This major volume of original essays maps the place of emotion in human nature, through a discussion of the relation between consciousness and body; by analysing the importance of emotion for human agency by pointing to the ways in which practical rationality may be enhanced, as well as hindered, by emotions; and by exploring questions of value in making sense of emotions at a political, ethical and personal level. Leading researchers in the field reflect on the nature of human feelings, (...) how and why we understand what other people feel, and the way in which our values become involved in specific emotional phenomena, such as guilt, fear, shame, amusement, or love. This collection addresses important questions in the philosophy of mind and comments on the implications of research in biology, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory for the philosophical understanding of emotions. (shrink)

Talk of the unconscious in the philosophy of emotions concerns twothings. It can refer to an emotion whose existence is not in any way presentto consciousness. Or, it can refer to emotional phenomena whose meaning lies in the unconscious. My interest here is in the former issue of whether emotional states can exceed the reach of conscious awareness. I start with a presentation of psychoanalytic views that inform contemporary work toward a cognitivist analysis of emotion. The discussion of cognitivism leads (...) to a consideration of work in experimental psychology that appears to establish the reality of emotional phenomena that transcend conscious awareness. However, I argue that a careful consideration of the relevant evidence falls short of supporting the claim that there are unconscious emotions. (shrink)

Sartre draws a sharp distinction between consciousness, on the one hand, and inner sense or knowledge of (it)self, on the other: ‘La conscience n’est pas un mode de connaisance particullier, appelé sens intime ou connaisance de soi’ (B& N: 7). I explore in detail the meaning of the terms involved in that distinction with a view to highlight its significance.

Phenomenology has done more than any other school of thought for bringing emotions to the forefront of philosophical inquiry. The main reason for the interest shown by phenomenologists in the nature of emotions is perhaps not easily discernible. It might be thought that phenomenologists focus on emotions because the felt the quality of most emotional states renders them a privileged object of inquiry into the phenomenal properties of human experience. That view, in its turn, might lead one to think that (...) phenomenologists attend to emotional experience for its highly subjective character. On the contrary, it is the ability of emotions to engage with reality that makes them crucial for phenomenological analysis. Emotional experience is an opening to the salient features of a situation; undergoing an emotion is a way – and, for some phenomenologists, the principal way – in which the world manifests itself to us. The exact character of that manifestation will be the main topic of discussion in the present chapter. We look at the two major accounts of the way in which that manifestation is structured. The first account is due to Martin Heidegger, and the second is articulated in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

Playwright, novelist, political theorist, literary critic and philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre remains an iconic figure. This book examines his philosophical ideas and methods. It is an introductory guide for the student who wishes to understand Sartre's philosophical argumentation. It reconstructs in plain language key instances of Sartre's philosophical reasoning at work and shows how certain questions arise for Sartre and what philosophical tools he uses to address those questions. Each chapter considers a range of issues in the Sartrean corpus including his (...) conception of phenomenology, the question of self-identity, the Sartrean view of conscious beings, his understanding of the self, his theory of value, human action as both the originator and the outcome of social processes, dialectical reason, and his conception of artistic activity. Hatzimoysis uncovers the philosophical argumentation, identifies Sartre's most important philosophical ideas and addresses the arguments in which those ideas are employed. Readers are able to get a real understanding of Sartre's approach to the activity of philosophising and how his method favours certain types of philosophical analysis. (shrink)

“Passive fear” denotes a certain type of response to a perceived threat; what is distinctive about the state of passive fear is that its behavioral outlook appears to qualify the emotional experience. I distinguish between two cases of passive fear: one is that of freezing in fear; the other is that of fear-involved tonic immobility. I reconstruct the explanatory strategy that is commonly employed in the field of emotion science, and argue that it leaves certain questions about the nature of (...) passive fear unanswered. I subsequently propose an account of passive fear that builds upon a phenomenological theory of emotions, placing emphasis on the interpretation of current research into human tonic immobility. (shrink)

Emotions are Janus-faced: their focus may switch from how a person is feeling deep inside her, to the busy world of actions, words, or gestures whose perception currently affects her. The intimate relation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ seems to call for a redrawing of the traditional distinction of mental states between those that can look out to the world, and those that are, supposedly, irredeemably blind.

Emotions are Janus-faced: their focus may switch from how a person is feeling deep inside her, to the busy world of actions, words, or gestures whose perception currently affects her. The intimate relation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ seems to call for a redrawing of the traditional distinction of mental states between those that can look out to the world, and those that are, supposedly, irredeemably blind.

