Thumos seminar (archives)

Here you can find all the past programs of the Thumos seminar. The actual program is available here.

Autumn 2023

September 21, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Andrea Rivadulla Duró (Geneva)

Iconic Prioritization and Representational Silence in Emotion

Emotions can be insensitive to certain attributes of a situation: Fear of flying is not always reduced by remembering air crash probabilities. A large body of evidence shows that information on probabilities, large numerical counts, or intentions is frequently disregarded in the elicitation and regulation of emotions. To date, no existing theory comprehensively accounts for the features that tend to be overlooked by emotion. In this talk I call attention to the common denominator of such features: they cannot be perceived nor contribute to the iconic representation of events. For instance, the exceedingly low probability of a plane crash does not affect its imagistic representation (i.e., the iconic representation of the event is silent about the event’s probability). This paper introduces the Iconic Prioritization Hypothesis, positing that the prioritization of the iconic format in emotion can explain the neglect of information that is representationally silent in this format. Delving into the causes of this format prioritization, I argue that emotion may favour iconicity as it is the format of immediate information about our surroundings (perception) and of stored first-hand evidence (episodic memory). Lastly, the hypothesis's compatibility with philosophical theories of emotion causation and its implications for experimental research are examined.

September 28, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Radu Bumbacea (Geneva)

An Acquaintance Principle in Ethics

I will argue for what I call ‘an acquaintance principle’ when it comes to our ethical judgments of attachments, such as those involved in love and friendship. The claim is that the value of an individual attachments is revealed in that instance and is only minimally connected to a general description of it. It will follow that if we want to understand the value of attachments in human life, we should not ponder on the value of general characteristics of such attachments, but rather acquaint ourselves with remarkable instances, such as those depicted in great works of literature.

October 5, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Benjamin Matheson (Berne)

Collective Guilt

This paper investigates collective guilt, including its nature, whether it is ever fitting to feel, and its ethical and political significance. As we’ll see, to understand collective guilt, we must not only understand guilt, but also the nature of collectives. Thus, this paper also investigates the nature of collectives. I will develop and defend an account of collective guilt according to which it is felt by a member of a group about a group wrong. I will consider whether such guilt can ever be fitting, but I will also argue that whether it is fitting misses its point. I argue that collective guilt is valuable because it can lead to a person taking responsibility for the wrongs of their group and because it aims to steer the attitudes, in particular the values, of a group.

October 12-13, 2023 – Conference in Aix-en-Provence

Programme here

Venue: Université d'Aix-Marseille, Bât. Multimédia, Salle de colloque 2.

October 19-20, 2023 – Warwick-Geneva-Leipzig Interdepartmental Workshop

Programme here

Venue: Université de Genève, Espace Colladon, Rue Jean-Daniel-Colladon 2.

October 26, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Agnès Baehni (Geneva)

Let Me Blame Myself 

The tendency to treat other-blame as the paradigmatic form of blame has provided fertile ground for various misunderstandings about the nature and norms of self-blame. As a result, two objections have recently been directed against self-blame. The first, championed by David Shoemaker, targets the coherence of moral self-blame by claiming that neither moral self-anger nor guilt can constitute self-blame. The second, raised by Patrick Todd and Brian Rabern, targets the moral dimension of self-blame by claiming that it is always inappropriate to blame oneself because one always lacks the standing to do so. In this presentation, I argue that both objections stem from a similar misconception of the links between self-blame and other-blame and that they can both be overcome if one treats self-blame as a distinct phenomenon. 

November 2, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

André Sant'Anna (Geneva)

Deweyan Experiences and the Aesthetics of Remembering

In Art as Experience, John Dewey offered what is arguably the most influential pragmatist account of the nature of aesthetic experience. A crucial feature of this account, which has been at the core of much contemporary interest in Dewey’s work in aesthetics, is the idea that aesthetic experiences are not restricted to the objects of the “fine arts”. For Dewey, even the most ordinary of experiences, such as enjoying a meal at a restaurant or having a conversation with a friend, can have an aesthetic quality as long as it has a specific internal structure—that is, one in which there is rhythmic progression between phases that ends in a culmination point. Building on this idea, my goal in this paper is to argue that some occurrences of personal remembering have the relevant internal structure that, according to Dewey, makes an experience aesthetic in nature. More specifically, I will argue that occurrences of remembering can be “Deweyan experiences” when they have narrative structure. In discussing the role played by narrative structure in attributing aesthetic quality to remembering, I will identify some key features of remembering that make it particularly suited to being experienced aesthetically. These features, I will argue, highlight crucial differences between remembering and other forms of narrative thinking vis-à-vis their aesthetic character.

November 9, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Rebecca Wallbank (Geneva)

Trust and Aesthetic Authenticity

It has been argued that many of us are committed to a certain kind of aesthetic ideal wherein we ought to live our lives with aesthetic authenticity. It has also been argued that deference to aesthetic testimony undermines our pursuit of this kind of aesthetic ideal. This paper will argue that this kind of argument operates on a flawed conception of what it is to live our lives with aesthetic authenticity, and relatedly a flawed conception of what it means to trust others when conducting deferential engagements. Such misconceptions have had significant consequences, many have failed to see the real problem with deference to aesthetic testimony, and more interestingly, the real virtues. 

November 16, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Angela Abatista (Geneva/Grenoble)

Positive Emotions and Feeling of Meaning in Life

This presentation aims to address the limitations of current psychological models of subjective well-being in fully comprehending the role of positive emotions within the context of eudemonic well-being. The discussion will focus on integrating existing research on self-transcendent positive emotions into the framework and assert that positive emotions extend beyond mere pleasurable experiences. Instead, they can serve as foundational elements for the self-transcendent experience of imbuing life with a sense of meaning. The theoretical framework presented here will draw support from three experimental studies, collectively suggesting a distinct and noteworthy connection between a specific category of self-transcendent positive emotions and experiencing meaning in life.

November 23, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Julia Langkau & Mathilde Cappelli (Geneva)

Is Fantasizing a Kind of Creative Imagining?

In this talk, we aim to distinguish creative imagining from fantasizing. Fantasizing is usually understood as a form of pleasurable imagining: fantasizing seems to always involve a positively valenced affective component, whereas imagining can be emotionally neutral. Creative imagining can be defined as imagining according to what one values, which can but does not have to be pleasurable. So, are cases of pleasurable creative imagining simply cases of fantasizing? To answer this question, we will look at intuitive cases of both and then explore more ambiguous cases in which it is unclear whether we are concerned with fantasy or creative imagination.

November 30, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Patrizia Pedrini (Geneva)

Normative Abuse in Personal Relationships (and Its Many Subtleties)

Abusing relationships are a dramatic reality, and are of diverse sorts. Psychologists are generous in instructing us about how to identify abusing techniques and how to counteract them and protect us from them. We all have the intuition that abusing techniques involve the violation of something absolutely fundamental of us qua persons and agents—centrally, some basic form of respect which is instrumental to grant us an integrity that grounds our psychological and practical well-being. But what does this integrity exactly amount to?

In this paper I wish to explore the nature of such integrity and the many ways in which it can be attacked by forms of abuse that need not reach egregious cases of psychological and/or physical violence, although the latter can (and dramatically do) happen. By taking stock of some of the main tenets of recent works on “normative isolation” (Bagnoli 2023) and on the perturbance of the “normative landscape” (Sliwa, forthcoming), I will suggest that such integrity is best qualified as normative integrity and that all attempts to produce a morally illegitimate modification of the normative field within which we live count as a normative abuse targeting normative integrity. I will distinguish legitimate and illegitimate attempts to produce modifications of the normative field of others, and I will show how all forms of morally illegitimate modifications belong to one unique spectrum of violations, ranging from egregious to less egregious forms.

My aim and hope is to contribute to a general increase of ethical awareness and self-awareness about forms of abuse that, given their subtleties, may well escape our moral and psychological attention, not only as potential (more or less conscious) victims, but also as potential (more or less conscious) perpetrators.

December 7-8, 2023 – Trusting State, Trusting Science Conference

Programme here

Venue: Université de Genève, Espace Colladon, Rue Jean-Daniel-Colladon 2.

December 13, 2023 – Supplemental Seminar (16h30 -18h00 | Campus Biotech, Room H8-01-C)

Artūrs Logins (Laval), in collaboration with Benoît Guilielmo

Suspension as Mood

Suspension of judgement is a ubiquitous phenomenon in our lives. It is also relevant for several debates in contemporary epistemology (e.g. evidentialism/pragmatism; peer-disagreement/higher-order evidence; inquiry). The goal of this paper is to arrive at a better understanding of what suspension of judgement is. We first question the popular assumption that we call the Triad view according to which there are three and only three (paradigmatic) doxastic attitudes, namely, belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment. We elaborate a cumulative argument regarding crucial differences between belief/disbelief and suspension and conclude tentatively that suspension is not a doxastic state. On the constructive side, we defend the positive thesis (with special attention to justification/rationality and reasons for suspension) that suspension is rather an affective phenomenon, viz. a sort of mood.  Finally, we consider further consequences of our view for contemporary debates in epistemology, and how it relates to ancient skepticism.

December 14, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Alex Grzankowski  (London)

Emotions as Transitions

One task of psychology is to identify cognitive capacities. We have a capacity to parse sentences, to identify faces, to sort things by their colour, and so on. Capacities serve as theoretical data – they are observed phenomena that one then seeks to better understand. One thing we might wish to understand is how these capacities are implemented. Take sentence parsing. Is this something achieved through some compositional process or, more like Natural Language Processing AI (e.g. GPT), by predicting the next word or token based on the previous words and training data? What structures underly our ability to parse sentences? There are likely to be many candidates, at least in principle.

In order to uncover the inner workings of our capacities, we look to ‘effects’. Most of us have the capacity to distinguish between spoken ‘ba’ and ‘fa’ sounds. One thought is that this is achieved through aural sensitivities that detect changes in vibration picked up by the eardrum. But the McGurk Effect suggests that there is more to the story. Without changing the incoming vibrations, sound experience can be modulated by showing a video of a mouth making a ‘ba’ sound or a ‘fa’ sound with a consistent sound overlaid. We learn that our overall auditory experiences are at least in part determined by visual cues in addition to what’s first picked up by our eardrums. The McGurk Effect gives us a hint into the inner workings of audition and helps us better understand the capacity to discriminate sounds of a certain sort.

In the present paper, the focus is on emotional capacities and a well-known effect – recalcitrance. Recalcitrant emotions, such as fearing the dog even though one knows that the dog is harmless or being angry with one’s partner even when one realises it was only in a dream that the partner was nasty, have played the role of effect in much theorising about emotions. But in my view, we’ve stayed a bit too close to home, aiming to fit the effect into a paradigm – the representationalist paradigm – that isn’t fit for purpose. I will use this criticism as a launching off point to introduce a different way of thinking about emotions that is better suited to making sense of recalcitrance. I will argue that emotions are transitions between representational states rather than being representational states themselves. The view is better suited to make sense of recalcitrance and, at the end of the paper, I will offer reasons for thinking that main points that speak in favour of a representationalist approach to emotion can be recaptured or explained away by the transitions view.

December 21, 2023 —Thumos Seminar

Emma Tieffenbach (Lugano/Zürich)

Is Warm Glow Giving Self-Defeating?  

Why do people choose to give part of their hard-earned income away? A scientifically popular answer, known as “the warm glow from giving”, is that donors seek praiseworthiness. I first contrast the related warm-glow givers’ desire for deserved praiseworthiness with the non-reflective desire to do good to others, on the one hand, and with the dubious desire to be praised by others. I then characterize warm glow giving as deliberately attempting to act in the way that is required for being the virtuous — i.e. the generous, efficient, charitable or righteous — donors one desires to be. In light of the proposed characterization, I then consider an objection raised against warm glow giving: its alleged vanity. If the desire to be praiseworthy is doomed to fail, there is a paradox: if generosity is a virtue, and if knowledge is a virtue, why isn’t knowledge of one’s virtue also a virtue, and, in fact, why is it a vice, known as moral self-complacency? I review and argue against various ways of making sense of the related paradox. 

Spring 2023
 

February 2, 2022 – Supplemental Thumos Seminar

Artūrs Logins (Laval)

The Zetetic, the Affective, and The Junk​​​​

Gilbert Harman famously observed that "[...] if one believes P, one's view trivially implies "either P or Q," "either P or P," "P and either P or R," and so on." Moreover, he suggested that "There is no point in cluttering one's mind with all thesepropositions." (Harman 1986: 12). Recently, Jane Friedman (Friedman 2018) has elaborated on the suggestion and shown that it conflicts with a basic evidentialist principle that tells us that we are allowed to form beliefs when we have good evidence for the relevant proposition. In this paper, I consider Friedman's suggestion that the best way to solve the conflict is to give up evidentialist norms. Then, I explore a recent response to Friedman's proposal that appeals to norms of inquiry. Finally, I provide a new solution to the conflict that considers the role of affective states in clutter avoidance and distinguishes between (i) attitudes that are genuinely permitted and (ii) attitudes that would be nice to have (or to avoid).

February 23, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni (Geneva)

Introductory session

March 2, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Michael Cholbi (Edinburgh)

Empathy and Psychopaths’ Inability to Grieve

Psychopaths exhibit diminished ability to grieve. Here I address whether this inability can be explained by the trademark feature of psychopaths, namely, their diminished capacity for interpersonal empathy. I argue that this hypothesis turns out to be correct, but requires that we reconceputalise empathy not merely as an ability to relate to other individuals but also as an ability to relate to past and present iterations of ourselves. This re-conceptualism accords well with evidence regarding psychopaths’ intense focus on the temporal present and difficulties in engaging in mental time travel, as well as with the essentially egocentric and identity-based nature of grief.

March 9, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Jonathan Way (Southampton)

Defusing the Normativity Challenge

Philippa Foot famously argued that moral requirements might not be robustly normative. As she put it, they might lack ‘automatic reason giving force’. In this respect, she suggested, they might be like requirements of etiquette, or the rules of a game. Over the last twenty years, many philosophers have raised parallel worries about other kinds of norms. For instance, it’s been questioned whether requirements of rationality, and the norms of fitting emotions are robustly normative. In this paper, I aim to understand and ultimately rebut this challenge, especially as it arises for rationality, and fittingness. I discuss two sets of criteria for robust normativity, and argue that neither underwrites a strong version of the challenge.
 

March 16, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Michele Ombrato (Oxford)

The Temporal Ontology of Emotions: States, Processes, and Boundaries in Emotional Experience

Accounts of emotions often start off with preliminary characterisations of their target phenomena which emphasise internal structural complexity and temporality. Emotion episodes, we are told, are complex psychological reactions of the whole person–typically ranging across affect, sensation, attention, cognition, and motivation–which persist and unfold over time (cf. e.g., Mulligan & Scherer 2012; Robinson 2018; Tappolet 2016). Such preliminary characterisations naturally suggest an approach to the temporal ontology of emotions in terms of composite processes (e.g., Goldie 2012; Robinson 2018). Process-centred approaches, however, have been recently criticised for being unable to account for the synchronic and diachronic unity of emotions as conscious, person-level aspects of the mind (Soteriou 2018; cf. Stout 2022). The proposed alternative consists in treating emotion episodes as clusters of changes in various aspects of the mind associated with some single aspect of the mind, namely the emotion-viz., some nameable emotional state. The aim of this talk is to argue that such single-aspect approaches, unlike process-centred approaches, cannot account for the way in which emotions persist and unfold over time, and that the rejection of process-centred approaches on which they rest has been too hasty: one may in fact account for the unity of emotion episodes as composite processes provided that one specifies the causal relations holding amongst their various components. The argument will proceed as follows. Firstly, I will examine what I take to be the most developed attempt to do justice to the complexity and temporality of emotions within a single-aspect ontological framework (Soteriou 2018), and I will argue that it fails to accommodate some central aspects of the way in which emotions unfold over time. Secondly, I will elaborate the process-centred approach by uncovering and articulating the causal interplay between affect, interest, attention, and mental agency which takes place within emotion episodes. Finally, I will elucidate the relevance of these interactions to the temporal ontology of emotions–specifically, to the way in which emotions persist and unfold over time, their synchronic and diachronic unity and their temporal boundedness.

March 23, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Céline Boisserie-Lacroix (Paris)

Uncertainty, metacognition and emotional rationality

This paper proposes a new perspective on emotional rationality to defend that it would rely on metacognitive vigilance mechanisms. The starting point is the observation that if emotions are often deemed unreliable, thus linking us erroneously to values, this is because emotional situations present a certain level of uncertainty. We start by proposing a typology of situations of emotional uncertainty and highlight the most decisive ones from an epistemic point of view. We then show why it seems reasonable to suppose the involvement of vigilance mechanisms to account for the role of emotions in epistemic rationality. The investigation of their nature and functioning will occupy the rest of this presentation. We assume that vigilance mechanisms take the form of metacognitive feelings of uncertainty and show that this hypothesis is in a better position than competing hypotheses. Finally, by examining the epistemic properties of feelings of uncertainty, we show that the latter play a determining role to increase the epistemic status of emotions.

March 30, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

François Jacquet (Strasbourg)

What exactly is speciesism?

In the animal ethics literature, speciesism is defined in all sorts of manners: as a behaviour or a philosophical view; as necessarily anthropocentric or possibly centred on other species; as involving the idea that species membership is morally significant or compatible with the rejection of that idea; as necessarily immoral or possibly ethically acceptable. In a way, this variety is unobjectionable. Everyone is, to some extent, at liberty to stipulate the sense in which she will use a term. But this is true only within limits. Some definitions are good and some bad, and on which side of the divide a definition falls hinges on whether it satisfies certain desiderata. In this paper, I define speciesism as unequal treatment based on species and argue that this definition is superior to other extant accounts because it meets two desiderata: matching a good account of racism and making the concept of speciesism useful for discussing our duties to nonhuman animals.

April 6, 2023 – Thumos Seminar — exceptionally held at Espace Colladon

Neil Levy (Oxford & Macquarie)

Do People Really Believe Weird Things?

One possible answer to the question “why do people believe weird things" is "they don't." I examine the prospects for this response. I argue that many weird  belief reports are insincere. In addition, however, people sincerely report believing things they don't believe. I examine how they come to mistake their imaginings for beliefs. 

April 20, 2023 — Thumos Seminar

Florian Cova (Geneva)

What makes instrumental music (sound) profound?

In his book Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience, Peter Kivy raises the following question: how is that we sometimes call instrumental music "deep" or "profound"? Indeed, on most accounts of what it takes for a work of art to be profound, an artwork is profound by virtue of its semantic content, and what it speaks about. However, instrumental music seems to have no such semantic content. But how can instrumental music be profound if it is not about anything profound? Several accounts have been put forward to answer this question: some have argued that pure music can truly be profound, while others argue that this is just an illusion. However, both types of account rest on psychological hypotheses about what makes music sound profound. Here, I will report the results of an empirical study in which I investigated the psychological underpinnings of people's experience of instrumental music as "profound". I discuss the implications for the different philosophical accounts in competition.

April 27, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Patrik Engisch (Geneva)

Creativity, Two-Fold

According to the consensus view in philosophy and psychology, creativity is a species of novelty whose differentia is value. This paper argues that such a conception of creativity must face serious problems that make it collapse into a value-neutral conception of creativity. It then argues that a such conception of creativity cannot account for the central notion of a creative practice and its essential tie to value. It then concludes that creativity must be conceived as two-fold: as a species of novelty contingently related to value and as a species of value contingently related to novelty. 

May 4, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Miriam McCormick (Richmond)

Conflict without contradiction: Defending Doxasticism about Implicit attitudes and Self-Deception

Two phenomena that pose a challenge for a certain standard view of belief, and which are my focus here,  are self-deception and holding implicit attitudes. While there are important differences between them, they are puzzling in similar ways. In both cases your behavior seems to indicate that you believe something explicitly disavowed, and we are tempted to ask “what do you really believe”?  My view of belief as emotion can help illuminate what is going on in these cases. If beliefs are emotions, then what we find in these cases is a certain kind of emotional conflict. We can thus employ the resources of emotion theorists to help make sense of these kinds of cases.  I will be defending doxasticism about  implicit attitudes and  self-deception.  That is, I will defend the view that self-deceived agents, and those holding implicit attitudes believe both what they claim to, as well what they disavow. I will begin by offering some clarification about what  I mean when I say that belief is an emotion, and then turn to a discussion of  self-deception and implicit attitudes. Both discussions will have a similar structure. I will introduce earlier attempts to defend doxasticism, discuss problems that have arisen for these views, and show how thinking of beliefs as emotions can address those problems. Thinking about ambivalent or conflicting emotions can help us understand self-deception; thinking about recalcitrant emotions can help us understand implicit attitudes.

