Upcoming events
Schedule of upcoming events
On this page, we advertise the research activities that are of interest to members and friends of Thumos, especially the Thumos seminar, which is the main research activity of our group. Thumos seminars take place on Thursdays, 16h15-17h45 at UniPhilosophes (PHIL116). Archives of the seminar are available here.
Members of the Swiss Doctoral School in Affective Sciences get credits if they participate to the seminar and their travel expenses can be reimbursed within Switzerland.
We also indicate events that may be of interest to students of the emotions or that happen on the same day :
- The CISA Lecture series take place on Tuesday, 12h15-13h15 at the Campus Biotech (seminar room will be communicated by e-mail to the members).
- The Quodlibeta takes place on Tuesdays, 18h00-20h00 at the PHIL211
- The PhilEAs talks usually takes place on Thursdays, 18h15-20h00 (PHIL201)
September 26, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
Irene Lonigro (Milan/Geneva)
Imaginative Resistance: Towards a Two-Level Account
The problem of imaginative resistance refers to psychological difficulties in imaginatively engaging with a work of fiction. Despite the apparent clarity of this definition, imaginative resistance has been analysed along different lines and has given rise to different kinds of puzzles. In this paper my primary concern will be the imaginative puzzle in relation to the fictional context. I will therefore examine our difficulty in following the imaginative project of the artwork, when our imaginative responses diverge from those prescribed by the author.
Following the canonical formulation of the problem within the contemporary debate, I will mainly focus on verbal representations. With this focus in mind, I will try to answer the following questions: what kind of difficulties prevent a full or proper engagement with artworks? Where should we locate the source of resistance? And, finally, what is meant by ‘imaginative, and ‘resistance’?
In what follows, I will defend a two-level account of imaginative resistance, in the belief that a clear taxonomy may help to clarify the terms of the debate and solve disputed issues. Accordingly, I will classify the relevant cases on two different levels of complexity. I will conclude that these two levels should be separately addressed since they concern two different kinds of imaginative resistance.
October 3, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
Agnès Baehni (Geneva)
Doing It For the Plot
The phrase "do it for the plot!" was initially coined by actress and influencer Serena Kerrigan in a viral TikTok video where she urges viewers to remember that "if something works out, great, and if it doesn't, it's for the plot". She explained that: "Do it for the plot is an extension of the idea of being the main character of one's life (...). I think that people just get pretty upset when things don't go their way, or they are embarassed if they got drunk one night and I'm like "its for the plot (....). In this paper, I take Kerrigan's suggestion seriously and explore it as an idea worthy of philosophical investigation. In doing so, I examine a category of actions that has largely been overlooked by philosophers, as well as the reasons we might have for performing them. I will argue that we have compelling reasons to sometimes "do it for the plot" and that they are best understood as aesthetic reasons supporting aesthetic actions. My claim is thus essentially a variant of the idea that esthetic reasons do not only favor certain attitudes such as awe or admiration but certain actions (King 2021:3). Where my discussion will hopefully add something more to the existing literature is that I argue that esthetic reasons like "do it for the plot" favor performing actions that bear final aesthetic value, that is actions that are aesthetically valuable independently of anything they could bring about. My view thus departs from aesthetic hedonism, the claim according to which aesthetic value is a special kind of hedonic value.
October 10, 2024 – Thumos Seminar / LOCATION: Rue Jean-Daniel Colladon, 2
Gregory Currie (York)
Bad Imagining
“Fantasy” is surely polysemous: a term with many but rationally related meanings. I focus on one, involving a range of cases where we suggest that imagination (or belief) has gone wrong in some way. In what ways might it go wrong? I discuss two; one where fantasy is a way of avoiding truth, and one where it is (or seems to be) a way of achieving desire. Along the way I will ask a (largely) conceptual question: Is fantasy (in this sense) always a form of imagination? And, in relation to desire, I will take a look at the emerging category of maladaptive daydreaming.
October 17, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
Camil Golub (Rutgers)
Love, grief, and meaning
How can grief in response to losing a loved one rationally diminish over time, given that the loss and its significance seemingly remain the same? I propose an answer to this puzzle centered on the idea that we can find meaning in the loss of a loved one by understanding how that loss has shaped who we are, or how it fits into a broader story about the world, without attributing value in any substantive sense to the loss. Thus, making sense of a loss through narratives can rationally support the diminution of grief even if the evaluative facts about that loss remain unchanged.