If emotion is not an arbitrary compilation of fixed types of (descriptive, conceptual, conative, prescriptive) content, nor a state that can be reduced to other types of pre-existing (perceptual, cognitive, behavioral) states, then what sort of thing is it really? Tom Cochrane has proposed that emotions are valent representations of situated concerns. Valent representation is a type of mental content whose function is to detect the presence or absence of certain conditions; what makes that type of content valent is that (...) without needing the mediation of any other state, a response is triggered that is disposed to increase or decrease the presence of the condition represented. I raise doubts about the plausibility of that account in light of recent work in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre is often interpreted as an ideal textbook summarising the main points of Sartre’s quite technical argumentation in his academic writings; it illustrates his theoretical views on the nature of time, while it presents a philosophical justification of art through the adventures of the novel’s hero, who is none other than the author in disguise. I show that, despite its popularity, this interpretation is incorrect. I provide an alternative reading of the novel that would identify its core (...) themes, in a way that illuminates the reflective distance between the fictional agent and the philosophical narrator. (shrink)

A familiar theme in the history of ideas is the appearance, in different periods, of identical claims with their theoretical titles reversed. I wish to examine an important instance of this phenomenon, and to analyse its implications for contemporary metaphysics.

I analyse the concept of sentimental value, with a view to identifying its relations with the notions of intrinsic, final, extrinsic and instrumental value. The analysis explores issues arising in the understanding of an object as sentimentally valuable, and reveals a serious tension in the common sense extrinsic conception of sentimental value.

What it is about mood, as a specific type of affect, that makes it not easily amenable to standard models of rationality? It is commonly assumed that the cognitive rationality of an affective state is somehow depended upon how that state is related to what the state is about, its so called intentional object; but, given that moods do not seem to bear an intentional relation to an object, it is hard to see how they can be in the offing (...) for rational assessment. In the first part of the paper I outline three ways of attributing intentionality to moods, raising for each one of them a series of problems, thus casting doubt on the viability of an intentionalist grounding for the rationality of moods. I then move to an examination of the view of moods as background feelings, which are intimately related to how we perceive the world; however, in my view, that approach fails to provide standards of assessment that would permit appraising the mood itself as rational or irrational. Finally, I look at an account of moods as mechanisms whose function is to monitor the balance between environmental demands and one’s physical or psychological resources. That is a promising way to proceed in our exploration of mood states; it faces though some formidable phenomenological challenges. All in all, defending the rationality of moods calls for a rethinking of the assumptions that are prevalent in the current literature over the representational dimension of affective states. (shrink)

Emotions are Janus-faced: their focus may switch from how a person is feeling deep inside her, to the busy world of actions, words, or gestures whose perception currently affects her. The intimate relation between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ seems to call for a redrawing of the traditional distinction of mental states between those that can look out to the world, and those that are, supposedly, irredeemably blind.

It seems hard to comprehend how, during mood experience, the ‘inner’ meets the ‘outer’. The objective of this paper is to show that a currently popular attempt at providing a neat solution to that problem fails. The attempt comes under the heading of representationalism, according to which the phenomenal aspects of mood are exhausted by its representational content. I examine three accounts of intentionality developed within the representationalist camp, and I show that they incur phenomenological and metaphysical costs.

Analytical descriptivism purports to identify the meaning of ethical sentences with that of the descriptive sentences that capture the clauses of mature folk morality. The paper questions the plausibility of analytical descriptivism by examining its implications for the semantics, epistemology and metaphysics of morals. The discussion identifies some of the reasons why the analytical descriptivist fails to deliver a reductionist account of normativity.

Anthony Hatzimoysis gives readers a clear understanding of Sartre's approach to the activity of philosophising and shows how his method favours certain types of analysis. Each chapter considers a range of issues in the Sartrean corpus, including his conception of phenomenology, the question of self-identity, the Sartrean view of conscious beings, his understanding of the self, his theory of value, his notion of human action as both the originator and the outcome of social processes, dialectical reason, and his conception (...) of artistic activity. Providing an introductory guide in plain language for the reader who wishes to understand Sartre's philosophical arguments, The Philosophy of Sartre reconstructs key instances of Sartre's philosophical reasoning at work and shows how certain questions arise for Sartre and what philosophical tools he uses to address those questions. (shrink)