May 11, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Lubomira Radoilska (Kent)

The Value of Grit and The Affect of Despair

Contemporary analytic philosophers tend to see akrasia, or acting against one’s better judgement, as a problem of motivation. On this standard view, akratic actions are paradoxical since akratic agents know that they have a better alternative but nevertheless take up the worse, akratic option. In other words, akratic agents know what they are doing. They do not make any epistemic mistakes but – inexplicably – engage in behaviours that they correctly identify as wrong. The thought that akratic agents are not flawed as inquirers and knowers but only as affective agents plays a key role in turning akrasia into a textbook example of motivational only, or practical irrationality. This paper will aim to revise the standard view by emphasizing the epistemic dimensions of the phenomenon, that is, the ways in which akrasia affects both how agents understand their own involvement and how they handle evidence about their prospects of success. The ambition is to show that akratic agents typically rationalise their akrasia. They do not recognise it as paradoxical or irrational. Instead, they reinterpret it as separate goal-directed actions undertaken under conditions that are not ideal for them. This rationalisation of akrasia is closely related to another epistemically deficient habit: akratic agents pay too much heed to evidence that they are unlikely to succeed. In so doing, they display too little of what some philosophers have described as ‘epistemic resilience’ or ‘grit’, which opens them to recurrent despair. The upshot is significant for a number of reasons. First, it helps shed light on the relationship between the affective and the epistemic sides of akrasia. Second, it offers a fuller understanding of the phenomenon as a multi-faced process that unfolds over time rather than a sequence of paradoxical actions. Third, it avoids issuing conflicting normative requirements toward agents who, like the akratic, already find themselves in an irrational state.
 

May 15-17, 2023 – Imagination and Creativity

Programme forthcoming

May 25, 2023 – Thumos Seminar

Luke Russell (Sydney)

Have You Forgiven Me?

In this paper I address the following questions: Can I know when I have forgiven others, and can I know when I myself have been forgiven? Are these kinds of knowledge easy to come by? Are there specific circumstances in which victims or perpetrators are unable to know whether forgiveness has taken place, and is this lack of knowledge a practical or a moral problem?

AUTUMN 2022
 

September 29, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Mathilde Cappelli (Geneva)

The epistemic value of sexual fantasy

It is a striking fact that while much work has been devoted in the philosophical literature to the nature, norms and value of imagination, those of fantasy have received very few attention. This unfortunate situation may be due to the fact that, very often, fantasy seems to be conceived as a mere subcategory of imagination, from which there would not be much to learn.

In this talk, I shall address several issues related to sexual fantasy and focus on the specific question of its epistemic value (if any). In order to do so, I shall first explore what is usually said about the epistemic value of imagination in general. I shall then be in position to explore the hypothesis that there is a distinctive epistemic value of fantasy. I shall argue that sexual fantasy provides us a direct epistemic access to some of our preferences—i.e. our sexual preferences—contrary to other forms of imagination. This difference, I shall argue, is based on the fact that fantasizing does not merely consist in imagining that I would like something, but partly consists in liking what I imagine. In other words, being sexually aroused and pleased by what I sexually fantasize puts me in a position to know what I am sexually attracted to. But when it comes to most of other forms of imaginative activity from which I conclude that I would like this or that, the possibility that I’m wrong is much higher because, in these imaginative activities, I am not pleased by what I imagine I would like.

October 13, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Filippo Contesi (Barcelona)

The Affective Nature of Horror

The horror genre (in film, literature etc.) has, for its seemingly paradoxical aesthetic appeal, been the subject of much debate in contemporary, analytic philosophy of art. At the same time, however, the nature of horror as an affective phenomenon has been largely neglected by both aestheticians and philosophers of mind. The standard view of the affective nature of horror in contemporary philosophy follows Noël Carroll in holding that horror in art (or “art-horror”) is an emotion resulting from the combination of disgust and fear. The view is also often accompanied by the view that horror in art is a distinct affect from horror in real life. This raises the question of what the relationship between horror in art and in real life might be. By looking within and outside art and the horror genre, and using a combination of historical, philosophical and empirical arguments, I argue for a departure from such standard views on the affective nature of horror. In alternative, I outline a novel view, on which horror is common to both real life and art and is primarily, typically individuated by a set of (output) affective reactions. 

October 20, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Andrea Rivadulla Durò (Antwerp)

The Prima Facie View of experiential imagination

Perception is said to have assertoric force: It inclines the perceiver to believe its content. In contrast, experiential imagination—perception-like imaginings from a first-person perspective—is commonly taken to be non-assertoric: Imagining winning a piano contest does not incline the imaginer to believe that she has won a piano contest. However, plenty of evidence from clinical and experimental psychology shows that imagination can influence attitudes and behavior to a degree similar to perceptual experience. In this talk I propose that experiential imaginings have by default implicit assertoric force and put forth a theory—the Prima Facie View—as a unified explanation for the empirical findings reviewed. According to the Prima Facie View, mental images and percepts are indistinguishable in operations involving the intuitive system. Because of this, imagining is never an innocuous epistemic enterprise. I will address alternative strategies that could also account for the empirical evidence reviewed—such as a Spinozian model of belief formation or Gendler’s notion of alief—and potential objections to the Prima Facie View. 

October 27, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Paul Noordhof (York)

Conscious Attention and the Attraction of Belief

Two plausible features of belief are the transparency of doxastic deliberation and the uncontrollability thesis (it is not possible to believe at will). Standard explanations of these features either appeal to a putative link between belief and truth specified in terms of aims, norms or functions or appeal to a feature of action. I argue that these approaches don’t work. Instead, the proper way to explain these features is terms of a striking feature of conscious attention. 

November 1st, 2022 – Extra Seminar

Alexander Velichkov (Lund)

The Internal Court of Guilt and Regret: Lorry Drivers, Gauguins, and Rational Plans of Life

A widespread view in the contemporary responsibility literature is that the self-directed emotions of guilt and regret 1) are forms of self-blame 2) that are fitting only if the agent’s (moral) error was under her control. I defend an interpretation of Bernard Williams’s “Moral Luck” and build on his insights in order to criticize both ideas. Guilt and regret are not only painful expressions of self-blame, but also fulfill important functions—such as motivating reflection and negotiation—in ambiguous situations where blameworthiness is not yet established. Furthermore, guilt and regret are noninstrumentally valuable acknowledgments of an agent’s faults, concerns, and values, even when her faults were outside of her control. However, I also suggest that there is room for ambivalence: sometimes an agent's guilt or regret can be tempered by the thought that she couldn’t have done better at the time with what was in her control. 

This seminar will take place from 2PM to 3.30PM at Campus Biotech, room H8.01.F

November 3, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Hanno Sauer (Utrecht)

Horizontal Metaethics

The mainstream in moral psychology and empirically informed metaethics tries to study the nature of moral judgment by looking at affective and cognitive processes which are carried out by somatic systems (the brain etc.) which are based in our biology. Moral psychology (and empirically informed metaethics) is done by studying individual minds (statistically aggregated into population averages) and the mental processes (cognition, emotion, etc.) that go on within them. Such “vertical” approaches to studying the mind ignore the fact that almost all of our cognition is thoroughly “horizontal”, that is, we are malleable social learners who get almost all of their skills and beliefs from other people, via processes of horizontal transmission from others in networks of families, friends, peers, colleagues, experts, celebrities, and -- finally but perhaps most importantly -- the accumulated cultural reservoir handed down to us from previous generations. In short: We are thoroughly cultural beings, shaped by cultural evolution. We get most of our beliefs, including our moral ones, not from “System I” or “System II”, but from horizontal cultural transmission and the role it plays in cultural evolution. But how does horizontal moral psychology look like? How does empirically informed metaethics change shape when we look at it through the lens of cultural evolution?

November 17, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Monika Betzler (Munich)

Moral Indifference (with Jonas Vandieken)

We all have an interest in how others are attuned to us and whether or how they recognize and acknowledge us as participants in the moral universe. In turn, we are vulnerable to being wronged by others if they fail to be attuned to us in the right way or if they fail to accord us the appropriate recognition and acknowledgment. We offer an analysis of moral indifference as a distinct kind of relational wrong – a failure to accord what we call basic second-personal moral regard. We do so by (i) locating moral indifference in conceptual space, (ii) demonstrating how it wrongs others in more injurious, because more fundamental, ways than more familiar kinds of relational wrongs. Lastly, we (iii) consider two important implications, namely that Peter Strawson’s distinction between the participant stance and the objective stance needs to be complemented by the indifferent stance and that in contexts where a certain kind of second-personal demand is unjustified, moral indifference can sometimes be less injurious way to respond to such a demand than outright rejection and denigration of another person.

November 24, 2022 — CISA's Annual Research Forum and Brain Forum Emotions

Programme forthcoming

December 1^st, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Becky Millar (York)

Can animals grieve?

Research into non-human animals has found behaviours that look very much like manifestations of grief. Many species seem to experience prolonged distress at the loss of a companion or relative and engage in distinctive death-related behaviours. However, recent work within the philosophy of grief challenges the idea that non-human animals can grieve. This is because grief, in contrast to more rudimentary emotional experiences, is taken to require potentially high-level abilities, such as a fine-grained sense of particularity and temporarily and an understanding of the death. This paper argues that these features of grief do not preclude animals, and that certain animals can, and do, grieve. In making this argument, I clarify that the principal kind of ‘understanding’ involved in grief is not intellectual, but is instead of a practical variety, and outline ways that the disruption to an animal’s life following a loss can hinge upon a particular individual and involve a degree of temporal organisation.

December 8, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Matthew Talbert (Lund)

Blaming Reasonable Wrongdoers

This paper focuses on the relationship between judgments of blameworthiness and the moral perspectives of agents. Many responsibility theorists believe that if a wrongdoer reasonably judges that she acts permissibly, then she is not open to moral blame. I argue that blame is not necessarily out of place in the case of such “reasonable wrongdoers.” I suggest that, while we often do excuse reasonable wrongdoers, this may be because we find that their normative outlook overlaps with our own in some significant way. Examples that feature reasonable wrongdoers who are excused on this basis do not support the proposition that wrongdoers can be excused just because of their own perspective on their behavior. For such support, we should look to cases that feature relatively little (potentially excusing, in our eyes) overlap between our own moral outlook and that of a wrongdoer. But, again, we do not find decisive support in these cases for the claim that reasonable wrongdoers are excused as it may not be clear to us that the wrongdoers in these cases are not blameworthy.

December 15, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Céline Schöpfer (Geneva)

Thinking (Too) Fast or (Too) Slow: Critical Thinking as a Time Process

Although critical thinking is seen as an essential remedy to face the various epistemic pitfalls of our time, the notion of ‘critical thinking’ is vague and hard to define. Therefore, an effort of conceptual clarification is necessary. To this end, I propose to consider critical thinking as a temporal process. This model enables me to clarify the nature of critical thinking, but also to identify the key moments when individuals are likely not to use their critical skills. I suggest a five-step model and specifically analyze two moments when the critical process is likely to fail. To clarify these two key moments, I use the trade-off between exploration and exploitation applied to decision-making. The first moment is the failure to engage in the critical process and in deliberative thinking. I conceptualize this problem as an excess of exploitation and analyze the motivational issues related to it. The second is the failure to complete the critical process and thus achieve epistemic success. I analyze this problem as an excess of exploration. In both cases, I propose solutions, inspired by virtue epistemology.

December 22, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Agnès Baehni (Geneva)

Angry and Guilty? The Schizophrenic Nature of Self-Blame

In recent years, there has been many attempts to define blame. Philosophers have come up against difficulties, foremost among which is the extremely diverse nature of what we call blame. To bypass this problem, the most common strategy has been to study the general phenomenon without focusing on specific types of blame. This is a problem in that it has left phenomena such as self-blame unexplored. In this presentation, I try to remedy this shortcoming. I examine self-blame’s emotional dimension by discussing its link with the self-regarding emotions of guilt, shame, self-anger and remorse. While the emotional theory of blame is plausible, it faces a major challenge in clarifying exactly which emotion is being referred to. I give two reasons to explain this difficulty. First, there exist several subcategories of self-blame, paradigmatically associated with different emotions. Second, the person who blames herself may experience two categories of emotions:  those associated with the “blamer” perspective and those characteristic of a “blamee” perspective. While discussing this issue, I draw on Shoemaker’s recent account of angry self-blame.

Spring 2022

February 24, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni (Geneva)

Introduction
 

March 3, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Margherita Arcangeli (Paris, in collaboration with Jérôme Dokic)

Affective Memory. A Little Help From Our Imagination

When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modified form at the phenomenological level of our present memory. When it does, we experience what is sometimes called an “affective memory.” Theorists of memories have disagreed about the status of affective memories. Sceptics claim that the relationship between memory and emotion can only be of two types: either the memory is about a past emotion (the emotion is part of what is remembered), or it causes a present emotion (the emotion is a separable effect of the memory). We argue that there is a third option, which points to an emotional way of representing the past situation. Drawing from Peter Goldie’s account of mental narratives, we show that three levels of mental perspective are involved in memories: the perspective of the represented subject (the character, if there is one), the perspective of the representing subject (the author), and the intermediary perspective of the narrator (who may remain virtual). Affective memories are cases in which the narrator’s emotional perspective has direct implications for the author’s emotional perspective, even if the former typically differs from the latter.

March 10, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Eric Cullhed (Uppsala)

On the Deeply Moving and the Merely Touching

Critics often link yet distinguish between ‘moving’ and ‘touching’ artworks. Julien Deonna’s account of being moved as a response to the thin goodness of exemplified final, important and impersonal thick values presupposes either that the difference is simply a matter of varying intensity, or that being touched is an unrelated affective experience. This article challenges these views, drawing on two forgotten analyses of the relation and divergence between being moved and touched in the works of Dietrich von Hildebrand and Willard Gaylin. It is argued that Deonna’s characterization of being moved successfully delineates an affective experience, but one that amounts to a subtype of a somewhat broader emotion category. A satisfactory account of the good that moves us must include an analysis of two additional phenomena which we tend to label ‘being touched’: one responding to the personal value of being loved, the other to the particular value of individuals.

March 17, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Jonas Blatter (Bern)

What Considerations are Reasons for Affective Attitudes?

In a 2018 paper, Barry Maguire argues that the normative support relation for affective attitudes, what he calls the fit-making relation, does not exhibit the necessary features the fit-makers to count as reasons for affective attitudes. He argues that reasons are gradable and contributory, both features the fit-making relation lacks. He arrives at this conclusion by comparing the fit-making relation for affective attitudes to reasons for actions. I argue that this is a mistake and that we should rather draw the analogy to reasons for belief. Doing so, it becomes clear that the fit-making relation is more analogous to the relation between beliefs and their truth-makers, and not to reasons for belief, e.g. evidence. I argue further that there are supporting considerations, analogous to evidence for belief, that are both gradable and contributory. Hence, there are considerations that count as reasons for affective attitudes.

March 24, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Juliette Vazard and Steve Humbert-Droz (Genève)

Imagining with Hope

Descriptions of episodes of hope typically involve the presence of mental images or immersive imagination as an exploration of the hoped-for outcome, to the point that it seems hard to explain what goes on in the mind of a hopeful individual without referring to imagination. Accordingly, most contemporary philosophical accounts of hope involve an element of imagination or “fantasizing” as input, part, or output of hope. This being said, there is no systematic view of the interaction between the emotional processes constituting hope and the processes constituting imagination. How do the affective processes that are part of hope exactly interact with the processes required to produce a mental image, or even an immersive exploration of a desired outcome? In this paper we bring together the philosophy of mind literature on the nature of imagination and the philosophy of emotion literature on the nature of hope, in order to clarify the exact role and value of imagination in hope.

This talk is followed by Julia Langkau's PhilEAs Talk

March 25, 2022 – Michele Ombrato's Thesis Defence (Bâtiment Colladon, 14h15)

March 31, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Isabel Kaeslin (Fribourg)

Spontaneous Aversion and Attraction in 'Good Thinking'

I argue that spontaneous emotional responses, in the form of spontaneous aversion or attraction, have been a neglected kind of mental state in our philosophy of mind, and that this has led to overly cognitivist views in ethics and epistemology. Spontaneous aversions and attractions play the important role of keeping our character flexible, by disrupting engrained habits and beliefs. This gives rise to a hitherto neglected virtue, the virtue of flexibility.
Being flexible is not only a virtue in how we act, but also a virtue of our thinking and believing. I suggest that what is most characteristic about cognitive states is their impetus toward coherence. The better trained our cognitive capacities are, the more our cognitive states tend toward coherence. That is, a purely cognitive way of making decisions would tend to maximal coherence (between the various beliefs, but also between beliefs and other attitudes). By contrast, the nature of feeling states is best captured by a description of their phenomenology, that is, what it is like to be in that state. We can individuate and characterize the core features of a feeling state by ‘merely’ referring to how it feels to experience it. The better trained our feeling capacities are, the more clearly and more strongly a feeling state appears to us.
The argument I am going to give in this talk is roughly the following. If we took ‘the best way of thinking’ to be only done by our cognitive capacities, it would amount to the claim that the best way of thinking is ‘maximally coherent thinking’. However, as I will argue, the norms for good thinking are not exhausted by maximally coherent thinking. Other norms, even such that go against coherence, are just as essential in achieving virtue in thinking. And for some of them, we need our spontaneous emotional responses to get there.

April 7, 2022 – Thumos Seminar (exceptionally in Bâtiment Colladon)

Justin D'Arms (Columbus)

Sentimentalist theories hold that values like ‘funny’ and ‘prideworthy’ are response dependent. According to my preferred version, to be funny or prideworthy is to be a fitting object of amusement or pride. The Alethic View of emotional fittingness holds that emotions involve various thoughts, some of which are evaluative, and that for an emotion to be fitting/correct is just for those thoughts to be true. This talk will briefly explain Rational Sentimentalism and the Alethic View, and then discuss some problems for the Alethic View. Some of the problems are due to the response-dependence of various values. I’ll suggest a way for the Alethic View to cope with these problems by becoming more sentimentalist. But doing so abandons some of what made the Alethic View seem substantive and attractive to begin with. Moreover, the Alethic View seems to mis-characterize what is wrong with unfitting emotions. So we should try to understand the idea that emotions can be fitting/correct to their objects without the Alethic View.

April 14, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Cain Todd (Lancaster)

Are there Aesthetic Emotions?

There has been a recent debate about the existence of a class of purportedly distinctive aesthetic emotions. Interestingly, it has largely been carried out within an interdisciplinary context by empirical researchers and to some extent independently of traditional philosophical disputes concerning the nature and character of what is usually referred to as aesthetic experience. In this talk I examine the dispute, while considering more generally the relation between supposedly paradigmatic aesthetic experiences and (aesthetic) emotions. I will argue that there is no distinctive class of aesthetic emotions, but that both affective and non-affective states can be marked by a distinctively aesthetic ‘character’ or ‘mode’. In addition to articulating this ‘mode’, I will make some remarks about the relationship between empirical and philosophical explanations of the phenomena at issue.

This talk is followed by Lorenzo Cocco's PhilEAs Talk

April 28, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Edgar Phillips (Paris)

A Stain on one's character: Identity, change and the persistence of guilt

Philosophical discussions of moral responsibility for actions typically focus on articulating the conditions that must obtain at the time of acting for an agent to be, having acted, responsible for what they have done. Less has been said about how responsibility, along with related conditions such as blameworthiness and guilt, persists over time and what if anything might condition, and in particular lessen, our responsibility for our past actions. Recent treatments of the latter issue have claimed that responsibility is sustained over time by psychological continuity, meaning psychological change can render an agent no longer responsible for their past actions (Khoury 2013, Khoury and Matheson 2018, Matheson 2014). I argue that this view rests on a mistaken conception of blame and blameworthiness as concerned with the agent’s moral character (narrowly and individualistically construed) rather than the moral significance of their actions as such. I bring this out through considering the nature of a victim’s anger and of a wrongdoer’s remorse, and the ways in which such anger and remorse seek resolution not merely in a change in the wrongdoer's psychology but in their addressing the wrong through (for instance) repentance, atonement and reparative action.

