütz, Hubert Dreyfus, and Iris Marion Young, among others, while also providing a fresh introduction to phenomenological philosophy. (shrink)

Crossing the border into the moral domain changes moral thinking in two ways: (1) the facts at hand become “anthropocentric” facts not easily open to revision, and (2) moral reasoning is often the servant of moral intuitions, making it difficult for people to challenge their own intuitions. Sunstein's argument is sound, but policy makers are likely to resist.

I begin by expressing my sincere thanks to my critics for taking time from their own impressive projects in epistemology to consider mine. Often, in reading their criticisms, I had the feeling of having received more help than I really wanted! But the truth of the matter is that we learn best by making mistakes, and I appreciate the conscientious attention to my work that my critics have shown.

John Doris has recently argued that since we do not possess character traits as traditionally conceived, virtue ethics is rooted in a false empirical presupposition. Gopal Sreenivasan has claimed, in a paper in Mind, that Doris has not provided suitable evidence for his empirical claim. But the experiment Sreenivasan focuses on is not one that Doris employs, and neither is it relevantly similar in structure. The confusion arises because both authors use the phrase ‘cross-situational consistency’ to describe the aspect of (...) character traits that they are concerned with, but neither defines this phrase, and it is ambiguous: Doris uses it in one sense, Sreenivasan in another. Partly for this reason, the objections Sreenivasan raises fail to block the argument Doris provides. In particular, the most reliable data Doris employs, Milgram’s famous study of authority, is entirely immune to Sreenivasan’s objections. Sreenivasan has not shown, therefore, that Doris provides unsuitable evidence for his claim. (shrink)

What contribution can political philosophers make to policy questions, such as the best configuration of the welfare state? On one view, political philosophers set out abstract theories of justice that can guide policy makers in their attempt to transform existing institutions. Yet it rarely seems the case that such a model is used in practice, and it therefore becomes unclear how political philosophy can contribute to policy debates. Following a suggestion from Margaret MacDonald, I consider the view that political philosophers (...) can contribute by drawing attention to relatively neglected values. I develop this view to add the possibility that political philosophers can try to correct a situation in which a particular value, though important, can come to be too highly emphasised. I illustrate the account by considering the rise of the value of ‘responsibility’ in the welfare state, and ultimately the damage that has been done to society to disadvantaged groups by the over-insistence on the importance of responsibility. (shrink)

Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling presents a reductio ad absurdum regarding the time-spans subject to moral evaluation. The text's classic dilemma depends on assuming that we only evaluate discrete, contextless instants. The pseudonymous author constantly seeks the single instant or moral “photograph” that indicates Abraham's status. Doing so, however, extracts scripture's moral legislation out from narrative, resulting in theological paralysis and thereby requiring an alternative temporal vocabulary for evaluating Abraham. Fear and Trembling contains an under-explored alternative that sets Abraham within (...) the covenantal narrative's temporality. The paper explores the consequences of shifting from evaluating instants to evaluating narrative durations, showing that while Genesis 22 remains a challenging episode, it also offers a model of imaginative faith, fidelity to promises, and hope in the face of trauma that focusing on moral instants overlooks. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently argued that phenomenology is well-suited to help understand the concepts of health, disease, and illness. The general claim is that by better analysing how illness appears to or is experienced by ill individuals—incorporating the first-person perspective—some limitations of what is seen as the currently dominant third-person or ‘naturalistic’ approaches to understand health and disease can be overcome. In this article, after discussing some of the main insights and benefits of the phenomenological approach, I develop three general (...) critiques of it. First, I show that what is often referred to as naturalism tends to be misunderstood and/or misrepresented, resulting in straw-man arguments. Second, the concept of normality is often problematically employed such that some aspects of naturalism are actually presupposed by many phenomenologists of medicine. Third, several of the key phenomenological insights and concepts, e.g. having vs. being a body, the alienation of illness, the epistemic role of the first-person perspective, and the idea of health within illness, each bring with them new problems that limit their utility. While acknowledging the possible contributions of phenomenology, these criticisms point to some severe limitations of bringing phenomenological insights to bear on the problems facing philosophy of medicine that should be addressed if phenomenology is to add anything substantially new to its debates. (shrink)

Causation and the laws of nature are nothing over and above the pattern of events, just like a movie is nothing over and above the sequence of frames. Or so I will argue. The position I will argue for is broadly inspired by Hume and Lewis, and may be expressed in the slogan: what must be, must be grounded in what is.

Perhaps the biggest radically unsolved problem about Part II of the Ethics is something that occurs in Part I, namely the definition of ‘attribute’ as ‘that which intellect perceives of substance as its essence’ (1d4). The term ‘intellect’ brings in just one of the attributes, namely thought, raising the question: A. What special privilege does thought have that entitles it to figure in the explanation of the..

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Alberta, as well as across multiple sites in Canada, this article describes and discusses the practices and experiences of heating off the grid with renewable resources (i.e. passive solar and wood). Heating with renewable resources is herein examined in order to apprehend the cultural significance of dynamics of corporeal involvement in the process of creating indoor warmth. A distinction between energy for which corporeal involvement is relatively high (hot energy) and relatively low (cool energy) (...) is then made. Off-grid indoor warmth is therefore understood as a hot energy requiring intense involvement. The authors argue that thermoception is a type of affect with catalytic properties. (shrink)