In this article, I reply to the charge, made in Analysis by Anthony Hatzimoysis, that my criticism of Sartre's Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions is unwarranted. I argued that Sartre offers two lines of reasoning about emotional experience that are in clear conflict with each other. Hatzimoysis counters that we can and should read Sartre's text in a way that avoids attributing inconsistency to Sartre. In response, I argue that Hatzimoysis' suggestion about how one might (...) read the text does not in fact remove the central inconsistency. Pace Hatzimoysis, the inconsistency that I identified remains. (shrink)

This paper examines the perceived ethical values of Malaysian managers. It is based on the opinions of 15 hypothetical ethical/unethical business situations from the 81 managers who agreed to participate in the survey. The findings of this study showed that these Malaysian managers have high ethical values. However 53% of the respondents believed that the ethical standards of today are lower than that of 15 years ago. Apparently, this is related to the existence of many unethical business practices prevalent in (...) the modern business world. The behavior of one's immediate superior is the most important factor in influencing managers to commit unethical practices. The results also indicate only a slight variation among the managers in terms of perceived ethical values by virtue of job position, job specialization, type of business activity or the size of the business organization. (shrink)

The essays featured in this collection seek to deepen our understanding of self-knowledge, to solve some of the genuine (and to resolve some of the spurious) ...

The point of formalisation is to model various aspects of natural language. Perhaps the main use to which formalisation is put is to model and explain inferential relations between different sentences. Judged solely by this objective, a formalisation is successful in modelling the inferential network of natural language sentences to the extent that it mirrors this network. There is surprisingly little literature on the criteria of good formalisation, and even less on the question of what it is for a formalisation (...) to mirror the inferential network of a natural language or some fragment of it. This paper takes some exploratory steps towards a quantitative account of the main ingredient in the goodness of a formalisation. We introduce and critically examine a mathematical model of how well a formalisation mirrors natural-language inferential relations. (shrink)

David Lewis objected to theories that posit necessary connections between distinct entities and to theories that involve a magical grasping of their primitives. In On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis objected to nondescript ersatzism on these grounds. The literature contains several reconstructions of Lewis’ critique of nondescript ersatzism but none of these interpretations adequately address his main argument because they fail to see that Lewis’ critique is based on broader methodological considerations. I argue that a closer look at his methodology (...) reveals the broader objection he presented against nondescript ersatzism. This objection, I further argue, remains a challenge for the ersatzer who posits structure-less entities as possible worlds. (shrink)

Public speakers like politicians carefully craft their words to maximize the clarity, impact, and persuasiveness of their messages. However, these messages can be shaped by more than words. Gestures play an important role in how spoken arguments are perceived, conceptualized, and remembered by audiences. Studies of political speech have explored the ways spoken arguments are used to persuade audiences and cue applause. Studies of politicians’ gestures have explored the ways politicians illustrate different concepts with their hands, but have not focused (...) on gesture's potential as a tool of persuasion. Our paper combines these traditions to ask first, how politicians gesture when using spoken rhetorical devices aimed at persuading audiences, and second, whether these gestures influence the ways their arguments are perceived. Study 1 examined two rhetorical devices—contrasts and lists—used by three politicians during U.S. presidential debates and asked whether the gestures produced during contrasts and lists differ. Gestures produced during contrasts were more likely to involve changes in hand location, and gestures produced during lists were more likely to involve changes in trajectory. Study 2 used footage from the same debates in an experiment to ask whether gesture influenced the way people perceived the politicians’ arguments. When participants had access to gestural information, they perceived contrasted items as more different from one another and listed items as more similar to one another than they did when they only had access to speech. This was true even when participants had access to only gesture (in muted videos). We conclude that gesture is effective at communicating concepts of similarity and difference and that politicians (and likely other speakers) take advantage of gesture's persuasive potential. (shrink)

This companion is a cutting-edge primer to critical forms of the posthumanities and the feminist posthumanities, aimed at students and researchers who want to catch up with the recent theoretical developments in various fields in the humanities, such as new media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, human animal studies, postcolonial critique, philosophy and environmental humanities. It contains a collection of nineteen new and original short chapters introducing influential concepts, ideas and approaches that have shaped and developed (...) new materialism, inhuman theory, critical posthumanism, feminist materialism, and posthuman philosophy. A resource for students and teachers, this comprehensive volume brings together established international scholars and emerging theorists, for timely and astute definitions of a moving target – posthuman humanities and feminist posthumanities. (shrink)