This talk is followed by Giovanni Merlo's PhilEAs Talk
 

May 5, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Hanno Sauer (Utrecht)

Criteria of Moral Progress

Moral progress occurs when things change for the better, morally speaking. The topic of moral progress has recently experienced a resurgence of interest in several disciplines. However, making judgments of moral progress raises a number of epistemic questions which thus far have not been systematically addressed in the literature. We dub these criterial problems, and argue that addressing them is important if we want to avoid errors in making judgments about moral progress. In this paper we address four important criterial problems for making moral progress judgments. First, questions of what the unit of analysis is for moral progress judgments: what is undergoing morally progressive change? Second, questions of timescale: over what period of time is moral progress occurring, and is this relevant for justifying claims of moral progress? Third, what moral criteria are being used to make moral progress judgments and how are these criteria justified? Fourth, how should we make progress judgments when there has been morally progressive change from the point of view of one moral standard but morally regressive change from the point of view of another? We analyze each of these epistemic problems for making moral progress judgments, assess whether they lead to skepticism about such judgments, and suggest possible solutions to each problem.

May 12, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Maria Silvia Vaccarezza (Genoa, in collaboration with Ariele Niccoli)

Let the donkeys be donkeys: in defense of inspiring envy

Once upon a time, Aesop says, there was a donkey who wanted to be a pet dog. The pet dog was given many treats by the master and the household servants, and the donkey was envious of him. Hence, the donkey began emulating the pet dog. What happened next? The story ends up with the donkey beaten senseless, chased off to the stables, exhausted and barely alive. Who is to blame for the poor donkey’s unfortunate fate? Well, there could be disagreement upon this, but I think emulation is to blame. And it’s on the kinds of envy-related emulation that I focus on in this talk.
More analytically, I aim at vindicating the role of envy for moral exemplars within an exemplarist character educational framework. In the first section, I recall the central tenets of an exemplarist account of moral progress, and highlight how negative emotions, in general, have suffered a bad press within character education, with exemplarism being no exception. Then I provide a brief outline of standard strategies of defending envy by appealing to useful taxonomies of envy (e.g., Taylor 1988; Protasi 2016; Fussi 2018). After that, I put forward my 'Donkey Objection' by recalling Aesop’s fable on "foolish imitation", so as to show that when envy triggers mere emulation, it can bear devastating effects such as conformism and a lack of self-worth and personal integrity.
In response to this objection, I bring into play a distinction between two rival forms of imitation—emulation and inspiration—and I coin the label of "inspired envy" for those forms of imitation by inspiration triggered by envy that lead to self-improvement avoiding morally detrimental consequences.

This talk is followed by Sven Rosenkranz's PhilEAs Talk

May 19, 2022 – Thumos Seminar

Ronnie De Sousa (Toronto)

Attitudinalism and the Objectivity of Values

Two rival views of emotions and their relation to values have recently gained prominence. On the ‘perceptualist’ model (P), emotions are apprehensions of the values instantiating their formal objects. On the ‘attitudinal’ (A), each emotion is a distinct attitude, the evaluative force of which generates the value ascribed to the emotion's target. After framing the debate in Part I, I begin, in Part II, by defending (P) against Jean Moritz Müller's charge of is incoherence. Part III explains why I nevertheless endorse a view very close to Müller's own. Müller's version of (A), however, is not radical enough. Contrary to what he and others take for granted, formal objects are not value properties, but non-normative properties of situations, particulars or states of affairs. Part IV defends that more radical version of (A) against an argument adduced by Rossi and Tappolet against the version of (A) propounded by Deonna and Teroni. Contrary to Rossi and Tappolet's contention, there is no need for value properties to be represented in the content of emotional attitudes. Part V offers brief reflections on two consequences of this radical view. One is the problem of explaining what is commonly meant by a ‘value’, as distinct from an individual preference. The second is that insofar as any values deserve to be thought of as objective, some do so more than others.

May 23-25, 2022 - Conference in Honour of Ronald de Sousa

Program here. Practical information here.

May 26, 2022 – No seminar (Ascension)

May 31 - Jun 02 – SoPhA Jeunes Chercheurs

TBA

Jun 22 - Symposium on 'The Philosophy of Envy'

TBA

Jun 23-24 - Conference on Political Emotions

TBA

July 11 - Mini-workshop on imagination

Program here

Autumn 2021

September 23, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Joffrey Fuhrer (Geneva)

What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful and happy lives

During this talk, I will present the results of two studies about what makes a life meaningful or happy. It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous researches have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s conceptions about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. Through two experimental studies, we have investigated the folk concept of a meaningful life by studying people’s third-person attribution of meaningfulness and comparing it with the attribution of happiness. We draw on hypotheses from the philosophical literature, and notably on the work of Susan Wolf (Study 1) and Antti Kauppinen (Study 2), testing different factors such as morality, the life direction, having a goal considered important or being fulfilled (among other factors).

September 30, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Juan Pablo Bermudez (Neuchâtel)

What is the feeling of effort about?

For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether it makes sense to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the feeling of effort. To advance towards a general theory, I defend the single-feeling view, which states that the feeling of effort is one and the same for both mental and bodily actions. This feeling represents the expected costs, both mental and physical, of performing a given action. Cost-based approaches have recently become influential for the feeling of mental effort. Here I focus on arguing that our sense of bodily effort does not simply represent physiological processes, but rather represents the expected costs of a bodily action. Through this talk I discuss the role of the feeling of effort (and affective states more broadly) in action guidance and the sense of agency. I also discuss how the single view can help us in defining efforts themselves.

October 7, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Per-Erik Milam (Gothenburg)

Pluralism about Forgiveness

There seems to be a fairly widely held belief that there are multiple types of forgiveness—that is, many people seem to be pluralists about forgiveness. However, while pluralism seems common, it is rarely argued for. Sometimes it is mentioned in passing; other times multiple types are described without explaining their relation to one another. Moreover, among those who have offered apparently pluralistic accounts of forgiveness, the descriptions of the different types often hint at a deeper, unifying monism. My aim in this paper is to consider whether—and, if so, how—we should be pluralists about forgiveness and to evaluate whether any of the current accounts of forgiveness are pluralisms of this sort. I begin by explaining why (I think) many forgiveness theorists are attracted to pluralism. I then briefly describe the few explicitly pluralist accounts of forgiveness in the literature and contrast them with competing monist accounts. I then identify a variety of reasons for and ways of being a pluralist about other things, from moral value to species to gods. Finally, I consider which of these reasons for and ways of being a pluralist makes the most sense for the would-pluralist about forgiveness and I briefly make the case againstforgiveness pluralism and describe what I take to be the best non-pluralist option available.

October 14, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Stéphane Lemaire (Rennes)

How emotions evaluate

Beyond the contingency of people’s emotional responses to their surroundings, philosophers and psychologists have searched for some systematicity. A central and very plausible hypothesis is that emotions result from or involve an evaluation of their circumstances and in particular of their intentional object. A further thesis that is often assumed by philosophers is that this evaluation is in terms of values. This axiological view is upheld by judgmentalists, low- and high-level perceptualists, and those who think that emotions are responses to intuitions of values. However, I argue that the axiological view must be rejected because it must rely either on non-conceptual or conceptual representations of values while these are constructed from material outside perception. I then introduce an alternative view according to which the evaluation that is responsible for our emotions is conative and assess the relevance of objects to goals. One key point is here to make sense of the mental states that goals are supposed to be and their different links to desires and emotions. I finally consider whether this is just another version of the axiological view as some have claimed and show some potential normative consequences of the view.

October 19, 2021 – CISA Seminar

Constant Bonard (Paris)

The meaning of slurs: considering affects thoughtfully

CISA, Campus Biotech, 15:00 - 16:00. Room H8.01 D

October 28, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Juliette Vazard (Geneva)

Anxious hopes, hopeful anxieties, and emotional valence

For creatures like us, entertaining possible future scenarios of how our life might play out is often accompanied or “charged” with emotions like hope and anxiety. Both hope and anxiety necessarily require that one does not know whether the target event (the desired end, the threat) will in fact occur or not. While hope has traditionally been viewed as a “positive” emotion, anxiety is considered a “negative” emotion. However, insofar as hope involves an awareness of the risk of non-attainment of the hoped-for outcome, and anxiety involves an awareness of the possibility of non-occurrence of the dreaded outcome, these emotions potentially carry both a positive and a negative kind of evaluation, and thus potentially both a positive and a negative valence. Recently, some philosophers have indeed argued that hope is always constitutive of anxiety (Miceli & Castelfranchi, 2015), and that anxiety is sometimes constitutive of hope (Stockdale, 2019). As a result, it is argued, the valence of both anxiety and hope is not as clear as we thought. I call these two claims the Constitutive claim of hope and anxiety, and the Unclear Valence claim. These claims, as I will show, have important implications for questions regarding the relation between emotional evaluation and emotional phenomenology.

November 11, 2021 – Thumos Seminar (exceptionally in room B112)

Laura Silva (Geneva)

The Epistemic Role of Outlaw Emotions: Beyond Justification

Outlaw emotions are emotions that stand in tension with one’s wider belief system, often allowing epistemic insight one may have otherwise lacked. Outlaw emotions are thought to play crucial epistemic roles under conditions of oppression. Although the crucial epistemic value of these emotions is widely acknowledged, specific accounts of their epistemic role(s) remain largely programmatic. There are two dominant accounts of the epistemic role of emotions in general: The Motivational View and the Justificatory View. Philosophers of emotion assume that these dominant ways of accounting for the epistemic role(s) of emotions in general are equipped to account for the epistemic role(s) of outlaw emotions. I argue that this is not the case. My argument gives us reason to suspect that focus on justification in outlaw emotion cases may be misguided. I end by sketching an alternative proposal for the epistemic role of these emotions that is not justificatory, nor motivational.

November 18, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Roberto Keller (Geneva)

Natural Goodness, Reasons for Attitudes, and the Normative Bedrock

It has become increasingly common to think of reasons for attitudes as the the building blocks of normativity. Various considerations can be adduced in favour of this view. Thinking of goodness or duty as reducible to, respectively, reasons to favour or to reasons to intend can for example help us make sense of important normative phenomena such as normative supervenience, normative relevance, and normative guidance. This view can also help us find unity among different types of normative properties and explain why we see some important kind of discontinuity between the normative and the descriptive. The aim of this talk is to show that these views are put under great strain when confronted with instances of natural normativity—the normativity that applies to plants, animals, and life processes more generally—and that those who wish to understand normativity in terms of reasons for attitudes face a challenging dilemma.

November 25, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Kourken Michaelian (Grenoble)

Remembering as imagining the (nonpersonal) past

According to the simulation theory of memory, to remember is to imagine an event from the personal past. McCarroll has recently argued that simulationism is unable to account either for forgetting or for infantile amnesia. While this talk will demonstrate that the simulation theory is in fact able to account for both phenomena, its implications with respect to infantile amnesia, in particular, do suggest that modifications to the theory are in order. Existing simulationisms presuppose that one can only remember the events of the personal past. This presupposition now appears to be unmotivated, and the chapter therefore proposes a radicalized simulation theory that holds that to remember is simply to imagine an event from the past, regardless of whether that event belongs to the personal past.

December 9, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Michele Ombrato (Geneva)

Emotions as variants of interest

It is often assumed that occurrent emotions are ‘episodic’ attitudes–i.e., that they are, at once, cognitive-cum-affective episodes and attitudes held towards emotional situations. I will suggest that this identification is ontologically problematic and that it leads to an artificial restriction of the scope of accounts of emotion to emotion episodes during which a single attitude happens to be retained–e.g., episodes of ‘fear’, or ‘anger’, or ‘shame’ etc. I will then put forward an alternative ontological framework articulating the relations between emotion attitudes understood as the proper referents of terms such as ‘fear’, ‘anger’ or ‘shame’, and emotion episodes as complex, dynamic cognitive-cum-affective episodes. On the proposed ontological framework, emotion attitudes feature as attitudinal-evaluative components of emotion episodes, and more precisely, as active states of interest which drive and constrain the way in which emoting subjects exercise control over the occupation of their attention. Finally, I will show how this reframing of the relations between emotion attitudes and emotion episodes may allow us to theorise emotion episodes that span ‘changes in attitude.’ My proposal will be that such ‘multi-attitude’ emotion episodes result from cycles of interest-driven exploration of the value or personal significance of emotional situations, cycles that may, over time, crystallise in different emotion attitudes. In so far as multi-attitude emotion episodes result from a single causal process or mode of production, they are emotional wholes or unities vs mere sequences of discrete episodic emotions.

Spring 2021

February 25, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni (Geneva)

Introduction

March 4, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Roberto Keller (Geneva)

Norms, Errors, and Defects

The aim of this talk is to shed light on the distinction between two forms of badness stemming from norm-violation: incorrectness and defectiveness. These notions are closely associated and they can sometimes be used interchangeably: a misspelling can be properly described both as an error or as a defect in spelling. As revealed by the case of mental states, however, this is not always the case: to qualify a mental state such as belief as incorrect is not to qualify it as defective and vice-versa. This observation will serve as a starting point in the articulation of the different forms of failure which are respectively captured by incorrectness and by defectiveness. Through a principled explanation of the difference between these notions, not only will we be in a position to explain why they sometimes diverge and why they sometimes overlap, we will also be in a position to sharpen our understanding of the claim that mental states like belief are constitutively governed by norms.

March 11, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Sarah Arnaud (Montréal) & Jesse Prinz (New York)

The Relationality of Emotions

While emotions are generally understood as internal episodes, emotion researchers widely acknowledge that they depend on socialization and cultural environments, and many emotions are social in nature or triggered by social elicitors. There is thus an internalist and individualist theory of where emotions are located, and a more externalist and social understanding of the conditions that elicit and condition our emotions.

March 18, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Rodrigo Diaz (Bern)

March 25, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Elena Cagnoli Fiecconi (London)

April 15, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Jean Moritz Müller (Bonn)

The Spontaneity of Emotion

Federico Lauria (Lisbon)

Interest and the Affective Springs of Inquiry: The 'Chiaroscuro' Epistemic Emotions

April 29, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Laura Luz Silva (Geneva)

Do Emotions Play a Distinctive Epistemic Role?

Debate regarding the epistemic role of emotions focusses on whether emotions can provide justification for evaluative beliefs. A prevalent objection to the view that emotions can do so stems from the observation that, as emotions are reason-responsive attitudes themselves, it seems that those very reasons that stand in justificatory relations to emotions, stand also in justificatory relations to evaluative beliefs with similar content. The Superfluity Objection claims that emotions are epistemically dispensable in the justification of evaluative beliefs, for the very reasons that stand in support of an emotion can justify the relevant evaluative belief directly. Responses to this objection have been offered in the literature, but none of these responses secure emotions a non-superfluous, or indispensable, epistemic role. I develop a novel response to the Superfluity Objection that takes steps towards doing just that.
 

May 6, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Michael Milona (Toronto)

Perceptualism, Attitudinalism, and the Content of Emotions

Perceptualism is the view that emotions are perceptual experiences of value. According to perceptualism, emotions have evaluative content much as ordinary sensory experiences have empirical content; and it lends itself naturally to the position that emotion types (anger, fear, etc.) are individuated by their respective evaluative contents. Although perceptualism has gained substantial support in recent decades, it has also been subject to important critiques. This paper explores an interlocking set of objections called the Attitudinalist Challenge. According to the challenge, everyday ways of talking and thinking about emotions conflict with the thesis that emotions have evaluative content. Attitudinalist maintain that while perceptualists correctly identify emotions as evaluations, they are evaluative at the level of attitude. This paper defends and develops perceptualism in the face of this challenge. One key lesson is that perceptualists should deepen their analogy with sensory experience. For according to a plausible version of perceptualism, different types of emotion are differentiated by virtue of their evaluative content in the same way that different types of sensory experience (visual, auditory, etc.) are differentiated by their contents. A second lesson is that perceptualists should distinguish between the representational guise of emotions (which is uniform across emotions) and the formal objects of emotions (which vary). This distinction can likewise be motivated by the core analogy with sensory experience. Having argued how perceptualists should answer the Attitudinalist Challenge, the paper closes with a challenge for versions of attitudinalism that share perceptualism’s commitment to the view that emotions are evaluative experiences.

May 20, 2021 – Thumos Seminar

Arina Pismenny (Gainesville)

Emotional Injustice

This paper, written in collaboration with Gen Eickers and Jesse Prinz, aims to explicate the concept of emotional injustice. This phenomenon takes multiple forms. We examine the ways in which social and cultural norms regulate emotional experiences, expressions, and ascriptions of emotional states to others. Modeling the concept of emotional injustice on the concept of epistemic injustice, we delineate three types. ‘Affective silencing’ occurs when unjust social norms enjoin individuals from experiencing or expressing a given emotion (‘boys don’t cry’; ‘girls don’t get angry’). Hermeneutical injustice occurs when the systemic oppression of a certain group results in their being deprived of concepts adequate to their emotional experience. For example, historically, under the medical model, female unhappiness was interpreted as depression, a mental disorder, even when it might have been better understood as a justified response to external barriers to flourishing. The third type we discuss is dynamic hermeneutic injustice. This is the misconstrual of a person’s emotional state in accordance with a stereotype. For example, white people often attribute anger to Black people who are not experiencing or expressing anger.

We have three main goals in this paper. First, to explicate the concept of emotional injustice, showing that some emotion norms are unjust, some conducive to justice, and some are neutral. Second, we identify several different kinds of emotional injustice, illustrating each. Third, we outline suggestions for redressing and mitigating emotional injustices.

Fall 2020

October 1, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Raamy Majeed (Auckland)

What Can Emotional Plasticity Tell Us About Social Biases?

Emotions that are quick, automatic and pre-reflective are typically explained by positing special evolved systems in the brain, i.e. ‘modules’. This framework, however, is ill-equipped to explain such emotions when they are responses to social or cultural cues, as as evolved modules are thought to be incapable of undergoing any significant form of socio-cultural learning. In this paper, I propose a developmental framework to accommodate such emotions. In particular, I argue such emotions can be explained by developmental modules: modules that aren’t innate, but form as a product of development, and which are crucially shaped by our socio-cultural environment. I end by exploring the implications of this approach for tackling some implicit social biases.

October 8, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Rebecca Wallbank (Uppsala)

Puzzles of Trust

It is prevalently assumed that when another person fails to do as we trust them to, we will feel betrayed. In fact upon many accounts such a liability to feel betrayal is an identifying feature of trust. It is also prevalently assumed that trust leaves us liable to feeling gratitude when it is fulfilled. But this seems inconsistent. Betrayal arises when someone fails to do something which we believe that they ought to have done for us, but we don’t tend to feel gratitude in circumstances in which they succeed, instead we tend to feel satisfied and treated fairly, perhaps relieved. So which is it, is trustworthy behaviour something that it makes sense for us to be grateful for or something which it makes sense for us to simply expect? Let’s call this Puzzle 1. It is also prevalently assumed that being trusted is an honour and something we can feel insulted by in the absence of and yet it is also widely assumed that trust is offered by people with no real discrepancy as to whom they place their trust in. But why would we feel honoured by this? Let’s call this Puzzle 2. There are various other puzzles about trust, but in focusing on these two I’ll expose how they are symptomatic of various concerning, and prevalently false assumptions about the nature of trust, how it arises and in what ways it is valuable to us. In this presentation I’ll address these misconceptions offering, what I regard to be, a more plausible account.

This talk will be directly followed by Magalie Schor's PhilEAs talk

October 15, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Helen Landmann (Hagen)

The bright and dark side of being moved

Feelings of being moved (i.e., being moved, overwhelmed, stirred) can be elicited by helping behavior and close relationships. Some scholars therefore consider being moved as a pro-social emotion (i.e., elicited by moral virtue and enhancing pro-social behavior). This, however, may constitute the bright side of being moved only. I report a series of studies showing that feelings of being moved can be elicited by effort, collective efficacy, and martyrdom as well. These studies further show that feelings of being moved can be associated with collective action, appreciation of extremist propaganda, and acceptance of violence, thus exemplifying the dark side of being moved.