October 24, 2024 – Thumos Seminar / LOCATION: Route de Drize 7, 1227 Carouge, Room RDC 60 (ground floor)
Daniel D. Hutto (Wollongong)
Recrafting the Narrative Self-Shaping Hypothesis: How We Understand and Shape Ourselves through Narrative Practices
This presentation aims to explicate and update the Narrative Self-Shaping Hypothesis (Hutto 2016) – a proposal about how narrative practices can play a central role in shaping who we are. It will question the extent to which we should adopt causal realism about reasons and advance a proposal about the importance of adopting a fictive stance when it comes to understanding ourselves. It then considers and comments on recent work on how best to understand the ways our narrative practices connect with and make a difference to our embodied activity, and vice versa. In this regard, it challenges and suggests updates to existing proposals about how to understand such connections as advanced by: Rovetta (2023), who hypothesizes that inner speech self-attributions are the basis for enacted self-narratives; Dings (2019) who rightly sees an important role for affordances in understanding interplay between embodiment and self-narrative but who, wrongly, it is argued, construes how this is achieved in terms of mechanisms instead of habits; and, finally, Miyahara and Tanaka (2023) who rightly emphasise the role of habits in accounting for the relation between embodiment and narrativity, but who, arguably, misconstrue the scope of that role.
October 31, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
Céline Schöpfer (Geneva)
Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking: Why Analysis Needs Self-Regulation
Critical thinking (CT) has been a staple in education for over four decades, yet its effectiveness remains contested. Despite widespread instruction, there is little empirical evidence to suggest that CT has significantly improved the reasoning skills of students. A major reason for this, I argue, lies in a conceptual imbalance between two crucial dimensions of CT: Analytical Critical Thinking (ACT) and Regulative Critical Thinking (RCT). While ACT focuses on cognitive skills such as analyzing arguments, evaluating evidence, and logical reasoning, it often lacks the regulatory elements that ensure self-correction and cognitive flexibility. These regulatory dispositions—including intellectual humility, introspection, and the willingness to question one’s own biases—are essential for guiding the application of analytical skills and ensuring a more complete form of CT. In this talk, I will argue that the failure to clearly distinguish and integrate ACT and RCT has led to an incomplete understanding of CT, resulting in thinkers who may be good at argumentation but lack the self-regulation needed to avoid cognitive arrogance or hyper-rationalization. By clearly distinguishing between these two layers of CT and reflecting on their interactions, this presentation offers a framework for more effective CT instruction.
November 7, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
Mathilde Cappelli (Geneva)
Towards a new view of sexual desire
This talk aims to shed light on the elusive nature of sexual desire. In order to do so, I shall first expose and reject the dominant views in the philosophical literature, namely the view that (i) sexual desire is mere sexual arousal, and the view that (ii) sexual desire is a desire for sexual activities, similar in nature to any desire for a given activity, and as such is a mere subcategory of such desires. I shall argue that this is not the case by making a distinction between two different senses of "desire". I shall first present the different ways in which many have drawn this distinction, and shall then advance a new way of drawing it, which I take to be more satisfying: that between what I shall call "passionate" and "dispassionate" desires. I shall argue on this basis that sexual desire is a passionate desire, the phenomenological aspect of which necessarily involves an urge.
November 14, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
Kael McCormack-Skews (Geneva)
The Natural Alliance Between Emotions and Mental Imagery
Mental imagery reliably motivates emotions and does so in a way that is rationally intelligible. Here I explain why emotions are so often based on mental imagery. I present a general condition for emotions, then show how mental imagery readily satisfies this condition. I adopt the view that emotions represent value. An emotion must be based on a set of cognitive states that provide the object of emotion. This set of cognitive states must satisfy “the unity condition”: representations of object O must provide a suitably unified view of how the non-evaluative features of O hang together. Such a unified view is required for an emotion to attribute value V to object O. Mental imagery, by its very nature, is apt to satisfy the unity condition. Mental imagery exhibits a kind of unity shared with perception and provides the “raw materials” for unified episodes of imagining.