The total ideology of the revolutionary-political themes of Ukrainian consciousness of the twentieth century, the poetization of the absurdly inverted hierarchy of values, was opposed by the new generation of artists with their philosophical and ethical orientation of their creativity. As I.Franko notes, they "... sought a completely modern European way to portray the peculiarity of the life of the Ukrainian people," revealing the unique collisionality of human existence, the diversity of psychological types, ideological orientations, and the human experience of (...) its existence on the background of this difficult time. However, Ukrainian writersphilosophers who talently laid the foundations of national culture, but are now returning to the generations of the Shattered Renaissance, filling black and bloody spots of troubled history of Ukraine. Among them are V. Pidmogylny, B. Antonovenko-Davidovich, G. Kosinka, D. Falkivsky, M.Ivchenko, T.Osmachka, E.Pluzhnik. This is a non-exhaustive list of the leading figures of the post-revolutionary period who were removed from the creative field, whose works are the golden fund of Ukrainian culture. (shrink)

The problem of human religious consciousness can be attributed to the category of "eternal" philosophical problems, which have never been removed and cannot be removed from the agenda of humanity. The world outlook of a person is updated throughout history as the person, conditions and content of his life, his goals, ideals and perspectives are constantly changing. In each era, this problem retains its fundamental importance, and, being part of all significant philosophical systems, means not a simple continuation of a (...) particular tradition, but the identification of the changing aspects and historical perspectives of human existence. The question of what consciousness, which is its nature and essence, is of great ideological, ideological and practical importance, since it touches upon the foundations of human existence, content and purpose of life. (shrink)

Christian preaching, the main purpose of which is to educate a person in the spirit of the Christian worldview, should answer the questions of the present, give believers concrete recommendations and patterns of behavior in life situations. At the same time, the sermon is based not on the personal opinion of a priest or pastor, but expresses a confessional point of view on one or another problem of modern life facing believers. This point of view, as a rule, is formulated (...) in special documents of confessions, the totality of which is called "Social doctrine of the church". (shrink)

The article provides, for the first time in the philosophical literature, a general description of the Konigsberg Kant studies as a special local direction in the history of philosophy. Core activities in this direction formed the Society of Kant’s Friends, as well as "archival Kant studies" — the work of collecting, annotating and publishing the manuscript heritage, correspondence and lecture notes Kant. Given the large volume of primary and secondary sources, we propose a variant of specification of structure of Kant (...) Studies in Königsberg — four lines of activity: popularization; biographical research and publications; collection and publication of manuskript heritage and conspects of lectures; the interpretation and reception of Kant's ideas. Detailed presented is the history of the first line — popularization of Kants philosophy. The activities of K. Rosenkranz and Society of Kant’s Friends, as well as history of creation of books of J. Schulz and K. Stavenhagen, articles, reports and brochures of R. Brückmann and O. Schöndörffer are described, their content is characterized. There are formulated some conclusions about the main value of this work for Kant studies, for the birth and development of the Kantianism, about the relationship of popularization with other lines of Kant studies in Königsberg, about cooperation of Königsberg researchers of Kant's life and philosophy with each other, and about continuity in their work. It is shown that the popularization work in all its forms has been conducted to date and the first to the last years of this trend, has played a major role in the emergence and development of other lines of activity. An author's translation of a number of fragments of the above publications. The prospects of the development of indepth and detailed analysis of the described compositions, for which this article can serve as a reference point. (shrink)

Purpose. To examine the existential anthropology of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski, in order to demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing the universal-spiritual, as human in human being, apart from the individual-existential in him, and to reveal the hierarchical correlation of biosocial, existential and spiritual spheres in personality. Theoretical basis. Within existential philosophy the author differentiates two separate traditions and proceeds from the insufficiency of the distinction of existential sphere, proposed by phenomenological tradition, showing the necessity of its correlation with the (...) spiritual sphere as a sphere of humanity, proposed by non-phenomenological tradition of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski. Originality. The author presents the anthropological conception of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski, in which human personality is understood as unity of individual-existential and universal-spiritual, which requires a special trans-empirical field of culture, which contains senses, images and symbols of humanity. Also, the author presents the recent developments of existential thinkers in distinguishing existential and spiritual dimensions, both not reducible to the physical and social dimensions. Conclusions. In both existential traditions, the specifically human was founded as a trans-biological and trans-social phenomenon, which appears as indefinable and non-predetermined. But in first tradition, humanity is understood as an existence, as a unique individuality, "project", variant of humanity, equivalent to other variants, and universal is understood as a community of human condition in the world. While in the second tradition, the universal is understood as spiritual. Thus, horizontal level of our private existence, as the process of movement from birth to death, is supplemented by vertical of human, universal ideals and images. Humanity appears as a task, on the way to which human being transcends beyond the limits of his individual "self" to the "super-individual", through inclusion into spiritual community, into universal culture. (shrink)