October 22, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Laura Silva (Geneva)

Two-faced Anger

The orthodox view of anger takes desires for revenge or retribution to be central to the emotion. In this paper I develop an empirically informed challenge to the retributive view of anger. In so doing I argue that a distinct desire is central to anger: a desire for recognition. Desires for recognition aim at the targets of anger acknowledging the wrong they have committed, as opposed to aiming for their suffering. In light of the centrality of this desire for recognition, I argue that the retributive view of anger should be abandoned. I consider and dismiss two types of moves that can be made on the part of a proponent of the orthodox view in response to my argument. I propose that a pluralist view, that allows aims for both retribution and recognition in anger, is to be preferred.

October 29, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Alex Grzankowski (Birkbeck, London)

In what sense do emotions have content?

The majority position has it that emotions represent, and typically they are taken to represent things as instantiating value properties. But this positions raises a difficult question. Namely, how might emotions represent such properties? It seems implausible that they might track them, for example, and even the existence of such properties is a well known matter of dispute. Rather than answering this question directly, I want to explore the possibility of side stepping it. More specifically, I will consider the prospect of Interpretationism about the contents of the emotions. I think there are good reasons not to be an Interpretationist about the contents of many of our mental states (e.g. memory and judgement), but emotions look like a more interesting candidate. Rather than thinking of the emotions as information bearing structures that encode and store, I want to offer some reasons for taking the intentional stance. At the end of the talk I will to gesture at a more radical conclusion by asking why we think it is important that emotions have contents in the first place.

November 12, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Andreas Mueller (Bern)

Are there reasons for emotions?

Our emotions are subject to various forms of normative assessment and critique. This suggests that there are normative reasons for emotions. The thesis that there are such reasons is often endorsed and is presupposed, e.g., by the buck-passing account of value, but it is rarely explicitly defended. Most worked out accounts of normative reasons focus on practical or epistemic reasons. In this talk, I address some of the challenges for the attempt to extend such accounts to the case of reasons for emotions. In particular, I discuss accounts that draw a close connection between reasons and reasoning and explore whether, like intentions and beliefs, emotions can be regulated by a process that qualifies as reasoning.

November 19, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Constant Bonard (Geneva & Antwerp)

November 26, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Jacques Vollet (Geneva)

Epistemic Akrasia and Justification

Can it be rational to be epistemically akratic, that is, to believe that p and that it is not rational to believe that p? Intuitively, no. However, you can have misleading higher-order evidence that your evidence does not support your belief. In such cases, we might think, epistemic akrasia is rational, for your evidence supports the belief that p and the belief that it is not rational to believe that p. But, if so, why is it that epistemic akrasia seems irrational? According to a recent proposal, this can be explained by fact that epistemically akratic responses manifest the bad disposition to “fail to correctly respond to a special class of conclusive and conspicuous reasons” (Maria Lasonen-Aarnio 2020). I will argue that this explanation fails. I will suggest a different approach, according to which although epistemic akrasia can be propositionally justified (ex ante rational), it cannot be doxastically justified (ex post rational).

December 3, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Tricia Magalotti (Rice)

Why do we care so much about emotional experience?

I have the intuition that a life without emotional experience would not be a life worth living. Perhaps this is an overstatement. But the slightly less dramatic intuition that removing emotional experience from one’s life would result in a drastic reduction in the value of one’s life seems to be widely shared. There is a special kind of regard that we have for emotional experience. However, it is not immediately obvious what is the source of the significance we place on emotional experience. In this talk, I will consider several potential explanations for why we hold emotional experience in such high regard. I will advocate for the hypothesis that the best explanation for the elevated standing that we accord to emotional experience is that it involves a special kind of value, the value of “feeling the world as it is,” where this kind of value implicates various different domains of value, including epistemic, practical, moral, and aesthetic.

December 10, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Juliette Vazard (Geneva)

How do questions come to mind? Anxiety, Questioning, and the Reflective mode of cognition

We can fail as rational inquirers by asking ourselves the wrong questions, by inquiring into irrelevant epistemic possibilities. While there is a vast number of possibilities we are ignorant about at a given time, when we inquire we move from a state of mere ignorance to one of explicit uncertainty about a specific question. In this talk I support the view that some emotions provide a framework to our inquiries, by making specific uncertainties salient, presenting them as pressing, relevant, and in need to be resolved. I focus on the emotion of anxiety, and in particular on epistemic anxiety. To support my hypothesis, I look at cases of unreasonable questioning, cases in which our capacity to inquire into the relevant questions is – temporarily or chronically – undermined. For both pathological and everyday cases of unreasonable questioning of a certain type, it seems that anxiety is the mechanism which prompts an interrogative attitude and a motivational push towards inquiry, by making salient an uncertain (and threatening) possibility. However, while malfunctioning anxiety may bring salience to uncertainties which are irrelevant (because too remote, for instance), fitting anxiety constitutes one of the ways in which (relevant) questions are brought to our attention.

December 17, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Conor McHugh (Southampton)

Logic and Norms of Reasoning

Logic is often thought to bear some important normative connection to (theoretical) reasoning. But it’s not obvious how this connection is to be made out. As Gilbert Harman famously pointed out, one is not necessarily required or even permitted to believe the logical consequences of what one believes - after all, these consequences might be uninteresting, or highly implausible. Subsequent literature has taken up the challenge implicitly set by Harman: to identify a plausible ‘bridge principle’ linking facts about logical consequence to normative facts of a certain kind. My first aim in this paper is to argue that, by failing to clearly distinguish norms governing belief from norms governing reasoning, this literature overlooks one natural approach to thinking of logic as normative for reasoning. My second aim is to take some steps towards developing and defending a version of this approach.

Spring 2020

February 4-5th, 2020 – CISA's Annual Research Forum

Details and program here

February 27, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Emanuela Ceva (Geneva)

Individual responsibility under systemic corruption: A coercion-based view

Should officeholders be held individually responsible for submitting to systemically corrupt institutional practices? We draw an analogy between individual action under coercive threats and individual participation in systemic corruption, and argue that the occupants of institutional roles who submit to corrupt practices are not excused by the existence of a systemic coercive threat. Even when they have good personal reasons to accept the threat, they remain morally assessable and, in the circumstances, they are also blameworthy for their actions in their institutional capacity.

March 3, 2020 – CISA Lecture

Emanuela Ceva (Geneva)

Negative moral emotions and the transformation of relationships dynamics in processes of transitional justice

This paper asks the question of the role of moral emotions in processes of transitional justice in countries emerging out of periods of violence or past wrongdoing. The discussion of the criteria for the moral assessment of processes of transitional justice has recently gained momentum among political and legal philosophers. An equally lively emerging debate concerns the role of moral emotions (such as resentment, envy, anger, guilt, shame, but also sympathy and empathy) as a driver of people's interactions. The philosophical studies of the relations between these two debates are currently quite sparse. This is an unfortunate lacuna because interpersonal or intergroup interactions in contexts of post-conflict transition are quite apparently ridden with (positive and negative) emotions, whose moral significance needs further research. By bringing together recent studies in the political theory of transitional justice and the role of moral emotions in analytic philosophy, this paper contributes to developing the normative research in this field. It does so by investigating, in particular, the potential for a positive role of negative moral emotions to bring about changes in the relationships dynamics between the parties involved in past wrongdoing, and how institutions of transitional justice may elicit such potential and change. In so doing, the paper contributes to the studies concerning social transformation by outlining the normative requirements of an "interactive political morality" for transitional contexts.

March 5, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Antoine Rebourg (Geneva)

The Contours of Self-Control

Across both philosophical and empirical literature, self-control is standardly defined as the ability to master inclinations (typically desires or emotions) that conflict with what we judge best to do.
This rough characterization has lent itself to diverse qualifications and debates regarding the mechanisms, temporal structure, and “targets” of an exercise of self-control. A popular view in cognitive sciences, which has recently received philosophical support by Sripada (forthcoming), is that self-control consists in certain mental control mechanisms that are deployed in situations of motivational conflict.
My talk is divided into two parts. In a first, critical part, I argue that this narrow focus falls short on both conceptual and empirical grounds. Notably, I claim that it does not tell the whole story about what we concretely do when we ordinarily control ourselves. In a second, constructive part, drawing from the classical toolkit of action theory and moral psychology, I put forward a reductive but surprisingly handy account of self-control.

Reference: Sripada C. (forthcoming). ‘The Atoms of Self-Control.’ Noûs

March 5, 2020 – PhilEAs Talk

Artūrs Logins (Zurich)

TBA

March 12, 2020 – Thumos Seminar (cancelled, talk moved to next week)

March 19, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Juliette Ferry Danini (Sorbonne University)

Do we really need more empathy in medicine?

It is often claimed that we need more empathy in medicine – by philosophers, health practitioners or patients alike. Empathy is indeed often presupposed to be something good, a virtue to display and to act on. It is believed to be especially beneficial to patients that their health practitioners feel empathy for their plight. Among many approaches, narrative medicine (Charon 2001) and the phenomenology of illness (Carel 2008; 2016) notably promote empathy in medicine. The biomedical model and the medical curriculum have specifically been argued to be causing a deficit in empathy in medical practitioners. Several empirical studies have claimed that medical students lose their capacity to feel empathy throughout their studies. For instance, about this decline in empathy, one study asks “how can we stop the rot?” (Spencer 2004). As many have commented, empathy however can be a fuzzy concept. Emotional empathy (feeling what the other is feeling, putting yourself in her shoes) is often distinguished from cognitive empathy (knowing what the other is feeling) and compassion (caring for the other person’s wellbeing). Emotional empathy is usually what is put forward in the context of medicine. We want health professionals to feel our plight. There is thus a normative claim – it is morally better for health professionals to feel empathy – and a descriptive claim – the biomedical education is detrimental to our capacity to feel empathy. In this talk, I argue that neither of these claims are fully convincing.
Note first that based on a review of the literature by Pedersen (2009), there is no consensus as to whether empathy does decline during the medical curriculum. A more pressing problem is that empirical measures of empathy use ambiguous definitions of empathy. What it means is that they measure bundles of things which sometimes appear to be very different from empathy. For instance, several questionnaires measure one’s likeliness to be anxious during emergencies as something akin to empathy: becoming anxious in emergency situations increases one’s empathy level. The claim according to which the decrease in empathy in medicine is bad – akin to “rotting” – is seriously weaken when put in perspective with what questionnaires actually measure.
In the second part of this talk, I turn to consider normative questions regarding empathy. Is it true that empathy is a good guide for our moral actions? In the context of medicine, does empathy help health professionals caring for and treating their patients? Overall, is empathy likely to improve medicine? Following Bloom (2016), I argue that empathy has been oversold as a moral guide for our actions. Empathy suffers from a number a biases and does not lead us to the best decisions, especially in the case of medicine. Furthermore, emotional empathy can have harmful side effects. Notably, asking for continuous emotional labour in the context of rising health problems in the medical community is not without risk.
Finally, I turn to consider the claim according to which patients heal faster when their health professionals feel empathy – suggesting that empathy should be used as a powerful placebo (Howick et al. 2018). I argue that similar measuring problems as mentioned previously affect this type of studies.
In brief, in this talk, I argue that empathy is not something to look forward as a promise for better care and better medicine. At the end of this talk, I argue that compassion – simply having the best interest of patients in mind, without necessarily feeling what they are feeling – is a better goal for medicine. However, talking about compassion is not useful if one does not acknowledge the importance of work conditions and the health system within which clinical medicine happens.

Bloom, Paul. 2016. Against Empathy. New York: HarperCollins.
Carel, Havi. 2008. Illness: The Cry of the Flesh. Stocksfield: Acumen.
———. 2016. The Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howick, Jeremy, Andrew Moscrop, Alexander Mebius, Thomas R Fanshawe, George Lewith, Felicity L Bishop, Patriek Mistiaen, et al. 2018. “Effects of Empathic and Positive Communication in Healthcare Consultations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 111 (7): 240–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141076818769477.
Pedersen, Reidar. 2009. “Empirical Research on Empathy in Medicine - A Critical Review.” Patient Education and Counseling 76: 307–22.
Spencer, John. 2004. “Decline in Empathy in Medical Education: How Can We Stop the Rot?” Medical Education 38 (9): 916–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2004.01965.x.

[The talk by Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen (Lund) is sadly cancelled]

March 26, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Markus Kneer (Zürich)

Happiness and Well-Being: Is It All in Your Head? Evidence from the Folk

April 2, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Laurent Jaffro (Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Blame and Forgiveness

In what way is ceasing to blame a necessary condition for forgiveness? What initially interested me in the subject was the need to clarify what forgiveness requires as a change in the relationship with the offender. The result was rather that my attention was drawn to the complexity of blame and the need for an analysis that does not reduce it to one or the other of its dimensions.
I draw attention to the costs of confining philosophical discussion about blame to the sense of censure or reproach. Distinctions like that between angry and detached blame, between external and internal blame, between expressed and silent blame, are certainly useful but may be considered as approximations of a more crucial distinction between blame as a speech act with perlocutionary effects and blame as moral disapproval and attribution of moral responsibility, be it tacit or explicit. A philosophical account of blame should not neglect the latter in favour of the former.
I will be arguing that:
a. Taken in the sense of moral disapproval and attribution of responsibility for a fault, as distinct from the second-personal expression of disapproval, ceasing to blame is not a necessary condition for forgiveness. On the contrary, as a specific response to wrongdoing, distinct from excuses and forgetting, forgiveness preserves the victims’ judgement that a serious wrong has been inflicted to them and does not change the fact that they attribute responsibility for this wrong to the offender. The one who forgives, while deciding not to retaliate in any way (or, if taking revenge is not an option, while ‘overcoming’ resentment in some other way), does not, however, waive the judgement of culpability.
b. Taken in the sense of reproach, second-personal censure, ceasing to blame is a necessary condition for forgiveness. To those who offer their forgiveness and simultaneously reproach you for the same misconduct, you might legitimately point out some inconsistency.
However, my claim is not that the problem rests upon a misunderstanding about blame and that all is needed is to specify in what sense the term is used. The semantic network of blame would benefit from being presented as a conceptual complex that goes from weaker to stronger forms, from the less personal to the more personal, from calm disapproval to angry censure.

April 7, 2020 – CISA Lecture

David Garcia (Complexity Science Hub Vienna and Medical University of Vienna)

Computational Affective Science: Collective Emotions in the Digital Traces After a Terrorist Attack

April 9, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Céline Boisserie-Lacroix (EHESS) and Marco Inchingolo (Institut Jean Nicod)

Empathy for a reason? From understanding agency to phenomenal insight

April 23, 2020 – Thumos Seminar

Magalie Schor (Geneva)

A Virtue Epistemology of Emotions

According to popular contemporary cognitive theories in the philosophy of emotions, emotions consist essentially in evaluations of their intentional object. The idea often defended is that emotional responses provide subjects with an epistemic access to the values instantiated in their surroundings. Given this epistemic aspect of emotions, some philosophers have recently raised the question of whether emotions could have a positive value for knowledge, for instance, by positively and reliably contributing to the acquisition of evaluative knowledge. The aim of the paper is to explore further the epistemic status of emotions. I will defend in a virtue epistemologist fashion that, similarly to beliefs, emotions, when some conditions are met, may be counted as kind of epistemic achievements, namely acquisitions of a kind of factual knowledge. As such, we may conclude that some instances of emotions are more than mere contributors of evaluative knowledge, they are constituents of it.

April 30, 2020 – Workshop "Fittingness" & Thumos Seminar (Broadcasted on Zoom)

10.00-11.30 - Jonathan Mitchell (Manchester), Two Objections to the Bodily-Attitudinal Theory of Emotion

14.15-15.45 - Roberto Keller (Geneva), Fitting Normativity for the FA Analysis

16.15-17.45 - Oded Na'aman (Jerusalem), Meaningful Suffering

“What actually arouses indignation over suffering,” Nietzsche writes, “is not the suffering itself, but the senselessness of suffering.” Though the distinction between meaningful and senseless suffering is only rarely discussed in contemporary moral philosophy, it is clearly significant. In this paper, I develop a fittingness-based account of meaningful suffering that explains the distinctive burden of senselessness and the way meaning can make suffering more bearable. In developing the account, I also argue that the common account of the distinction between rational and a-rational attitudes in terms of judgment-sensitivity is flawed; the distinction between rational and a-rational attitudes should be drawn, instead, in terms of fittingness. Meaningful suffering is a rational attitude in the sense that it purports to be fitting to what it is about; senseless suffering might occasionally be justified but it is not about anything at all. When suffering is meaningful it expresses the agent’s evaluative perspective on the world, it is the suffering of the person, unlike senseless suffering, which befalls the person.

May 7 - Thumos seminar

Toni Ronnow-Rasmussen (Lund)

In Defence of Good-for Unitarianism.

The general aim is to argue that the expression good-for expresses a much richer notion than what traditionally has been thought to be the case. By “richer” is meant that the scope of good-for is considerably larger than what is usually believed to be the case. For instance, no one denies there are close connections between what is good for us and such notions as well-being or welfare. The question is if the notion of good-for admits of other things than e.g., well-being as being good for you. In Personal Value (2011), it was suggested that this was indeed the case; good-for can appropriately be ascribed to a range of things—things that have a personal rather than impersonal value, but which are not constitutive of someone’s wellbeing or welfare. One way of understanding this suggestion is to think that ‘good for’ is an ambiguous word. Sometimes it is used with a sense that should be confined to cases involving well-being, sometimes we employ it to a wider group of objects that carry so-called personal values. On this approach—what we might refer to as Disunitarianism about good-for—we should distinguish between “well-being good-for” and “personal value good-for”. A disunitarian view on good-for, admits that non-instrumental good-for denotes two or more notions. However, it denies the Unitarian idea that good-for can be given a single unambiguous conceptual analysis. Disunitarianism’s scepticism against a rich non-ambiguous notion of good-for is by no means far-fetched. In fact, it might be true. It might be correct that the notion of personal value is sometimes expressible in terms of what is good for someone, but it does not follow from this that when we think something is good for someone in the “well-being sense”, we use “good for” with the same meaning. I shall therefore consider some arguments suggesting why I was wrong in thinking that good-for has the same meaning when we talk about what is well-being constitutive and what has personal value. However, I shall also consider some reasons in favour of Good-for Unitarianism.

May 14-15, 2020 – Workshop "Knowledge and its Limits at 20" ***NEW DATE: November 5-6, 2020***

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June 25-26 – The Political Role of Moral Emotions

Fall 2019

September 26, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Arturs Logins (Geneva)

Emotions and Evidence

According to a popular view in philosophy of emotions, emotions can be epistemically justified. However, despite a widespread agreement on this general point, there has been little further theoretical development on how exactly to think about epistemically justified emotions. In this paper I hope to make some progress toward a better understanding of whether and if yes under what conditions can emotions be justified in properly epistemic sense. The question of whether it is (epistemically) wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone to have an emotion upon insufficient evidence will be one of the more specific questions that I hope to tackle in this paper.

October 3, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Heidy Meriste (University of Tartu)

In Defense of a Unified Conception of Guilt

According to traditional analysis, guilt is conceptually tied to believed norm violations. This idea, however, has been challenged by various counter-examples. In particular, I will take a closer look at two types of counter-examples that have been considered as serious enough to give rise to the suspicion that perhaps we should altogether abandon the attempt to come up with a unified conception of guilt. First I will deal with the cases of, what might be labelled as, pure empathy-based guilt, for which it is allegedly sufficient if one is empathetically distressed about another person’s suffering and recognizes oneself as the cause of that suffering. For example, one might be said to experience such guilt about causing heartbreak by not reciprocating another person’s romantic feelings—even if one does not think that he/she is thereby violating any moral norms. Secondly, I will look at survivor guilt, especially insofar as it can be viewed as an example of the more general category of guilt over unfair benefits. Here, one is not even causally responsible for the death of other people, and it is even harder to see why one might construe oneself as doing something wrong. The aim of my presentation is to preserve the unity of guilt by showing that, despite the appearances, the alleged cases of pure empathy-based guilt and survivor guilt can nevertheless be explained in terms of perceived norm violations—or else, are better described as something other than guilt.

October 10, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Vilius Dranseika (Vilnius University)

Folk Infallibilism about Justification

In experimental philosophy, attributions of knowledge receive much more attention than attributions of justification. In this presentation, I will attempt to look deeper into the folk concept of justification. I will argue, on the basis of a set of several empirical studies, for folk infallibilism about justification. I will also use folk infallibilism about justification to shed some light on recent research on Gettier intuitions.