The debate concerning the moral permissibility of using human embryos in human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research has long centred on the question of the embryo's supposed right to life. However, in focussing only on this question, many opponents to hESC research have escaped rigorous scrutiny by making vague and unfounded appeals to the concept of moral respect in order to justify their opposition to certain hESC practices. In this paper, I offer a critical analysis of the concept of moral (...) respect, and its use to support the intuitively appealing principle of proportionality in hESC research. I argue that if proponents of this principle are to justify its adoption by appealing to the concept of moral respect, they must explain two things concerning the nature of the moral respect owed to embryos. First, they must explain which particular aspect of the embryo is morally relevant, and why. Second, they must explain why some uses of embryos in research fail to acknowledge what is morally relevant about the embryo, and thereby involve a violation of the moral respect that they are due. I shall show that providing such explanations may be more difficult than it first appears. (shrink)

It is, I think, possible to generate a variation of McTaggart’s (Mind 17:457–474, 1908 ) paradox that infects all extant versions of presentism. This is not to say that presentism is doomed to failure. There may be ways to modify presentism and I can’t anticipate all such modifications, here. For the purposes of the paper I’ll understand ‘presentism’ to be the view that for all x , x is present (cf. Crisp ( 2004 : 18)). It seems only right that, (...) at a conference devoted to McTaggart’s work on time, we continue to pursue new ways in which his now infamous arguments remain relevant to us today. (shrink)

We are defined by our faces. They give identity but, equally importantly, reveal our moods and emotions through facial expression. So what happens when the face cannot move? This book is about people who live with Mbius Syndrome, which has as its main feature an absence of movement of the muscles of facial expression from birth.

: "Therapeutic misconception" has been misconstrued, and some of the newer, mistaken interpretations are troublesome. They exaggerate the distinction between research and treatment, revealing problems in the foundations of research ethics and possibly weakening informed consent.

A philosophical travel memoir, discussing Nietzsche's life and philosophy while visiting his three favorite residences, Nice, Turin, and Sils-Maria.

This essay focuses on James Baldwin's treatment of the Atlanta child murders in The Evidence of Things Not Seen, a book that began as a series of reports for Playboy magazine. Returning to the United States from France, Baldwin not only reported on the child murders, but offered a treatise on terror as well: a treatise that distinguishes an imagined or remembered menace from a terror that might be considered constitutive, ontolological. This terror persists, Baldwin maintains, as the negative cause (...) of African American existence. Insistently political, the kernel of nonbeing to which Baldwin's thought appeals is not the grand abstraction of death but the becoming-abstract of abduction and permanent disappearance. Baldwin's essay on the Atlanta child murders thus seeks not only to bear witness to the plight of the missing children, but of the persistence of this “terror of being destroyed” as well. This essay revisits Baldwin's late work, often dismissed as either lackluster polemic or as sermonizing reportage, as no less apocalyptic a work of Pauline witnessing than The Fire Next Time. (shrink)

Perhaps nothing so radically changes one’s value perspective as psychosis. In a moving article, writer Mark Lukach describes his wife Giulia’s struggle with an illness presumed to be bipolar disorder. A woman with a “concrete life plan … to become a director of marketing at a fashion company and have three kids by the time she turned 35”, Gulia’s acute psychosis resulted in her ranting “unintelligible babble about heaven, hell, angels, and the devil”. For her husband, Gulia had become a (...) different person; “the person you love is no longer there, replaced by a stranger who’s shocking and exotic”.Yet, change to value systems is ubiquitous and usually far less dramatic than that occurring in... (shrink)

Within the philosophy of time there has been a growing interest in positions that deny the reality of time. Those positions, whether motivated by arguments from physics or metaphysics, have a shared conclusion: time is not real. What has not been made wholly clear, however, is exactly what it entails to deny the reality of time. Time is unreal, sure. But what does that mean? There has been only one sustained attempt to spell out exactly what it would mean to (...) endorse a temporal error theory; a theory that denies the reality of time—Baron & Miller’s ‘What is temporal error theory?’. Despite the fact that their paper makes significant strides in spelling out what would be required of a temporal error theory, my claim in this paper is that their position must be rejected and replaced. As well as looking to reject Baron and Miller’s position, I also look to provide that replacement. (shrink)

A critical question for epistemologists is whether there are any inter-subjective requirements for having a justified belief C whether there is an >us= in >justification=. One recent epistemologist that has addressed this issue is Keith Lehrer. In Knowledge, Lehrer presents a..

However, throughout his career he regularly lectured on a wide range of moral and political philosophers of the past. This volume collects these previously unpublished lectures.

Our choices about what to eat have crucial implications for our stomachs, the welfare of animals, the natural environment, the arrangement of our society, our pleasure, and our health. So a lot is hanging on our decisions about what we eat. Moreover, these are not merely hypothetical ivory tower cases: every one of us typically makes these decisions (or has them made on our behalf) several times daily!

ABSTRACTThis rejoinder represents a final installment in a debate between myself and Paul Gunn over the feasibility and desirability of deliberative democracy. Here I argue that our debate has helped clarify an ambivalence in the literature surrounding the ends and means of deliberative democracy. I specify two ways to understand both ends and means, establish their importance in deliberative theory, and show how they can be combined. I conclude by showing how this systemic view incorporates and overcomes several challenges facing (...) modern democracy, such as the necessity of expert authority, the role of partisanship, and the problem of social complexity. (shrink)

Ein zentrales Anliegen Richard Wollheims war es, Erkenntnisse der Psychoanalyse für die Philosophie fruchtbar zu machen. Mit dem Konzept des „körperlichen Ich” verweist Wollheim auf die mannigfaltigen Aspekte der körperlichen Repräsentation geistiger Zustände. Sei es, dass psychische Zustände durch körperliche Metaphern ausgedrückt werden, sei es, dass sie als physische Ereignisse repräsentiert oder halluziniert werden und als solche ihre Wirkung entfalten. Diese Repräsentationen eröffnen überraschende Zugänge zu den Funktionsweisen des menschlichen Geistes.