November 21, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
Francesca D’Alessandris (Geneva)
Aesthetic Disputes Revisited: An Experience-based View of Objectivism
Aesthetic disputes, typically understood as debates about the attributions of aesthetic properties or values to an object, are something philosophers love to dispute about. It seems that laymen, art critics, artists, and, among others, philosophers disagree in aesthetic evaluations more than what most aestheticians are willing to endorse without any resistance. This results in meta-aesthetic, epistemological debates about the subjectivity or the objectivity (in the sense of the conditions of correctness) of aesthetic judgments as well as in ontological debates about the realism of aesthetic properties.
In this presentation I will shift focus from epistemological debates on aesthetic judgement to address the under-explored issue of divergences in aesthetic experience. I will suggest some arguments to make sense of the objectivity of aesthetic experience itself and, specifically, I will advocate for the epistemic legitimacy for a subject, in case of divergences, to expect others to have an aesthetic experience of the same object similar to hers. To support this suggestion, I will draw on a view of aesthetic experience as a (either spontaneous or intentional) cognitive mental activity ultimately constrained by real properties of aesthetic objects.
November 28, 2024 – Conference in Clermont
No seminar
December 05, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
Edgard Darrobers (Paris/Geneva)
The Valence of Being Moved
There is a growing consensus in psychology and philosophy that being moved is a distinct emotion, characterized by warmth in the chest, a tightening of the throat, an increase in heart rate, and tears. However, there is still a debate about the valence or hedonic content of the emotion. Whether the valence can be considered mixed or positive is indeed controversial. Some argue that it can be both (Menninghaus et al. 2017, 2019; Wassiliwizky et al. 2015, 2017a, 2017b), while others claim that it can only be positive (Deonna 2020, Cova & Deonna, 2014, Cova, Deonna & Sander, 2016, 2017). But it is worth noting that this debate is not neutral. The underlying question is the polarity of the value to which emotion is supposed to react. Regarding the former, the value can be both negative and positive if it has pro-social consequences. As for the latter, the value can only be positive. In other words, the question is whether negative values can move us, and if so, how? It appears that not all emotions can be characterized in terms of the presence of a positive value. For instance, certain works of art, such as Paul Celan's poem ‘Todesfuge’, can move us without necessarily presenting a positive value. Additionally, we can also be deeply moved by situations such as death, destroyed homes or the ‘Shoah'. It is therefore necessary to postulate another hypothesis about the nature of being moved’s object, since most of these cases cannot be described in terms of positive values. I defend the idea that what is salient in being moved is the personal importance that accompanies a concrete value, rather than the positivity, negativity or social consequences of that value. This personal importance can qualify both positive and negative values.
December 12, 2024 – Thumos Seminar
James Laing (Oxford)
The Significance of Sharing
We like to share what’s on our mind. We do so by sharing attention, knowledge, emotion and experience; we seek to share our minds with specific others and with the world at large. In this paper, I provide an elaboration of our motive to engage in these different forms of sharing-behaviour which prioritises the concept of ‘interpersonal connection’. This explanation is offered first as an explanation of the motive to engage in joint attention in early infancy. It is then extended to encompass forms of sharing through conversation in maturity, with particular emphasis on the role of interpersonal connection in the dynamics of close personal relationships. Finally, this account is extended to identify a non-narcissistic, non-exhibitionist motive to share with others in general, through memoir and social media.
December 19, 2024 – Thumos Seminar / LOCATION: Campus Biotech, Room H8-01-D
Andrea Scarantino (Georgia State)
Emotions and Direction of Fit: Descriptive, Directive or Both?
The dominant view about emotions is that they have a descriptive, mind-to-world direction of fit. This is true for judgmentalist and perceptualist theories of emotions but also, somewhat surprisingly, for Deonna and Teroni’s attitudinal theory. In this talk, I will argue that we should think of emotions as essentially having an imperative, world-to-mind direction of it. I will investigate how descriptive and imperative directions of fit may co-exist and be coordinated in emotional episodes, ultimately making the case that emotions have a dual direction of fit. This descriptive-cum-imperative direction of fit gives rise to two dimensions of normative assessment. Are emotions occurring when they are supposed to? Are emotions bringing about what they are supposed to?