October 17, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Edgar Phillips (Fribourg)

Making Sense of the Unintelligible

Certain authors make a contrast between ‘intelligible’ and ‘unintelligible’ attitudes. The terms are typically unqualified, suggesting that intelligibility is an absolute notion and that any attitude is simply intelligible or not. I outline two ways of understanding the distinction, one fairly widespread, the other suggested in a recent paper critical of the widespread account. I argue that certain kinds of bizarre or weird affective responses to things can be intelligible (at least to their subjects and perhaps to some others) in a way that neither account easily accommodates. I offer a diagnosis—in short, that it is a mistake to apply the absolute notion of unintelligibility to affective attitudes—and an alternative suggestion about how to think of the contrast between the intelligible and the unintelligible with respect to such attitudes.

October 23, 2019 – Quodlibeta

Hélène Leblanc

TBA

October 24, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Olivier Morin (Max Plank Insitute, Jena)

Information in images

How do images carry information? This question, usually addressed by semioticians or philosophers, can be answered quantitatively. This talk will present a framework that uses information theory to study and predict how the amount of information that images can carry may evolve. This framework focuses on graphic codes—images conventionally associated with meanings, as found in writing systems, pictographs, coin designs, heraldry, digital communication, etc. It considers three forms of information that a visual symbol may carry: complexity, distinctiveness, and specificity. A symbol's complexity assesses the cognitive costs carried by the act of processing and storing it. Its distinctiveness measures to what degree it stands out relative to other symbols. Its specificity quantifies the degree of precision that it is capable of when pointing at objects outside itself. All three types of information can be tracked using measures derived from information theory. These allow us to bring an evolutionary and quantitative perspective to classical semiotic questions. Do letter shapes show a tendency to simplify during the evolution of writing systems? Do visual symbols face the same trade-off between informativeness and simplicity as natural languages do? How specific do signals have to be for communication to be possible? These questions will be addressed using a mix of quantitative cultural history, experimental laboratory work, as well as a large-scale online communication project. Beyond the particular topic of graphic codes, the goal of this work is to make the cognitive sciences relevant to scholars whose main interests lie outside the laboratory and beyond psychology.

October 31, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Francesco Orsi (University of Tartu)

An explanatory objection to the fitting attitude analysis of value (Francesco Orsi & Andrés Garcia)

The fitting attitude analysis (FA) states that for objects to have value is for them to be the fitting targets of attitudes. The following paper presents an objection to the analysis according to which value and the fittingness of attitudes differ importantly in terms of their explanations. Whereas the fittingness of attitudes holds, inter alia, in virtue of both the properties of attitudes and those of their fitting targets, the explanation of value tends to have a different content. In particular, objects have value in virtue of the features that make them valuable and these need not involve attitudinal properties. If this is right, then there are reasons to doubt the claim that for objects to have value is for them to be the fitting targets of attitudes. Insofar as value is a property, it appears to be distinct from the property of objects being the fitting targets of attitudes.

The conference is followed by a Phileas Talk: Anne Meylan (Zurich) Bastions Main Building room B108 - 18.15 See here for additional info

November 4, 2019 – Emotion, Expression, and Language, a Workshop with Mitch Green

Mitch Green (University of Connecticut)

Benjamin Neeser (Geneva)

Cristina Soriano (Geneva)

Constant Bonard (Geneva and Antwerp),

The workshop consists of a main talk by Mitch Green, three shorter prensentations on topics related to Green's work by Benjamin Neeser, Cristina Soriano, and Constant Bonard, commentaries on the three talks by Mitch Green, and a roundtable discussion.

Schedule and abstracts here.

November 5, 2019 – CISA Seminar (additional info here)

Luke Russell (University of Sydney)

What is Forgiveness?

There are many contexts in which people are encouraged to forgive. Forgiveness is praised by Christians, by therapeutic psychologists, and by political theorists. The moral and practical attitude that we ought to take towards forgiveness depends on what forgiveness is, but there turns out to be deep disagreement on this issue. In this talk I will explore some recent philosophical disagreements about the nature of forgiveness. For example, is forgiveness is an internal emotional change or an external behavioural change? Is forgiveness a conscious and intentional commitment, or can forgiveness just happen? Does forgiveness, like apology, have to be communicated? Is forgiveness compatible with continuing to punish, or does forgiving preclude further punishment?

November 7, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Luke Russell (University of Sydney)

The Function of Blame and the Point of Forgiveness

Miranda Fricker has proposed that the function of blame is to create a shared understanding between victim and perpetrator. She also claims that forgiveness is the removal of blame feeling, and that forgiveness is justified whenever blaming is not the best available means of producing shared understanding between victim and perpetrator. In this paper I argue that blame is polyfunctional, and hence that Fricker overlooks a wide variety of reasons that count for or against forgiving. Just as blamers might be trying to achieve many independent goals, forgivers might be trying to secure a range of quite different outcomes.

November 13, 2019 - Quodlibeta

Guillaume Fréchette (Geneva)

TBA

November 14, 2019 – We co-organize the workshop Well-Being and Affective States (Université Clermont Auvergne)

November 21, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Constant Bonard (Geneva)

What Do Emotions and Moods Represent? Distinguishing Personal and Sub-Personal, Narrow and Broad Contents

According to Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni’s attitudinal theory of emotion (2012, 2015a, 2015b, 2016), the content of emotions does not represent evaluative properties. This claim is denied by their closest rivals: the motivational (e.g. Scarantino 2014) and the perceptual (e.g. Tappolet 2000, 2016, Prinz 2004, Döring 2006) theories of emotion. Another claim made by Deonna and Teroni is that moods don’t have a representational content. This claim is more widely accepted among philosophers of emotion, but is nevertheless contentious and many philosophers refuse it (e.g. Dretske 1995, Crane 1998, Prinz 2004, Tye 2008). I believe that some clarity can be brought in both these debates by making two distinctions concerning representational contents. The first is Dennett’s (1969) distinction between the personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. For Deonna and Teroni, it is at the personal level that emotions don’t represent evaluative properties, but their account seems compatible with the claim that sub-personal affective mechanisms nevertheless represent evaluative properties. This distinction might make the aforementioned disagreement between the attitudinal theory and the motivational theory disappear, even though other incompatibilities would persist. We can also apply Dennett’s distinction to moods: Deonna and Teroni claim that they don’t represent anything at the personal level, but the claim that moods’ sub-personal mechanisms possess a representational content is not in contradiction with their claim. This might also dissipate certain apparent disagreements with representationalists about moods. The second distinction is Recanati’s (2007: 133ff) distinction between a narrow or a broad content (or ‘overall content’). Deonna and Teroni reserve the expression ‘content’ for the narrow content, but several authors (e.g. Dretske 1995, Tye 2008, or sometimes Searle 1983) use ‘content’ to denote a broad content, which encompasses the narrow content as well as features of the psychological mode. With this distinction in mind, we can say without contradiction that emotions represent evaluative properties as part of their broad content and agree with Deonna and Teroni that emotions don’t represent evaluative properties as part of their narrow content. This allows countering some criticisms made by rival theorists (e.g. Rossi and Tappolet 2018). Furthermore, applying the narrow/broad content distinction to moods allow claiming that moods don’t have any narrow content, but that they nevertheless have a broad content, and that the latter has a representational function. Again, this might also dissipate certain apparent disagreements with representationalists about moods and make Deonna and Teroni’s theory compatible with some versions of ‘intentionalism’ or ‘representationalism’ (e.g. Dretske 1995).

November 27 - Quodlibeta

Baptiste Le Bihan (Geneva)

TBA

November 28, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Eric Cullhed (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and Uppsala University)

The moving, the miserable, and the cutesy

I plan to carry proverbial owls to Athens and will try to make a contribution to the debate on the emotion being moved that was pioneered by Julien Deonna in a 2011 essay. The focus of my talk will be why certain ostensibly distinguishable emotions tend to be lumped together with being moved in everyday language use as well as in scholarly contexts. I will especially address the claims that empathic concern and responses to cuteness are each “a part of“ being moved (see doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00723 and doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00387 respectively). Examples will be drawn from Greek and Roman literature, especially the Homeric epics.

December 5, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Andrew Reisner (Uppsala University)

Wellbeing as the foundation of theoretical reason

This talk bring together diverse material for my in progress monograph, The Pragmatic Foundations of Theoretical Reason. The book aims to explore the possibility that a pluralistic theory of normative reasons for belief and a fairly traditional set of views about theoretical rationality can both be explained by appeal to a general picture of theoretical reason which has wellbeing at its foundations. The aim of this talk is to look at some of the core arguments that motivate the project and to look at some of the most serious, obvious difficulties for which, at present, I have no very complete solution.

The conference is followed by a Phileas Talk: Andreas Brekke Carlsson(Oslo) Bastions Main Building room B108 - 18.15 See here for additional info

December 11, 2019 - Quodlibeta

Florian Cova (Geneva)

TBA

December 12, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Roberto Keller (Geneva)

Bringing Correctness into Focus

An emotion’s correctness conditions are often minimally stated as follows: admiring x is correct iff x is admirable. In this talk, I will propose a refinement of this biconditional statement through the notion of focalisation, namely the property of an emotion of focalising one’s attention on some particular features of its intentional object. This will yield the following restatement where (i) x is the intentional object and (ii) y is the set of properties of the intentional object on which one’s attention is drawn by the occurrence of the emotion: admiring x in a respect y is correct iff x is admirable with respect to y. The rationale for this refinement is that emotions apprehend their intentional object as having a given evaluative property in a given respect, namely in virtue of those features on which the emotion focalises. For this reason, for an emotion to be correct, it is not sufficient for the object to exemplify the relevant evaluative property in some unspecified way: it must exemplify it in the same respect on which the emotion focalises. This richer and more fine-grained understanding of correctness can promptly respond to a challenge to emotions such as admiration, contempt, pride and shame, which have been argued to be systematically incorrect.

The conference is followed by a Phileas Talk: Constant Bonard (Geneva) Bastions Main Building room B108 - 18.15 See here for additional info

December 19, 2019 – Thumos Seminar

Patty Van Cappellen (Duke)

Reaching to the Sky or Getting on Your Knees: Emotions Expressed in the Full Body

Emotions are expressed nonverbally, and not only in the face, but in the full body. In addition, the body reciprocally influences the construction of an emotional experience. These two statements, although central to many emotion theories, have not received enough empirical attention. In this talk, I will present some relevant and recent results from a larger project studying the embodiment of emotions and of religious experiences.

First, we documented full body expressions of various positive (e.g., joy, awe, hope) and negative (e.g., sadness, guilt) emotions by asking participants to position a small mannequin according to how they would express these emotions. Postures were coded for multiple dimensions of expansiveness, arm and head position, and other features. Results document distinct postures for these emotions as well as different meanings. We then focused on specific body postures varying on body’s orientation (upward vs. downward) and space (expansive vs. constrictive), to study whether they would be differentially associated with the experience of positive and negative emotions in the real-life context of church attendance (among Christians) and in the context of prayer (among Christians, Hindus, and Muslims). Finally, in two studies we directly manipulated postures in the lab and tested whether they would modify the affective and physiological responses to music. We find the strongest support for an association between positive emotions and bodily postures that are expansive and oriented upward. Together, this research advances our limited knowledge of full body emotional expression, and especially that of positive emotions. It also highlights the importance of studying mind-body connections to more fully understand emotional and religious experiences.

Spring 2019

February 21, 2019 - Thumos seminar

Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni (Geneva)

Introduction

February 28, 2019 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Constant Bonard (Geneva)

Extending Gricean communication beyond ostensive signals

The standard picture of communication in philosophy, linguistics, ethology, developmental psychology, and other fields is importantly structured by the distinction between signals that display overt intentions to communicate (ostensive signals) and those that do not (non-ostensive signals). This distinction is generally taken to draw the line between the explanatory scope of the two main models of communication: the code model would account for communication through non-ostensive signals and the Gricean model for communication through ostensive signals. In this paper, I challenge this picture by showing that some non-ostensive signals can be accounted by neither of these models. I focus on examples of non-ostensive emotion expression and in particular laughter. I argue that such cases can be accounted by what I call the extended Gricean model, whose explanatory scope is not restricted to ostensive signals.

N.B: There will be a PhilEAs talk afterwards (room B105) given by Angela Martin (Fribourg) - Ethique animale: Enjeux actuels

March 05, 2019 - Brain and Cognition seminar (CISA cession)

March 07, 2019 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Edgar Phillips (Fribourg)

Towards a Romantic View of Love

Recent work on the philosophy of love has seen fairly widespread (not to say universal) agreement that love is a rational attitude, in the sense that there are reasons for loving and love is characteristically responsive to those reasons. A central motivation for this view is the idea that love is intelligible from the lover’s point of view. In this paper, I explain the idea that love is a rational attitude and argue that the most defensible version of this idea will look something like Niko Kolodny's ‘relationship view’. I then argue that that view has trouble making sense of certain variations on an example that Kolodny uses in one of his own arguments—the ‘argument from amnesia’. Considering these variations, I suggest, motivates a reconsideration of the rationalistic view of love and a different take on its first-personal intelligibility.

March 14, 2019 - Thumos seminar

Kris Goffin (Geneva)

Implicit Bias & Emotion

March 21, 2019 - Thumos seminar

Marta Benenti (Torino)

Sad minor chords and emotion knowledge

“The perception of the chord as expressing sadness is possible only for someone who has some idea of what sadness is like from the inside”. (Peacocke 2009:263)
It is particularly difficult to understand how the capacity to recognise something as a felt feeling could translate into the ascription of a perceivable property to an inanimate object.
I will first assess the kind of knowledge of emotions that we are supposed to have in order to recognise a simple sound as expressive. Second, I will explore emotion concepts and offer an account of their use that is compatible with different justified applications to both animated and inanimate beings.
As a result, the relation between knowing what it is like to feel sad and recognising a chord as sounding sad will hopefully sound less mysterious.

March 28, 2019 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Julia Langkau (Fribourg)

I argue that we should distinguish two phenomena underlying our use of the notion of imaginative vividness: ‘vividness’ of mental images and ‘vividness’ of imaginative experience. While the first refers to the level of accuracy of mental images (visual images and images of other sensory modalities), the second refers to the level of intensity of an imaginative experience. I will argue that accuracy of mental images and intensity of imaginative experiences play different epistemic roles, and I will make a suggestion as to what these roles are

N.B: There will be a PhilEAs talk afterwards (room B105) given by Frédérique de Vignemont (Paris)

April 04, 2019 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Florian Cova (Geneva)

Is there an empirically testable difference between emotions and quasi-emotions?

One popular solution to the paradox of fiction requires postulating that, aside from "genuine" emotions, we are also able to experience "quasi-emotions" that constitute a very distinct emotional phenomenon. However, to motivate such a postulate, one has to show that introducing quasi-emotions into our ontology allows us to best explain certain phenomena, and thus that the quasi-emotions hypothesis must make different (and better) predictions than alternate hypotheses. In this talk, I will discuss whether such predictions can be made, and will review recent attempts at giving an empirical content to the quasi-emotions hypothesis.

April 11, 2019 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Davide Bordini (Liège)

April 18, 2019 - Thumos seminar

Sebastian Aeschbach (Geneva)

Against Artistic Individualism

Can an artist form the intention to present his artwork to an audience and not care about its response(s)? Or does an artist present artifacts to an audience in order to trigger a specific experience – aesthetic or cognitive? A common claim has it that artists do not and should not create art with the aim of pleasing an audience or, more generally, with the aim of eliciting a specific experience (Zangwill, 2007; Heinich, 1998). Why would artists then take the trouble to reach audiences? Why would the painter wish to present his work in an exhibition, or the poet publish his Ode? Artistic individualism comes in different forms (Collingwood, 1938; Zangwill, 2007). There is the claim that the art-status of an artifact does not depend on relational properties, in particular, it is independent of an audience and its emotions. Another claim is that none of the artist’s intentions ever relates to an audience and its potential aesthetic judgment. The artist in other words should only (form the intention to) create something beautiful or otherwise interesting, irrespective of the pursuit of, say, fame or fortune. We shall reject this view on the basis that it raises the problem of artistic solipsism and the impossibility of “private art”. We shall then distinguish two sets of relevant intentions: the intentions to create a beautiful or an otherwise artistically valuable artifact and the intentions to unveil this artifact to the public. If this distinction holds true, one can reasonably argue – in similar fashion to Grice on language – that some minimal maxims apply to artifacts that are made accessible to an audience. On this view, conceptual art for example needs to make its underlying idea experientiable (Goldie & Schellekens, 2010).

Ronnie De Sousa (Toronto)

May 02, 2019 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Ronnie De Sousa (Toronto)

What does Talking do to Feeling?

Two conflicting attitudes are sometimes expressed to the verbalization of our most significant emotional experiences—aesthetic, erotic, or religious. One is that verbalization allows us to savour experience, enhancing its value and enriching its meaning, even when we are tempted to describe it as ‘ineffable’. The other is that verbalizing an intense experience blunts it or reduces it to clichés. How is this difference to be reconciled, or adjudicated? In this talk, I distinguish two questions. One concerns explanation. It is best approached in terms of the different origins and functions of intuitive and analytic modes of thinking, shedding light on the relation between qualitative experience and the need for replicable social sharing served by language. The other question is normative, and derives from ideological assumptions about what is most deeply and authentically human. Opinions on that latter question, I suspect, stem largely from individual temperamental differences.

N.B: There will be a quodlibet afterwards given by Catherine Herfeld (Zürich)

May 09, 2019 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Samuel Lepine (Clermont-Ferrand)

Psychopathy, emotions, and well-being

Psychopathy is a condition in which subjects exhibit important emotional deficits like emotional callousness, reduced empathic responses, and violent behaviors, whereas at the same time they seem to be completely rational. This has led many psychologists to argue that psychopathy is a mental disorder, or more specifically a moral disorder (e.g. Blair et al., 1995a; Raine, 2018). In this paper, I argue that a more comprehensive view of psychopathy as a mental disorder should not focus only on its immoral and violent features, but also and more generally on its emotional deficits. I argue that psychopathy should be understood as a case of emotional blindness, in which subjects are unable to grasp the relevance of some properties for their own motivations, and more generally for their own well-being. Then, I confront this approach with two possible objections. The first is that there are probably successful psychopaths, and the second is that psychopathy could be conceived as an evolutionary adaptation. I argue that none of these two objections is convincing enough regarding empirical data, and that psychopathy is a mental disorder at least according to Wakefield’s framework (1992) where mental disorders are defined as “harmful dysfunctions”.

N.B: There will be a PhilEAs talk afterwards (room B012) given by Juliette Vazard (Genève/Paris)

May 16, 2019 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Lauren Ware (Kent)

The Nature and Value of Emotional Suffering in Criminal Punishment

N.B: There will be a PhilEAs talk afterwards (room B105) given by Alain Pe-Curto (Yale)

May 23, 2019 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Robert Schneider (Indiana)

The Rise and Fall of the “Resentment Paradigm”: A Mid-Twentieth-Century Story

In the middle decades of the twentieth century there emerged what I am calling the “Resentment Paradigm.” With intellectual roots in Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment (The Genealogy of Morals), but more urgently in response to the historical experience of fascism and other forms of right-wing extremism, largely in Europe but in the US as well, scholars and intellectuals fashioned a well-wrought analysis of these movements and their ideological appeal that hinged on popular resentment against modernizing forces as the decisive explanatory factor. The main figures in this intellectual enterprise were well-established American academics and public intellectuals: Talcott Parsons, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and others; but they also acknowledged the influence of writers associated with the Frankfurt School and especially the important 1950 publication, The Authoritarian Personality, in which Theodor Adorno played a central role. In the post-WWII era, this paradigm, I will argue, achieved a hegemonic reach when it came to explaining such movements as populism, anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, nativism, and all variations of fascism. (It was much less deployed to explain movements from the left.)

By the later decades of the twentieth century, however, this paradigm lost its appeal and in most academic and intellectual quarters was largely discredited. Several factors explain its decline, but they can be summarized in a turn away from an intellectual identification with both a psychological (or in many cases a psycho-analytical) approach and modernization theory. Historians and social scientists, starting circa-1970, tended to be more attentive to the grievances and interests that animated popular movements, and less inclined to see their protest and discontent as symptoms of a maladjustment to “modernity.” Interestingly, the decline of this paradigm coincided with the wide-spread social and political protest movements of “the sixties.” Indeed, as I will demonstrate, for the most part these movements were not “coded” in terms of “resentment.” Nor, as I will additionally suggest, was resentment a core emotion among those who identified with them. In short, the “Resentment Paradigm” “fell” both as an intellectual diagnosis and as a lived experience.