A. John Simmons is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and creative of today's political philosophers. His work on political obligation is regarded as definitive and he is also internationally respected as an interpreter of John Locke. The characteristic features of clear argumentation and careful scholarship that have been hallmarks of his philosophy are everywhere evident in this collection. The essays focus on the problems of political obligation and state legitimacy as well as on historical theories of property (...) and justice. Cumulatively the collection presents a distinctive social and political philosophy, exploring the nature of our most fundamental rights and obligations, and displaying the power and plausibility of Lockean ideal theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A FAOT ABOUT THE VIRTUES A. CHADWICK RAY Oentrai OoUege Peila, Iowa PHILIPPA FOOT remarks in Virtues and Vices that "with the nota;ble exception of Peter Gea;ch hardly 100.yone sees ·any difficulty in the thought that virtues may sometimes be di·splayed in bald ructions." 1 That a man may use his courage to deplorable ends; that 'a tea.ah.er ma.y show charity in igiving a miudent undeserved credit-these seem to (...) ibe hardly problema.tic possibilities. Yet Aquinas upholds •a definition of morrul virtue as " a good quality o[ the mind, by which we live rightly, of whioh no one cain make bad use,..."2 And Aristotle's conception of the man Ol:f p:riactica:l reason as the standard of moral virtue likewise seems to p!'lec1ude a virtue 's being misused.3 Times change, and rupparently eV'en virtue is not what it used to be. Nevertheless I mean here to survey the resour.ces of moral psyichology in the tradition of.Airistotle to see what sort of grounding can be found for the no-bad-use thesis. Presumably Geach stamds wlmost 1 afone today on this question, because the more traditional view would seem defensible only if it is taken as analytic. We could stipulate that an action wilil be called virtuous only if on balance it is the wisest alternative aivaifaible to the agent, but the utility of such a l Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 15. In After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 216, Macintyre finds Hume, Kant, Mill, and Rawls taking virtues as dispositions to conform to certain rules. To the extent that rules are unreliable, the virtues will be too. 2 Aquinas, Summa theoiogiae, I-II, q.55, a.4. a Aristotle, Nioomaohean Flthios 1106b36-7a2, 1113a30-31. 430 A. CHADWICK RAY concept would be doubtfrnl, and 'virtue' would seem to name no real thing. The'1'e are, after aH, appwrently anomalous cases, as wihen a teacher is moved to indulgence by an undeserving student's plea and seems to show kindness to a fault. The deifense oif the no-bad-use thesis requires us to deny that real kindness is shown here. But if no better justification for the denia~ can be offered than that the action is wrong and so cannot be virtuous, the thesis wil:l express only an a11bitrary decision about how to use 'virtue ' and related terms. But if such deni1als can he justified by appeal to facts about human nature, then the no.:brud-use thesis itself may perhaps be taken a;s descriptive of certain realities constitutive of human life. After considel'ing some of the conditions of vir:tuous action and the possibility of degrees of virtue (section III), I shaill argue (IV and V) that the opening sentence of Aristotle 's Nicomachean Ethics affords a bctua:l ba;sis for sustaining the no-had-use thesis as descriptive of virtues as we find them; that if "every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good " is perhaps an overstatement, still the humanness and intelligibility of an action would seem to depend on its aiming at some good; and that it is largely by trying to consider actions independently of the goods they aim a;t that we imagine virtues able to se1we unworthy ends. Payffig fuH rega11d to the purposiveness of human action and the desires expressed in it will also make it possible (VI) to avnid oonoluding with Aristotle that the virtues are inseparable from eaich other. I conclude (VII) with some brief refteetion on the meaning of my departures from Aristotle. Before offering my own interpretation of the Aristotelian resources, though, I briefly contend for the reality of moral virtues (as tiraditiona1ly understood ) against conventioIJJa1ist interpretations ('section I) and then (H) consider an ailtemative account (roughly Geach's) of the nature of the virtues that would sa¥e the no-bad-use thesis. A FACT ABOUT THE VIRTUES 431 I. Virtues as Teleological Di8}Jositions Why indeed speak of vi1rtues at a1l? Behavior would seem to be describahle and e:x:p1a... (shrink)