As a coda to my paper, I will point to the revival of “resentment” as an explanation in recent decades for a range of phenomena—from religious fundamentalisms around the world, to nativist, xenophobic movements, to Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US. But I will also note how our deployment of this term lacks the rigor that once characterized it. And I will propose that we need to rethink our casual and often unthinking reliance on it to explain some of the most puzzling and disturbing movements of our times.

N.B: There will be a quodlibet afterwards given by Stéphanie Ruphy (Lyon) - Scientific pluralism or scientific metaphysics: why you have to choose

June 05, 2019 - Cultivating negative emotions: the virtues of anxiety and disgust

Are negative emotions such as anxiety and disgust emotions that we should cultivate? In this workshop, we will examine this question by addressing the related issues: Can we distinguish anxiety from other related emotions like stress and fear, empirically speaking? How does goal-relevance impact anxiety felt in social contexts? Which social and epistemic benefits does an emotion like anxiety provide? Can we regulate disgust, and particularly the disgust we might feel towards other people?

Program:

14:00-15:15 Charlie Kurth: Emotion cultivation and human agency: The cases of anxiety and disgust

15:15-15:30 Break

15:30-16:00 Ben Meuleman: Differences between stress, fear, and anxiety: Evidence from a virtual height experiment

16:00-16:30 Ryan Murray: Appraisals of goal-relevance and social value in social anxiety

16:30-17:00 Coffee break

17:00-17:30 Juliette Vazard: What we do when we doubt: Epistemic anxiety and open questions

17:30-18:00 Jonas Blatter: Controlling disgust – Virtue or compensatory obligation?

Poster here

N.B: the workshop will take place from 14:00 to 18:00 (Campus Biotech)

Fall 2018

September 20, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Arturs Logins (Geneva)

September 21, 2018 - CISA Doctoral Students Day

More information here.

September 25, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Elena Semino (Lancaster)

Linguistics and communication about chronic pain

September 27, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Kris Goffin (Geneva)

Better Scared than Sorry: A Pragmatic Account of Emotional Representation

N.B.: There will be a Quodlibet by Jiri Benovsky (Fribourg) - Dual-aspect-pan-proto-psychism - afterward (room B108)

October 04, 2018 - Conference on negative emotions

Riikka Rossi (Helsinki)

October 04, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Mikko Salmela (Helsinki)

The Rational Appropriateness of Hetero-induced Pride and Shame

October 09, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Janet Bultitude (Bath)

Neglecting a painful limb: Attention bias in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

October 11, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Jonas Blatter (Bern)

Moralising Emotions: Emotions in interpersonal morality

I argue that emotions can constitute moral wrongs towards their objects. There are several approaches to evaluating emotions on a moral basis. A consequentialist approach is arguably the most straight-forward, but also lacks any true directedness and basis for claims of the object against the subject. A virtue ethical approach offers more options for different kinds of considerations, be they prudential, out of a virtue like kindness, or for the sake of personal growth. However, virtue theory by its nature focuses on agents, and hence the subjects of emotions and not their object. In this talk, I present an approach based on interpersonal moral considerations to explain what is morally problematic about unfair emotions; and I address two major challenges to such an approach: (1) the No-Harm challenge, which is based on an apparent lack of morally relevant harm to the object, and (2) the No-Control challenge, which is based on the principle of ought–implies–can and the apparent lack of control over our emotions.

October 16, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Robert Shepherd (Melbourne)

From a “jolt to the head” to the gift of hearing: Taking neural prostheses to the clinic

October 18, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Michele Ombrato (Geneva)

Emotional Reactions Over Time and Sustained Emotional Engagement

October 25, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Matilde Aliffi (Birmingham)

Emotions and Epistemic Responsibility

N.B.: There will be a Quodlibet by Arturs Logins - Emotional Lotteries and Problems of Confidence. A New Approach to the Lottery Paradox and Belief - afterward (room B108)

October 30, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Diego Vidaurre (Oxford)

Characterizing brain network dynamics in rest and task

October 30, 2018 - joint session LgBIG meeting & Thumos seminar

Steve Humbert-Droz (Geneva-Fribourg) & Michal Hladky (Geneva)

Imaginary invalid! Deflating the model bubble

Models and simulations are widely used in science offering methods complementary to experiments and hypothesis testing. Philosophers of science are attempting to answer the following related questions. What are models? How do scientists generate knowledge with models? How do scientists build and use models? There is a variety of alternative accounts that can be roughly classified as representational, teleological, epistemic. In all of these cases, the existence of an intentional agent is explicitly or implicitly postulated.

Our aim is to expose the problems of overcharged definitions of models, provide an alternative deflationary account and show how it contributes to clarify the notion of imagination under constraints deployed in scientific contexts.

In the first part, we introduce definitions of models (and simulations) from the literature in philosophy of science and discard those using epistemic and pragmatic/teleological notions. Then, we expose the representationalist accounts based on the notions of fiction and imagination. To conclude this section, we introduce the deflationary mapping account which will be compared with representational accounts in the third section.

The second part is dedicated to the notions of imagination and fiction as studied in philosophy of mind. We introduce the best candidates for being imaginative mental states (supposition, mental images, projection into fiction) as well as Walton's intentionalist account of fiction based on games of make-believe. Semantic accounts of fictions will be excluded.

In the third part, we expose several arguments against representation, fiction and imagination accounts of models in science. Arguments against representational definitions are based on considerations from philosophy of science. We argue that model relation between source and target structures based on isomorphism is preferable to representation, as it supports the change of direction in the context of building and of using scientific models. Furthermore, representation on its own is not sufficiently restrictive to justify inferences leading from observations of source systems to conclusions about targets. Also, in case of complex theories, scientists might not be able to fully represent them mentally. Finally, there are examples of scientific modelling in which causally and explanatory relevant entities are not represented, but inferred.

Arguments against fiction and imagination accounts are based on considerations from philosophy of mind. Philosophers of science often refer to Walton's theory of make-believe, but fail to consider several of its problematic features. In the context of science, the personal experiential character of imagination might not be required and might even be undesirable. Intentionalists could attempt to avoid this issue by modifying Walton’s account. Either imagination is reduced to supposition or the notion of games of make-believe to rule following. In either case, imagination properly speaking does not seem to characterise scientific modelling. We argue that fiction accounts, independently from the consideration of imagination, are incompatible with scientific practice. The intentions of authors of fictions need not be constrained by the world, contrary to those of the authors of scientific models. Similarly, we evaluate scientific models on the basis of their similarity with the world, something that obviously contrasts with the way we evaluate fictions.

The deflationary mapping account of models avoids these problems and has several independent advantages. It can be systematically applied in the definitions of simulations and of computer simulations by simple restrictions on its domain. It can feature in analyses of more complex phenomena as we will demonstrate in the next section.

The fourth part illustrates how the deflationary mapping account can be used to characterise cases in which scientists use imagination in order to derive conclusions about the world. As pointed out above, the simple representation relation is not sufficient to provide epistemic justification. Similarly, not all kinds of imagination can lead to knowledge. We introduce the notion of imagination under constraints that corresponds to the use of imagination in scientific contexts.

This application demonstrates that the explanatory relation between models and imagination should be reversed. It is not the imagination that clarifies what models are but rather model relations that characterise the notion of imagination under constraints. The intuitions of philosophers of science proposing definitions of models in terms of imagination can be explained by a simple correlation. It is often the case that scientists deploy imagination when using models. The alternative non-minimal definitions can be explained in analogous manner. When using models, scientists might think in terms of similarity, use mathematical expressions to describe their systems, evoke specific goals (solving equations) and so on. Philosophers aim to capture these phenomena by introducing these correlated terms in the definitions of models. However, this leads to a multiplicity of accounts that are arguably too narrow and mutually exclusive. The deflationary mapping account, on the other hand, is general and modular. Combined with other elements, it can be used in the analysis of diverse activities – such as imagination under constraints.

N.B.:The event will take place at Phil102 (i.e. Batiment des philosophes), 12:15-14:00.

November 01, 2018 -Thumos reading group

Jonathan Mitchell (Warwick) - The Psychosemantics of Emotional Experience

We read and discuss a paper on emotions by Jonathan Mitchell

N.B.: The event will take place at B107 (Uni-Bastions, 1st floor), 10:00-12:00

November 01, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Jonathan Mitchell (Warwick)

Emotional Intentionality and the Attitude-Content Distinction

Typical emotions share important features with paradigmatic intentional states, and therefore might admit of distinctions made in the theory of intentionality. One such distinction is between attitude and content, where we can specify the content of an intentional state separately from its attitude, and therefore the same content can be taken up by different intentional attitudes. According to some philosophers, emotions do not admit of this distinction, although there has been no sustained argument for this claim. Moreover, the consequences of this view have not been explored, and so it is not clear what challenges are faced by those who accept it. This paper argues that on a Goldie-inspired reconstruction of the phenomenology of emotions, the attitude-content distinction does not apply to emotional experience. The main thesis is as follows: the way values figure in emotional experience is such as to intelligibly motivate felt valenced attitudes – as having the power to motivate such responses – and it is this feature which blocks application of the attitude-content distinction. I also consider two challenges the view faces and suggest ways it can respond.

November 13, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar (CISA cession)

Louis Charland (Ontario)

Anorexia Nervosa as a Passion: A contemporary case study in psychopathology and the affective sciences

November 15, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Louis Charland (Ontario)

The Distinction between Passion and Emotion: A Distinction We Ignore at Our Philosophical Peril

Contemporary English speaking philosophers and scientists do not typically refer to “passions” as constituents of the affective life. Indeed, with very few exceptions, the prevailing view in the history of “emotion” and the affective sciences appears to be that the term “passion” has been superseded by the term “emotion.” Admittedly, vestiges and variants of the term “passion” remain in ordinary parlance, not only in English, but also in other European languages. Nevertheless, as a theoretical category in the philosophy of “emotion” and the affective sciences, “passion” appears to have been relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history. In this seminar, we examine some of the perils of overlooking the distinction between” passion” and “emotion” in both historical research and contemporary theory.

November 20, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Pascal Fries (Ernst Strüngmann Institute)

Rhythms for cognition: Communication through Coherence

November 22, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Juliette Vazard (Geneva-Paris)

Unreasonable Doubt as a failure of affective experience

Apart from radical skeptics, persons suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) probably manifest one of the most extreme forms of unreasonable doubting. What are the cognitive and affective mechanisms responsible for generating the need and motivation to suspend our judgment, reassess our beliefs, and gather further evidence to support or reject them? Given that OCD’s disabling symptoms are thought to result from a dysfunctional tendency towards doubt, uncertainty, and indecision, this disorder certainly holds some answers to these questions. The type of (unreasonable) doubt which I will consider is not a theoretical or “paper” doubt, but a doubt that is motivated and acts as a reason for mental and physical action. I will make a suggestion as to the kind of affective state providing motivational power to this doubt. In particular, expanding on views from Christopher Hookway and Jennifer Nagel, I will argue that doubt is triggered by an emotion which is sensitive both to the epistemic risk and to the practical cost associated with considering a given proposition as accurately representing reality. I then go on to propose an explanatory model to account for the instances in which this mechanism goes wrong and generates a doubt that is unreasonable (i.e. unjustified by the evidence at hand). To do this, I have chosen to look at what might be considered a distorting mirror of unreasonable doubt, namely the pathological doubt of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

N.B.: There will be a Quodlibet afterward (room B108)

November 27, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Roza Umarova (Freiburg)

Predictors and signatures of stroke recovery: insights from spatial neglect

The talk will take place at 18h15 in the room B002

December 04, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Melanie Wilke (Göttingen)

Action-perception dissociations

December 06, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Demian Whiting (Hull)

Urges of the heart

“The noble personages, being somewhat further away, abandoned themselves to their emotions with hardly more discretion. Each gave free rein to the urges of his or her heart”. (Patrick Süskind, Perfume, p.246)

Emotion has long been suspected to play a key role in the generation of human behaviour, but the exact nature of the role has been harder to pin down. In this paper I aim to do just that. A standard view in metaphysics has it that dispositional properties or powers have categorical bases, properties of objects that ground or explain or realize the way objects are disposed to behave when certain circumstances obtain (e.g. Prior et al, 1982). But if this is true of objects in general, then the same must be true of people specifically. So, the question arises: what in the case of ourselves might play the role of a categorical basis for our behavioral dispositions? I will argue that emotion is the best candidate – indeed it turns out to be the only viable candidate – for the categorical basis for how we are disposed to behave. Time allowing, I will also sketch out some possible implications of the view advanced in the paper for how we should understand emotion’s role in the formation of moral thought, virtue, and vice, taking, as commonly supposed, that such things involve dispositions to behave in certain ways.

References
Prior, E., Pargetter, R., & Jackson, F. (1982). 'Three theses about dispositions'. American Philosophical Quarterly, 19, 251 - 257.
Süskind, P. Perfume. (1986). Penguin Books: London.

December 11, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Peggy St.Jacques (Sussex)

TBA

December 13, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Magalie Schor (Geneva)

Nothing Special About Fictional Emotions

In this talk, I address the following issue. What is special about fictional emotions – do they really differ from ordinary ones? And, if so, how and why? Trying to answer this question, I start by articulating the thesis found in the literature on the topic according to which there is an important difference between fictional and ordinary emotions: fictional emotions typically do not lead the subject to action. We do not flee the movie theater when we fear monsters on the screen. I argue against this thesis and show that it goes wrong especially because it doesn’t seriously consider interactive fictions such as videogames and role-playing games. Addressing this mistake, I expose what is interesting in interactive fictions and how considering them enables us to conclude to a parallelism between emotions elicited in both fictional and ordinary real-life contexts: emotions do not significantly differ in action motivation as a function of the fictional or real nature of the context. They rather vary according to the kind of interactivity afforded by the situation which elicits them, be it real or fictional. I show that this interactive context variability hypothesis, as I call it, is better in explaining and predicting whether the action motivated by the emotions will be effective or not. Furthermore, I show how this hypothesis provides a better explanation of why emotions differ in this way depending on the interactivity of the context.

N.B.: There will be a Quodlibet afterward (room B108) and then a "pot de fin d'année" in the central building of Uni-Bastions.

December 18, 2018 - Brain and Cognitive seminar

Yael Hanein (Tel Aviv)

Printed EEG and EMG electronic-tattoos for neurological applications

December 20, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Maude Ouellette-Dubé (Fribourg)

Moral Understanding and Experiential Understanding

Moral epistemology, similar to epistemology in general, is characterized by a search for knowledge and questions such as “does moral knowledge exist and, if yes, how can we gain some?”, “what is good and how can we know?” or again “what is a morally right action?” are central for it. Again, in trying to answer these questions the moral inquiry centers on how and whether we can gain moral knowledge, that is, how we can come to have a justified true moral belief. While it is uncontroversial that moral epistemology echoes a search for moral knowledge, some have questioned whether this needs to be so. Over and above moral knowledge, some defend the view that the primary goal of our moral inquiry should be to gain moral understanding (Hills 2009, 2011). The account of moral understanding favored along this view is explanatory understanding or “understanding why”. In this case, the agent is said to understand when she grasps the reasons “why P” and in the case of moral understanding “P” will have moral content: “understanding why lying is wrong”, “understanding why an action is right”. There are many reasons to favor the pursuit of moral understanding over that of moral knowledge. For instance, moral understanding is considered central in an account of morally worthy action. Again when an agent has moral understanding she is more reliable because she has a systematic grasp of the subject at hand and, presumably, an ability to make good judgements about new cases.

I suggest that to define moral understanding solely in terms of explanatory understanding makes us fail to recognize another kind of understanding which I will call “experiential understanding”. Such understanding, if it is not a necessary condition to have moral understanding, at least contributes to it importantly. In presenting my account of experiential understanding I hope to show that it is important to fully account for the whole of the moral understanding process and that it values the epistemic role of moral emotions.

February 22, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni (Geneva)

Introduction

March 01, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Anne Meylan (Basel)

The Reasons-Responsiveness Account of Doxastic Responsibility and the Basing Relation

In several papers (2013, 2014, 2015) Conor McHugh defends the influential view that doxastic responsibility, viz. our responsibility for our beliefs, is grounded in a specific form of reasons-responsiveness. The main purpose of this paper is to show that a subject’s belief can be responsive to reasons in this specific way without the subject being responsible for her belief. While this specific form of reasons-responsiveness might be necessary, it is not sufficient for doxastic responsibility.

March 08, 2018 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Moritz Mueller (Bonn)

Responding to Significance: Dietrich von Hildebrand on emotion

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s writings contain one of the most ambitious and sensitive accounts of our affective lives to be found within early phenomenology. While comparable in scope to Scheler’s treatment of this subject and building on some of his central insights, Hildebrand’s work offers an original and distinctive systematic account both of the ontology and significance of emotion. At the core of this account is the claim that paradigm emotions constitute a form of position-taking (Stellungnahme). In developing this idea and contrasting position-takings with other types of intentional phenomena, Hildebrand offers an account of the nature and normative role of emotions that is substantially continuous with and at the same time crucially modifies central strands of Kantian ethical thought. As position-takings that respond to (antworten auf) the axiological properties of objects and events, emotions are seen alongside paradigm intellectual and volitional phenomena as forms of active engagement with the world, one of whose characteristic manifestations is conceived as expressing what is most definitive of our personhood.

In my talk I critically reconstruct the most central aspects of Hildebrand’s views on emotion. I begin by introducing von Hildebrand’s account of paradigm emotions as affective position-takings, contrast his account with views that conceive of emotions as forms of apprehension or grasp of axiological properties and critically assess Hildebrand’s view of how affective position-takings are to be distinguished from other types of position-taking. I then elaborate an important distinction which Hildebrand draws between different kinds of axiological property to which emotions can be responsive – ‘(dis)value’ and the ‘mere subjectively (dis)satisfying’. In this context, I also discuss some (dis)continuities with those aspects of Kantian ethical thought that inform his proposal and how it is supposed to make emotions intelligible as capable of manifesting the core of their subject’s personhood. I finally assess Hildebrand’s claim that emotions can be morally valuable in their own right and note some difficulties for this account in light of the role he assigns in this context to a specific form of higher-order position-taking that confers moral value on (first-order) emotional responses.

N.B.: There will be a Quodlibet by Joan Vance - Perceptual uncertainty and precision - afterward (room B108)

March 15, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Daniel Vanello (Geneva/Fribourg)

Moral Conflict, Practical Rationality, and the Appropriateness of Emotions

The aim of this talk is to argue that the notion of “appropriateness” of emotions one favours, and its relation to value judgements, is driven by tacit assumptions constituting one’s conception of practical rationality in ethical practice. First, I rely on Bernard Williams’ argument to the effect that moral conflict is structurally different from conflicts of belief to extract two common assumptions about practical rationality. I then argue that the first of these assumptions seems to be at work in the interpretation of the “appropriateness” of emotions in terms of “fittingness”. Finally, by exploring the second assumption about practical rationality, I put pressure on the interpretation of ‘appropriateness” in terms of “fittingness” by suggesting that there might be an alternative way of understanding the “appropriateness” of emotions and its role in ethical practice.

March 22, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Guy Fletcher (Edinburgh)

Prudential Judgements and Motivation?

In this paper I explore in detail how prudential judgments are related to motivation. I proceed by exploring a number of possible theses concerning their interrelation, and grounds of these theses. I argue for the following thesis:

Prudential Judgement Internalism (PJI): At least one type of prudential judgement (judgements about what is best for oneself, among current options) is necessarily connected to motivation in rational agents.

Here is the plan. I begin by arguing for PJI in §2 before considering objections to it in section 3. In sections 4 and 5 I consider the prospects for more ambitious, general, forms of internalism than PJI. I do this by examining possible explanations of the truth of a range of internalist theses including PJI. I argue that the two main ways of extending PJI are implausible and so we cannot sustain anything more ambitious than PJI. In section 6 I make two small amendments to PJI and give its final statement before (§7) closing by discussing the relation between PJI and questions concerning the nature of prudential judgements and the purported anti-alienation constraint on prudential value.

March 29, 2018 - Warwick-Geneva Interdepartmental Workshop

The event is part of the Geneva-Warwick collaboration in the Philosophy of Mind. The collaboration started in 2014 and is meant to foster a strong link between two internationally-renowned departments of Philosophy. Each year one of the departments organises an event where both members of staff and PhD’s can present their work. The event provides a unique opportunity for PhD students and early career researchers on both sides to meet each other and expert philosophers.

Location: PHIL 211 (Batiment des Philosophes)

10.15-11.00 Naomi Eilan (Warwick) - Communication as Joint Action

According to Tomasello’s ‘shared intentionality hypothesis’ (in A Natural History of Human Thinking), the evolutionary roots of the distinctive features of human thinking lie in 'adaptations for dealing with problems of social coordination, specifically problems presented by individual's attempts to collaborate with each other’. A key step in the evolution of such collaboration was the emergence of the capacity for joint action, in particular the capacity for a uniquely human form of joint action -- collaborative communication. I call his approach to communication the Collaborative Communication’ approach and oppose to it something I call the ‘Second Person’ approach, which in my view does better justice to some, though certainly not all of Tomasello’s claims about the importance of social interaction in explaining fundamental aspects of human minds. I will begin to spell out the difference by contrasting the two approaches along three dimensions: (1)The account given of the fundamental motivational structure underpinning the most basic forms of social engagement; (2) The relation between explanations of the capacity for communication, and of what it is to stand in communicative relation, on the one hand, and explanation of the understanding and acquisition of basic mental concepts (3) The account given of the genus ‘communication’ of which distinctively human communication is a sub-species.

11.00-11.30 Q&A

11.30-11.35 Break

11.35-12.20 Steve Humbert-Droz (Geneva) - What Imagination is - The Tricky Case of Supposition

There is a growing consensus that imagination is not only a matter of mental images. In particular, some scholars have argued that supposing is a kind of imagination on the same footing as sensorily imagining. This suggests that our capacity to suppose constitutes a psychological faculty that is irreducible to an already known form of imagination or to a combination of other psychological faculties.

In this talk, I will criticize three “simulationist” accounts, which have it that our capacity to suppose constitutes such a faculty because it simulates/recreates a genuine faculty. The first account is by Mulligan (1999), according to whom supposing simulates judging; the second is by Currie & Ravenscroft (2002), for whom supposing simulates believing; the third and final one is by Arcangeli (2011; forthcoming), who argues that supposing simulates accepting.

By using the mode/content distinction put forward by Searle (1983) and others, I will suggest that the capacity to suppose fails to (i) fulfil the conditions for being a psychological faculty because of its content oriented nature, and (ii) that the simulationist account cannot integrate supposition without losing in explanatory power.

I will finally defend that supposition can be considered as a deliberative strategy that is imaginative only by analogy.

12.20-12.50 Q&A

Workshop organized by Daniel Vanello

March 29, 2018- Thumos seminar

Naomi Eilan (Warwick)

Knowing and understanding other minds: on the role of communication

Over the past decade or so there has been increasing interest, in both philosophy and psychology, in the claim that we should appeal to various forms of social interaction in explaining our knowledge of other minds, where this is presented as an alternative to what is referred to as the dominant approach to such knowledge, usually identified as ‘theory-theory’. Such claims are made under a variety of headings: the ‘social interaction’ approach, the ‘intersubjectivity approach’, the ‘second person approach’, the ‘collective intentionality’ approach and more. A multitude of claims are made under these various headings, both about the kind of social interaction we should be appealing to, and about how exactly this or that interaction provides an alternative to the ‘dominant approach’. Faced with this plethora of claims and characterizations one may well find oneself wondering whether there is an interesting, well formulated debate to be had in this area

I believe that there is a least one such debate, and in my talk I begin to sketch out how I think it should be formulated, and why I think it reveals fundamental issues about the nature of our knowledge and understanding of both our own and others’ minds. The debate turns on pitting two claims against each other. I will call one the ‘Observation Claim’, a claim that does, I think capture a very widely held view, over the ages, from Augustine on, about the basis and nature of our knowledge of other minds, and is rightly labeled ‘dominant’. The other I label the ‘Communication Claim’. It says we should give particular forms of interpersonal communication a foundational role in explaining both self and other understanding and knowledge. Although I think some version of the Communication Claim is right, my main aim is not so much to argue for it but to put on the table some of the central claims I believe would need to be made good if it is to an interesting and serious alternative to the Observation Claim.

N.B.: There will be a PhilEAs talk by Karen Crowther (Geneva) afterward (room B108)

April 12, 2018 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Hichem Naar (Duisburg-Essen)

Reasons for Love and the Significance of Encounters

The question whether there are reasons for loving particular people (and not others), and what such reasons might be, has been subject to scrutiny in recent years. On one view, reasons for loving particular people are some of their intrinsic qualities. A problem with this view, however, is that it seems to make people replaceable in a problematic way. On another view, by contrast, reasons for loving particular people have to do with our relationship with them. Even if it might avoid the charge that it makes people replaceable, the view nonetheless appears to ascribe people a merely instrumental role in the generation of reasons for loving them. I argue for a view which combines these two views in a way that makes people neither replaceable nor instrumental. On my view (Naar, 2017), reasons for loving particular people are some of their intrinsic qualities as manifested in the context a relationship with us. After spelling out the view, I discuss an important challenge facing it: what’s so special about actually being in touch – via a relationship – with the positive properties of a person that would explain why we have special reasons to love them? I consider a couple of inadequate answers to this question before putting forward my own.

N.B.: There will be a Quodlibet by Katia Saporiti (Zürich) afterward (room B108)

April 19, 2018 - PhilEAs talk

Stacie Friend (Birkbeck)

The Factual Basis of Learning from Fiction

Discussions of the cognitive value of fictional literature usually take for granted that we can learn ordinary facts from fiction, and focus instead on other forms of knowledge or cognitive improvement. I argue that at least some of these other kinds of cognitive value -- such as learning 'what it's like' to have different experiences, or acquiring psychological insight into other human beings -- presuppose a basis in fact. I outline an account of the conditions under which we learn facts from fiction, and deploy it to better understand how fictions may be sources of other forms of cognitive value.

April 26, 2018 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Anthony Hatzimoysis (Athens)

Anxiety as an Affective State

Among the phenomena of mood, some figure more prominently than others, forming the background of our interaction with the world. According to an influential line of reasoning, there is a set of fundamental moods attendance to which reveals important truths about our existence. And perhaps none of the moods is as revealing about the human predicament as the mood of anxiety. In the first part of my presentation I am going to assess the prospects of contemporary attempts to make sense of moods as intentional states. In the second part, I shall focus on anxiety in relation to fear, with the purpose of clarifying how we may best approach the phenomenology of the relevant experiences.

N.B.: There will be a PhilEAs talk by Margherita Arcangeli (Berlin) - Dispelling the confusion about mental imagery - afterward (room B108)

May 03, 2018 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Jona Vance (Arizona)

Gradable dimensions of emotional experiences

N.B.: There will be a Quodlibet afterward (room B108)

May 17, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Monika Betzler (Münich)

Shared Belief and the Limits of Empathy

The aim of this paper (co-authored with Simon Keller) is to show that (affective) empathy often makes demands of belief. As we will put it, once we empathize we are under a rational requirement to have beliefs that cohere with our empathy. To empathize with another person is to imagine how her situation is like for her, and share in her emotions. Emotions involve ways of seeing the world; fear of cats, for example, involves seeing cats as dangerous. To empathize with another person is, in part, to see the world as she sees it. If I empathize with your fear of cats, then I am under rational pressure to believe that cats are dangerous. The connection between empathy and belief has far-reaching consequences for several debates about the moral and epistemic roles of empathy. Empathy carries distinctive epistemic dangers along with its epistemic benefits; there can be good reasons to avoid empathy; there are epistemic barriers to our ability truly to empathize with others, even those very close to us; the ideal of universal empathy is incoherent; and empathy cannot plausibly be taken to be the basis of morality.

May 24, 2018 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Julia Langkau (Fribourg)

Fiction and Emotions as Construals

It’s uncontroversial that we can be and frequently are moved by fiction. The question I address in this paper is how we can explain the relation between what we care for, or our concerns, and our emotions towards fictional characters. While we might sometimes develop concerns with respect to fictional characters, this is an implausible explanation in other cases, for instance when we sympathise with a character at the very beginning of a novel where we don’t ‘know’ the character yet and cannot possibly have developed a concern. I will argue that in these cases, our concern is either rooted in our non-fictional life or in some aesthetic features of the fiction. A theory of emotions which can nicely explain the connection between concerns rooted in real life and emotions towards fictional characters is Robert C. Robert’s quasi-perceptual theory of emotions, according to which emotions are a kind of construal: they are mental events or states in which one thing is grasped in terms of something else. A construal is a three-place relation: a subject ‘perceives’ (more or less literally) something in terms of something else. The ‘in terms of’ relation can have as its terms a perception, a thought, an image, or a concept. Emotions are a specific kind of construal: they are concern-based, i.e. we have to have a concern about the construed situation. My thesis is that in some cases of emotions towards a fictional character, our concern is about something in our non-fictional life rather than about something in the world of the fiction, while the emotion is still directed towards the fictional character.

N.B.: There will be a quodlibet afterward by Annamaria Schiaparelli (Geneva) - Should All Definitions Be Grounded in Classification?

May 31, 2018 - Thumos seminar

Jona Vance (Arizona)

Predictive coding

N.B: this thumos seminar will be given at the Campus Biotech (room H8.01 E)

June 15, 2018 - The Imaginative Workshop

09.30 – 10.45 – Julia Langkau (Fribourg) - Vivid Text and Vivid Imagination

Break

11.00 – 12.15 – Steve Humbert-Droz (Fribourg/Geneva) What is Imagination? – The Tricky Case of Supposition

Lunch

02.30 – 03.45 – Patrik Engisch (Fribourg) Non-Cognitivism About Fiction

Break

04.00 – 05.15 – Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna) Inconscious Imagination

Venue: Room B109 (Bâtiment des Bastions, 5 rue de Candolle, Geneva)

Participation is free, and everybody is welcome (it would be helpful if those who plan to come could contact Steve Humbert-Droz, Steve.humbert-drozATunige.ch).

Workshop organized by Fabrice Teroni and Steve Humbert-Droz

Poster here

June 26, 2018 - Workshop: Emotion and Relevance

This interdisciplinary workshop will explore possible bridges and overlaps between neuro-psychological, linguistic pragmatic and philosophical accounts of the relation between relevance and emotion.

Although these disciplines approach relevance in different ways and with different purposes, they all highlight the important role of this notion in emotional experience. In contemporary neuro-psychological accounts, relevance is usually thought to play a key role in the triggering of emotions, since the latter are believed to emerge when the emotional system evaluates a given stimulus as relevant to its concerns. In philosophy, emotional relevance sparks interest in terms of its relation to value: as such, the concept of relevance is suited to assess the role of emotions in ethical, aesthetical and epistemological issues. In contemporary pragmatics, relevance plays a fundamental role in the communication of propositional meaning; recently, however, researchers in the field have started to discuss its contribution to the communication of non-propositional and affective contents.

During the workshop, invited speakers will first present how the notion of relevance plays out in their own accounts of daily emotional experience and then engage in the discussion of possible interfaces between disciplines. The goals of this event are thus to explore the different facets of the relationship between emotion and relevance and, crucially, to discuss further possible interdisciplinary directions of research on the topic.

The workshop is organised by Daniel Dukes (Universities of Geneva and Amsterdam) and Steve Oswald (University of Fribourg) and is proudly and generously sponsored by the Swiss Center for Affective Science and Swissuniversities. The event will be held at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva on the 26th June from 2-6pm. Participation is free but registration is mandatory. If you would like to register, please contact Steve.Oswald(at)unifr.ch before the 19th June.

Location: Campus Biotech – Room H8-01-D

Schedule:

14:00-14:10 Introduction (with Daniel Dukes and Steve Oswald)

14:10-14:30 Neuroscience and psychological theories of emotion and relevance (David Sander)

14:30-14:50 Questions and Clarifications

14:50-15:10 Break

15:10-15:30 Philosophical theories of emotion and relevance (Constant Bonard)

15:30-15:50 Questions and Clarifications

15:50-16:10 Pragmatics, theories of emotions and relevance (Tim Wharton)

16:10-16:30 Questions and Clarifications

16:30-16:50 Break

16:50-18:00 Summary and Discussion

(more information here)

First semester 2017-2018 (Semptember 19 - December 21)

September 19, 2017 - CISA Lecture serie

Carlos Crivelli (Leicester)

On Extraordinary Claims Requiring Extraordinary Evidence: Basic Emotions Theory and the Doctrine of Facial Expression Universality.

The idea that humans “express” and “recognize” a set of emotions pan-culturally based on their facial expressions has become canonical in many fields of research. This view—popularized since the late 1960s by Basic Emotions Theory (BET)—has also become “received truth” among lay people, educators, and policy makers. Careful scrutiny reveals that the foundational studies for BET were technically flawed and their conclusions were either overstated or erroneous, yet. In the current state of affective science, evidence challenging BET propositions is severely scrutinized, whereas shaky evidence favoring BET is rarely challenged. BET’s 50-year grip on inquiry into basic issues on emotion and facial expression has suppressed inquiry by imposing important limitations in the diversity of samples, methods and theories being tested. My research to date has focused on overcoming the ideological barriers BET imposes by gathering data out of the Western lab, using a variety of methodological approaches and study designs, and testing alternative explanatory frameworks to BET. This approach has led to instances that support Carl Sagan’s celebrated dictum by supplying “extraordinary evidence” that support “extraordinary claims,” instances of facial expressions and emotions that do not accord with the culture-bound presumptions and proscriptions of BET.

N.B.: The talk will take place at the room 144.165 (Campus Biotech)

October 03, 2017 - CISA Lecture serie

Riikka Rossi (Helsinki)

On the poetics of disgust in naturalist fiction

The lecture explores disgust in literature and focuses on naturalist fiction in particular. In the nineteenth-century, naturalist literature received adverse publicity as “disgust literature,” inciting moral indignation and accusations of indecency in reading audiences. By analyzing case studies in French and Finnish literature, I offer an overview to disgust-triggering topics in naturalism and decadence, to their natural, aesthetic and moral aspects and the constellation of emotions within this literary movement. I consider my fictional examples to be illustrative of the complexity of “negative” emotions. While disgust has sometimes been considered as a morally suspect emotion per se, it also unveils a “cathartic” potential; triggering disgust in art can be used for critical purposes. Literature not only depicts emotions but also adjusts our emotions and understanding of reality, thus shaping the emotional communities we live in.

N.B.: The talk will take place at the room 144.165 (Campus Biotech)

October 5, 2017 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibeta

November 16, 2017 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Juliette Vazard (Geneva)

Epistemic Anxiety, Unreasonable Doubt, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

NB: There will be a PhilEAs talk by Michal Hladky (Geneva) afterward at Uni-Bastions (B108) untitled Neuroscience without brains - in silico experiments

November 23, 2017 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Maria Silvia Vaccarezza (Genova)

Both sides of the exceptional: on character education and emotions targeting moral exemplarity

By proposing her Exemplarist Moral Theory (EMT), Linda T. Zagzebski (2010, 2012, 2015, 2017) has been among the first who favored a retrieval of admiration after a long philosophical neglect. Largely due to her works, recent philosophical literature has seen a retrieval of interest in analyzing the role morally exceptional individuals play in our everyday moral lives, as well as the way they ground our moral judgements on virtues, values, and right actions.

Within such a new wave, a particularly fruitful line of investigation is now represented by research on how positive moral emotions targeting moral exemplarity (as they are presented, e.g., by Haidt 2003; Kristjansson 2017), and particularly admiration (Zagzebski 2015) affect the way we detect the morally exceptional. From a character educational perspective, research on emotions targeting moral exemplarity is of particular importance, in that it concerns the question of how they can be canalized so as to foster virtue acquisition (see, e.g., Sundari 2015; Croce and Vaccarezza 2017).

In this talk, I will briefly sketch the basics of Zagzebski’s EMT, as well as her account of admiration; then, I will broaden her perspective by taking a richer set of emotions into account. In particular, I aim at defending the constitutive, and not merely instrumental, moral and educational value of (i) positive exemplar-related emotions other than admiration, such as gratitude and moral awe, and (ii) negative exemplarity-related emotions such as jealousy, envy, embarrassment and shame.

NB: There will be a PhilEAs talk by Maude Ouellette-Dubé (Fribourg) afterward at Uni-Bastions (B108)

November 28, 2017 - CISA Lecture serie

TBA

November 30, 2017 - Thumos seminar

Antti Kauppinen (Tampere)

What is happiness about?

Recently, many philosophers have argued that happiness consists at least to a large extent in positive emotions. In this paper, I explore the implications of a quasi-perceptual model of emotions for the nature and epistemology of happiness.

NB: There will be a Quodlibeta talk by Hamid Taieb (Genève) afterward at Uni-Bastions (B108).

December 05, 2017 - Graduate seminar

David Sander (Geneva)

Introduction to psychology theories of emotion

NB: The seminar will take place in the room 144.165 (Campus Biotech), from 14:00 to 18:00

December 07, 2017 - Thumos seminar

Peter Poellner (Warwick)

Indistinctness in Emotional Experience

According to a widely held view in the philosophy of emotions, emotional experiences typically purport to disclose evaluative properties. Among those sympathetic to this view, there is considerable disagreement about what ‘disclosure’ amounts to in this context. It is sometimes said, for example, that the relevant sort of disclosure is nonconceptual. I shall argue that this claim is open to different interpretations, which do not necessarily conflict and may apply to different kinds of emotional experiences. I am especially interested in those (arguably frequent) cases where it seems initially plausible to say that, while the experience presents us with evaluative properties, we do not grasp those properties as such (or ‘access’ them) in, or on the basis of, the experience. I shall present some cases that invite this sort of description. If the description is roughly right, this raises interesting questions about the epistemological role of those emotional experiences. While in at least one sense they do not make available reasons that would be available to us were we to grasp the relevant properties, I shall argue that they are not rationally inert or otiose but rather have an important epistemic and practical role.

December 14, 2017 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Patrik Engisch (Fribourg)

There Is Still No Role for Imagination in Fiction

NB: There will be a PhilEAs talk by Raffaele Rodogno (Aarhus) afterward, untitled Subjectivism and Objectivism about Well-Being, at Uni-Bastions (B108)

December 21, 2017 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibet

Daniel Vanello (Geneva)

Two Conceptions of Ethical Practice and the Appropriateness of Emotions

The aim of this talk is twofold. First, I want to introduce and develop an often neglected distinction between two conceptions of ethical practice found in the writings of Bernard Williams and David Wiggins. Second, I want to show that contemporary debates on the appropriateness of emotions are often driven by tacit assumptions deriving from siding with one of the conceptions of ethical practice at the expense of the other.

NB: There will be a Quodlibeta talk by Simone Zurbuchen (Lausanne), untitled Laïcité and Tolerance, afterward at Uni-Bastions (B108).

Second semester 2016-2017 (March 02 - June 15)

March 2, 2017 - Thumos seminar / Quodlibeta

Arturs Logins (Geneva)

Peace and Love or How To Dissolve The Lottery Paradox While Maintaining All Of Its Intuitive Premises

I will defend the view that that a proposition p has high evidential probability on one's evidence entails that one is justified, in a sense, in believing p. According to the view that I will put forwards there is a variety of sorts of epistemic justification: beliefs can be appropriate or permissible in a number of distinct senses. Having a high evidential probability corresponds to one kind of epistemic justification. This pluralist conception allows us to maintain the view that high evidential probability can justify one in believing something while replying to the challenge from the Lottery Paradox.

N.B: There will also be a Phileas talk by Constant Bonard (Geneva) afterward. See the PhilEAs site for details

Elena Cagnoli (Geneva)

Emma Tieffenbach (Geneva)

Some thinkers oppose the exchange of money for human organs and tissue, surrogacy services, and works of art, and the “commodification” of many areas of cultural life. One source of concern is said to be the alleged “incommensurability” of money with the relevant value-bearers, sometimes put in terms of their “incomparability”, “non-substitutability”, “non-tradability”, “(market)-inalienability”, or “irreplaceability”. Whichever term is used, the objection may be summed up as follows: the fact that value-bearers A and B (e.g. a kidney and $10,000) are incommensurate (or incomparable, non-tradable, and so forth), or that they are perceived as such, provides a sound, powerful reason to ban or at least to refuse trade between them. Let us refer to this type of objection to certain exchanges as the incommenurability objection. This article’s main contention is that the incommensurability objection fails. Our argumentative strategy is as follows: We present seven conceptions of incommensurability (and the like), which we call (a) “no betterness and equality”, (b) “no common scale”, (c) “no ground for comparison”, (d) “occasion for reasonable regret”, (e) “betterness regardless of numbers”, (f) incompatibility, and (g) and “status difference”. We then review candidate rationales for banning or avoiding trade of one value bearer for another on grounds of their incommensurability (and the like), and show the failure of these accounts on each of these conceptions of incommensurability (and the like).

Florian Cova (Geneva), François Kammerer (Paris Sorbonne) & Maxence Gaillard (Rikkyo University)

June 2, 2017 - Thumos seminar

Jona Vance (Arizona)

Phenomenal commitments: A puzzle for experiential theories of emotion

This paper raises and responds to a puzzle for experiential theories of emotion. Experiential theories entail that some emotions just are experiences. The puzzle is to explain how subjects could be rationally evaluable in virtue of their emotional experiences, as experiential theories entail in conjunction with the desideratum that subjects are rationally evaluable in virtue of their emotions. Component theories entail that no emotions just are experiences. On some component theories, the experience component of emotion is distinct from the rationally evaluable component. These theories do not face the puzzle. As a result, these component theories have a potential advantage over experiential theories. In response to the puzzle, I defend experiential theories of emotion. Like many others, I argue that the rational evaluability of subjects in virtue of their emotions requires rationally evaluable subjective commitments. Unlike many others, I argue that the commitments need not be even partly constitutive of emotions. Instead, I suggest that emotional experiences are rationally evaluable because of their relation to other commitments the subject makes and the norms that govern those commitments.

The seminar will take place exceptionally on Friday at 10:15.

June 6, 2017 - Thumos seminar / CISA Lecture

Colin Leach (Connecticut)

At 10:00, Thumos discussion's group on the recent paper of Leach and Gausel Concern for self‐image and social image in the management of moral failure: Rethinking shame

At 12:00, CISA lecture on Police Force | Black Protest: Tracing systems of appraisal, emotion, coping

Since the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing 17-year old Trayvon Martin, the US is again grappling with the moral, political, and social issues of police use of force and Black protest against it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter movement). Guided by temporal models of cognitive appraisal (e.g., Lazarus, 1991; Scherer, 2001) and social psychological models of dynamic coping (e.g., van Zomeren, Leach, & Spears, 2012), several recent studies use cognitive, behavioral, neurological, and physiological indices to trace Black and White participant’s appraisal, emotion, and coping in response to images of police force and Black protest. Findings are consistent with the view that a dynamic, multi-system, temporal process leads individuals to be psychologically “moved” by social events that are personally relevant enough to sustain their attention and to stimulate emotion, motivation, and coping. Methodological, theoretical, and ethical implications will be discussed.

June 8, 2017 - Alain Pe-Curto's Dissertation Defense

Alain Pe-Curto (Geneva)

Values Under Construction

The Defense will start at 14.15, room B109.

June 12, 2017 - Thumos seminar

Bas van Fraassen (Princeton)

The Self

The question What is the Self? should be asked in the first person: What Am I? With that condition, which I regard as essential, I shall argue, it is literally impossible to arrive at an adequate conception of my Self. But among superficial conceptions there is still better and worse. For example, I am embodied; but identification with the body fares very poorly as a view of the Self. To arrive at a more tenable view, while evading metaphysical riddles, I propose to adapt a Wittgensteinian phrase: I am not a thing, but I am not nothing. I exist, but I am not a thing among things.

The seminar will take place exceptionally on Monday at 16:00, room B108 (Uni-Bastions).

We are thankful to Patrizia Lombardo who co-organises this event.

June 14, 2017 - Quodlibeta special

Bas van Fraassen (Princeton)

After Hempel’s Dilemma: On the Evidence of Things Unseen

The debate over the reality of theoretically postulated entities began more than half a century ago (famously, Hempel 1958). Although ostensibly about questions of ontology, that debate shifted to topics in epistemology, which became ever more contentious, and remain so still. I shall argue that traditional assumptions about evidence and inference bedeviled this debate. Following Hermann Weyl and Clark Glymour I shall propose a view of empirical grounding, of models and theories, that disentangles the relation between confirmation and evidential support and thereby place scientific practice in a different light.

June 15, 2017 - Thumos seminar

Alain Pe-Curto (Geneva)

Thin Atomism

I defend the Moorean theory of organic unities against one type of value atomism. First, I introduce the brand of atomism that I call “Thin Atomism” and describe its place within value theory and, in particular, with respect to the question of organic unities. I look at a specific implementation of it, namely Zimmerman’s, which recruits the determinable-determinate distinction. Secondly, I present two arguments against the thin atomist claim that no convincing cases of organic complexes have been presented yet and that alleged cases of such complexes should instead be understood in terms of evaluative inadequacy. With the first argument, I show that the account faces its own pitfalls with regard to its specification of the evaluative adequacy that it requires. With the second argument, I argue that even if it managed to avoid these obstacles, it would in fact not support the claim that there are no convincing cases of organic unities. In developing this last point, I offer an explanation for both the appeal of this sophisticated form of Thin Atomism and its inability, to my mind, to provide a proper response to the Moorean theory of organic unities. I am able to do so on the basis of my account of such complexes, on which I conclude.

First semester 2016-2017 (sept. 19 - Dec. 23)

September 29, 2016 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

Cognitive dis-integration, agency and attachment

Moral requirements often direct us to act in ways that are contrary to our personal interests. Altruistic requirements are a central case, asking that we act with the aim of benefitting another at a cost to ourselves. What motivates us to comply with such requirements? One traditional view is that altruistic actions are in part explained by affective empathy, where that is a nature-given propensity to mirror and be moved by the needs of our conspecifics. More recently, some theorists have opposed this view, arguing that empathy is dispensable to moral motivation: while morality may require concernfor our fellows, that concern need not be produced by empathic engagement – it need not be empathic concern as such.

I defend the traditional view that empathy underpins our responsiveness to many moral requirements. I depart from tradition, however, in two ways. First, I distinguish between non-rational and rational empathic concern, characterizing the latter as on analogy with the phenomenon of perceptual, and especially aesthetic ‘experiencing-as’. Secondly, I argue that, in the basic case, rational empathic concern depends on a feat of cognitive integration by which an agent’s experience is configured in accordance with norms of consistency and coherence. A virtue of this account that it suggests why psychopathic subjects typically manifest deficits of cognitive integration in concert with empathic ones – and how these deficits jointly work to compromise their standing as moral agents. I conclude with some observations about the possible role of early attachment failure in the developmental trajectory of cognitive disintegration, and the implications for attributions of moral agency.

October 20, 2016 - Thumos seminar / PhilEAs talk

This talk focuses on the contrast between aggregation of individual preference rankings to a collective preference ranking and aggregation of individual value judgments to a collective value judgment. The targeted case is one in which the two aggregation scenarios exhibit a far-reaching structural similarity; more precisely, the case in which the individual judgments that are to be aggregated are value rankings. This means that, formally, the individual judgments are isomorphic to individual preference rankings over a given set of alternatives. The paper suggests that, despite this formal similarity, the difference in the nature of individual inputs in two aggregation scenarios has important implications for the aggregation procedure: the kind of procedure that looks fine for aggregation of judgments turns out to be inappropriate for aggregation of preferences. The relevant procedure consists in maximization of similarity between the ouput and inputs, or – more precisely – in minimization of the average distance of the output from individual inputs. It is shown that, whatever measure is chosen, distance-based procedures violate the (strong) Pareto condition. This seems alright as value judgment aggregation goes, but would be unacceptable for preference aggregation, at least on one natural interpretation of the latter.

When applied to judgment aggregation, distance-based procedures might also be approached from the epistemic perspective: questions might be posed concerning the procedures’ advantages as truth-trackers. From that perspective, what matters is not only the probability of the output being true, but also its expected verisimilitude: its expected distance from truth.

Second semester 2016 (March, 03 - June, 03)

March 03, 2016: Quodlibeta

QUODLIBETA TALK by Fabrice Teroni (University of Geneva, CISA) at 18:15, Uni Bastions B109.

The Phenomenology of Memory

The aim of this talk is to explore what it is like to remember. After having introduced the distinction between content and psychological attitude, I shall distinguish two groups of issues in the phenomenology of memory. First, one may enquire into the phenomenological impact of various memory contents. How does what one remembers contribute to phenomenology? Is there a phenomenology of content exclusive to memory? And can we explain the phenomenological differences between perceiving, imagining and remembering in terms of content? Second, one may enquire into the attitude of remembering and how it impacts on phenomenology. How does remembering itself, as opposed to what is remembered, contribute to phenomenology? Is there a feeling distinctive of remembering? Exploring the impact of memory contents and the attitude of remembering on consciousness will lead me to discuss cognitive phenomenology, the limits of imagistic representation and a variety of metacognitive feelings.

See the philosophy department site for further details.

March 10, 2016: THUMOS TALK / Phileas talk

Melanie Sarzano (University of Basel) & Marie van Loon (University of Basel)

Understanding the incompatibility of rationality and irrationality

The purpose of this paper is to deepen our understanding of the relation between rationality and irrationality. We suppose that there is an ordinary sense in which rationality and irrationality hold prima facie incompatibly in regards to each other: as it seems, there is something problematic about deeming a belief or a person rational and irrational at the same time. Given that they are many types of incompatibility to be distinguished, understanding in which sense rationality and irrationality are incompatible properties should help us shed light on the concept of irrationality itself. We do this by distinguishing two senses of rationality and argue that irrationality and rationality holds in a particular type of incompatibility. We use this to suggest some implications for cognitive irrationality.

Note: There will also be a Phileas lecture by Claudio Calosi (Neuchâtel) afterward. See the philosophy department site for details.

March 24, 2016: THUMOS TALK

Patrizia Pedrini (University of Florence)

Self-Deception and the Causal Problem

According to Alfred Mele's motivationalist account (2001), self-deception is caused by the biasing working of a desire that p be the case over the cognition relevant to the formation of the belief that p. I will assess the prospect of Mele's account vis à vis the formulation of what I call the "causal problem" of self-deception. The causal problem of self-deception is generated by an objection to early versions of Mele's motivationalism due to Bermudez (2000), known as the "selectivity problem" of self-deception. The objection shows that self-deception is more selective than the presence of a desire that p be the case in the psychology of a subject can predict, as there are cases of people in the grip of a desire that p be the case who do not end up self-deceptively believing that p.

I will argue when a desire that p be the case biases a subjects's cognition so as to lead him or her to self-deceptively believe that p this happens because the desire that p be the case is not causally equivalent to the desire that p be the case which operates in the subject who does not end up self-deceiving. Rather, it is a desire that is made causally suitable to let the subject reach the self-deceptive belief by the overall psychology of a subject.

The causal theory of self-deception I will outline will also help us to do justice to the psychological complexity and the existential significance of the phenomenon of self-deception in the life of the subject who experiences it.

April 7, 2016: THUMOS TALK / Quodlibeta

Richard Dub (University of Fribourg, CISA)

Irruptive Cognitions

The effects on action produced by emotions are various and flexible. An episode of fear can dispose a person to perform relatively simple behaviors, but it can also dispose a person to engage upon in complicated plans of escape that require reasoning and forethought. Tappolet (2010) has argued that in order to accommodate this variety of emotional behaviors, we must reject theories that claim that each emotion merely generates a fixed and limited number of behavioral action tendencies. Rather, emotions influence our actions by temporarily altering our desires and motivations. Griffiths, following Frank, calls these temporary conative states 'irruptive motivations.' I argue that in addition to irruptive conations, emotions produce irruptive cognitions. That is: emotions influence behavior not only by causing us to take up momentary desire-like states; they also cause us to take up momentary belief-like states. These cognitive states are not exactly beliefs: they are acceptances.

Note: There will also be a Quodlibeta lecture later in the day by Julien Deonna (University of Geneva, CISA). See the philosophy department site for details.

April 14, 2016: THUMOS TALK

Samuel Lepine (Jean Moulin Lyon 3)

Unstable Motivations, Unreliable Emotions, and Confabulation

The view that emotions play a decisive role in our understanding of values is a widely accepted thesis. On the other hand, many philosophers, in line with commonsense, have put forward the idea that emotions are epistemically unreliable, for at least three reasons, which I would like to explore during my talk. The first reason is that our emotions are based on motivations which are quite unstable. Given the fact that our sensibilities are changing from time to time, and from one person to another, it is dubious that our emotions can track objective evaluative facts (D'Arms and Jacobson, 2010). The second reason is that some emotions could be systematically misleading, because they have been shaped to meet evolutionary constraints which are not relevant anymore (Goldie, 2008). The third reason is that many emotions are linked to cognitive heuristics and biases, and thus are suspected to be unreliable. It seems in particular that they often lead to confabulation, so that they support the search of justifying reasons even for unjustified emotions. In order to vindicate the idea that emotions still have an interesting role to play in our understanding of values, we should assess those three problems each at a time. It seems that this analysis may be fruitful if one wants to clarify the basic constraints which are weighing on the epistemology of emotions and emotional justification in particular.

April 20, 2016: Workshop

Brentano in Discussion, organized by Inbegriff – Geneva Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy

11h00-12h00 - Uriah Kriegel (Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris)

Brentano on Will and Emotion

12h00-13h00 - Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni (University of Geneva)

Discussion of Brentano on Will and Emotion

April 21, 2016: THUMOS TALK / Quodlibeta

Gregory Currie (York)

Contagion and our Emotional Attachment to Authentic Objects

Since Frazer, the idea of contagion has been theorised as an influential magical idea and a powerful driver of behavior. Psychologist Paul Bloom and colleagues have argued that it provides an explanation of much of our interest in the authentic--the painting from the hand of the original artist, as opposed to the copy, however indistinguishable from the work from the artist's hand. I argue that the idea of contagion ought really to be analysed into two quite distinct component ideas, one of which provides a rational basis for our valuing originality in art and the other a magical idea which is less obviously defensible.

Note: There will also be a Quodlibeta lecture later in the day by Christian Whütrich (University of Geneva). See the philosophy department site for details.

April 22, 2016: Workshop

The Arts and the Emotions, organized by Patrizia Lombardo (poster here)

9.15 Patrizia Lombardo, Université de Genève - Introduction
9.30 Gregory Currie, University of York - Real emotions, unreal emotions and quasi emotions
10.30 Peter Dayan, University of Edinburgh - Pourquoi faudrait-il croire que la musique n'exprime pas nos émotions
11.30 Margherita Arcangeli, CISA, Genève - The Sublime and the Arts
14.15 Jean Marie Schaeffer, EHESS, Paris - About some mediated emotions
15.15 Dennis Kennedy, Trinity College, Dublin - Emotion and Belief in Ritual and Theatre
16.15 Carole Talon-Hugon, Université de Nice - Les (dé)plaisirs complexes de l’art

May 2, 2016: Groupe Genevois de Philosophie's talk

Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni (Geneva)

Honte et sphère privée (poster here)

May 10, 2016: Swiss Center for Affective Sciences Lectures series / Quodlibeta

Beate Seibt (UiOslo), Thomas Schubert (UiOslo) & Alan Fiske (UCLA)

From the folk concept 'being moved and touched' to the theoretical emotion 'kama muta': Theorizing and data on a social emotion and its causes

Abstract: Being moved or touched is an emotional experience that can cause weeping, goosebumps, and sensations of warmth. It has been cultivated for millennia, but psychological science has only recently started to learn more about it. We propose that being moved or touched is a social-relational emotion that regulates communal sharing relations. We hypothesize that it is caused by appraising a sudden intensification of social closeness (indexing communal sharing). In our talk, we review our studies where we asked people about their past experiences of being moved, where we asked people right after they saw moving videos, and where we asked them while they were watching videos. Our data are in line with the hypothesis that social closeness is a predictor of being moved. We will also discuss our approach to conceptualizing emotions in general and being moved and touched in particular, and why we believe that studying the folk concept referred to by the vernacular term 'being moved', or its equivalents in other languages might not be sufficient. Instead, our proposal is to introduce a theoretically defined emotion, which we call 'kama muta', and consider vernacular terms as its culturally variants.

May 12, 2016: Quodlibeta

Annabelle Lever (University of Geneva, CISA)

Putting Democracy First: Towards a Democracy-Centred Ethics

See the philosophy department site for details.

Note: there is no Thumos' seminar.

May 17, 2016: Archives Jean Piaget's talk

Julien Deonna (Geneva)

Organised by the Archives Jean Piaget

May 19, 2016: THUMOS TALK

Fritz-Anton Fritzson (Lund)

Subjectivism and Relational Good

In recent years, philosophers have taken a growing interest in the notion of good (or bad) for as distinct from the notion of good (or bad) period. Goodness for is an example of a relational value (typically a value in relation to a person, therefore sometimes called 'personal value'), and as such can be contrasted with straightforward goodness which is a non-relational (or 'impersonal') value. According to one classification of views in this area, a distinction can be drawn between goodness-type monism and goodness-type dualism. Goodness-type monism comes in two varieties. Non-relational monists claim that all values are non-relational; all goodness is straightforward goodness, or can be fully understood in terms of, or reduced to, straightforward goodness. Relational monists claim that all values are relational; all goodness is goodness-for, or can be reduced to goodness-for. Goodness-type dualists recognize both relational and non-relational values and claim that neither of these types of value can be fully understood in terms of the other. The critics as well as the defenders of relational value and the corresponding notion of 'good for' have tended to take an objectivist approach to the nature of value. In this presentation I sketch a distinctly subjectivist analysis of the nature of relational value. Subjectivist value analyses have usually been put forward for non-relational values, and the aim here is to extend this kind of analysis to cover relational values as well. Value subjectivists in general understand the nature of value in terms of attitudes, and the subjectivist analysis of relational value that I propose appeals to a particular type of attitude; namely, so-called 'for someone's sake attitudes'.

May 27, 2016: Workshop

Workshop: LG2C: Lake Geneva Graduate Conference (poster), organized by Alain Pe-Curto, Alexander Bown, Maria Scarpati, Pablo Carnino, and Steve Humbert-Droz

Speakers:

• Prof. Christian Wüthrich (Geneva)
• Jonas Werner (Hambrug)
• Davide Romano (Lausanne)
• Prof. Karen Bennett (Cornell)
• François Pellet (Münster)
• Alberto Tassoni (UC Berkeley)

Informations here.

May 28-29, 2016: Workshop

Workshop: Exploring Psychological States Through the Mode/Content Distinction (poster), organized by Fabrice Teroni, Richard Dub, and Steve Humbert-Droz

Speakers:

• Berit Brogaard (Miami)
• Richard Dub (Fribourg)
• Peter Langland-Hassan (Cincinatti)
• Federico Lauria (Columbia)
• Michelle Montague (Austin)
• Paul Noordhof (York)
• François Recanati (CNRS, Paris)
• Gunther York (Mahidol)

June 2-3, 2016: Workshop

Workshop: Experience, Values and Justification (Poster), organized by Santiago Echeverri (here the complete programm)

Speakers:

• Berit Brogaard (Miami)
• Mary Carman (Geneva)
• Elijah Chudnoff (Miami)
• Sabine Döring (Tübingen)
• Santiago Echeverri (Geneva)
• Karen Jones (Melbourne)
• Mohan Matthen (Toronto)
• Jean Moritz Müller (Tübingen)
• Peter Railton (Michigan)

First semester 2015-2016 (September 17-December 17)

17.09: THUMOS TALK

24.09: THUMOS TALK

08.10: THUMOS TALK

15.10: THUMOS TALK

22.10: THUMOS TALK

29.10: THUMOS TALK

12.11: THUMOS TALK

19.11: THUMOS TALK

26.11: THUMOS TALK

Axel Grosseries (Louvain)

Second semester 2014-2015 (February 19-May 21)

19.02: THUMOS TALK

12.03: THUMOS TALK

19.03: PHILEAS/THUMOS TALK

20.03-21.03 THUMOS CONFERENCE ON INDIGNATION

Information here.

26.03: THUMOS TALK