Thumos Seminar

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, 18h15-20h00 at the PHIL211
• The PhilEAs talks usually takes place on Thursdays, 18h15-20h00 (PHIL201)

February 26, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Antonin Broi (Geneva)

Effective Altruism and Care Ethics

Effective altruism (EA) has received some of its most vocal criticisms from supporters of care ethics. In this paper I take a comparative approach to determine whether a compelling critique of EA can emerge from care ethics at the ethical level, and more generally how much common ground can be found between the two. I will argue that not only are they largely compatible, but they can be seen as complementary or even converging approaches.

March 5, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Ralf Bader (Fribourg)

Impartiality Without Impersonality

This paper argues that impartiality need not be understood in terms of an impersonal evaluation that transcends the perspective of any person, but can also be understood as an evaluation that abstracts from the particularities of anyone's perspective. Put differently, it need not be the view from nowhere but can be the point of view of no one in particular. This makes it possible to develop an impartial person-affecting approach in population ethics that rejects impersonal good yet is able to operate with a permutation-invariant betterness ordering and hence avoids the non-identity problem.

March 12, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Catherine Rioux (Laval)

Self-Respect at the Margins: When Hope Is All That Is Left

Recognition self-respect is often defined as the respect we are owed simply in virtue of our humanity. Evaluative self-respect, by contrast, is thought to be earned by meeting our personal standards of what makes life worthwhile and rationally judging that we have done so. This latter sense of our worth as the particular person we are is especially valuable: it is closely tied to our identity and thus seems capable of shielding us from pernicious external influences. Because it engages our capacity for rational self-evaluation, it also helps direct our agential powers. Accepting these ideas on the value of self-respect, my aim in this paper is to cast doubt on the centrality of positive judgments or beliefs in evaluative self-respect. I argue, more specifically, that hope – and not belief – is the minimally positive attitude one can take toward meeting one’s standards while still enjoying the protection that evaluative self-respect affords. I further suggest that hope helps us avoid the twin pitfalls of complacency and excessive harshness toward ourselves, often described as ways of losing evaluative self-respect. The key idea is that the norms of rational hope determine the appropriate degree of demandingness in the standards a self-respecting person should endorse.

March 19, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Gopal Sreenivasan (Duke)

Nettles in the Nexus: On Wallace on Relational Morality

In the Moral Nexus (2019), Jay Wallace aims to interpret all of morality in relational terms. For Wallace, the paradigmatic features of the relational interpretation derive from the case of promising.  I agree both that morality has a rich and interesting relational core and that promises illustrate it well.  Against Wallace, however, I argue that other significant elements of morality resist assimilation to his relational interpretation.  In some cases, this is because their relational character differs notably from that of promising. Here my examples are relationship-based wrongings.  In other cases, important elements of morality lack a relational character altogether.  Here my examples are the all things considered ought and moderate deontological constraints.  Wallace’s interpretation therefore stands to be improved by sharply reducing the scope of its ambition.

March 26, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Ingrid Vendrell (Marburg)

On Feeling Shame for Another

This paper analyzes a particular and scarcely explored kind of shame: shame for another self. Drawing on an example provided by Max Scheler in his essay on shame, it explores the possibility of a form of shame that targets another’s self with the aim of protecting it from   devaluation. It is argued that shame for another self must be   distinguished from cases of vicarious shame, in which one feels ashamed of another person. The paper develops a model of the mechanisms underlying shame for another self as grounded in perspective-taking, experiential imagination, and sympathy.

Recognizing shame for another self, I argue, is essential for explaining a set of cases that current typologies cannot accommodate. Moreover, identifying this phenomenon supports a broader reconceptualization of shame as a self-conscious positive emotion. In other words, defending the existence of this kind of shame supports the view that shame is a self-conscious emotion through which the subject becomes aware of the positive value of the self—whether one’s own or another’s. On this view, shame neither casts the self in a negative light nor undermines our relations with others, but instead performs the constructive function of protecting the self.

April 2, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Rodrigo Diaz (Geneva)

Varieties of Emotional Recalcitrance

Recalcitrant emotions persist despite conflicting with our evaluative beliefs. For example, recalcitrant fear of flying persists despite the belief that flying is not dangerous. Most researchers agree with this characterization of recalcitrant emotions, according to which they involve emotion-conflicting beliefs. However, cognitivists argue that recalcitrant emotions also involve emotion-congruent beliefs, whereas non-cognitivists deny this. In this paper, I argue that only a minority of cases of emotional recalcitrance fit the non-cognitivist description, and even those cases may be accommodated within a minimally cognitivist framework. This has important implications for debates about the relation between emotion and cognition.

April 16, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Jonas Vandieken (Munich)

Love and Morality: Practical Openness to Another in the Moral Nexus

This paper argues that love—understood as practical openness to another—is central to moral obligation and moral motivation. Drawing on the work of Iris Murdoch and Stephen Darwall, it develops a second-personal account of love, according to which love is not merely an affect but a practical stance: practical openness renders the beloved a concrete source of valid claims and grounds a reciprocal normative nexus as part of which each can be wronged and held accountable by the particular other.

Against prominent views, including Darwall’s own, that locate the ground of moral obligation and motivation in the reasons generated by impartial moral norms, the paper contends that love can itself suffice to generate and justify certain moral obligations and may in fact be necessary to explain moral motivation. This becomes clear when focusing on personal relationships like friendship. Acting solely from impartial duty in contexts of personal relationships like friendship risks alienation and recognitional injury.

Extending the argument beyond intimate relationships, the paper argues that even ordinary moral encounters, such as responding to a stranger’s valid moral claim, require a minimal form of practical openness. This becomes clear when reflecting on the wrong of moral indifference – a failure to acknowledge the other as a source of valid claims. This goes to show that love is not confined to partial relationships like friendship but underwrites the moral relationship itself. The alleged distinction between what Darwall calls ‘the attitudes of the heart’ and the ‘attitudes of the will’ is set to disappear; morality, it turns out, is not a heart-free zone.

April 23, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

James Hutton (Delft)

When Emotions Clash: Affective Conflict, Ethical Disagreement, and Moral Empiricism

According to Moral Empiricism, people can sometimes gain noninferential ethical knowledge through emotional experiences. But this view faces a serious challenge: people often have divergent emotional responses to the same situation. How, then, can emotions ground ethical knowledge in the face of such emotional differences? This talk develops a systematic Moral Empiricist response. I argue, first, that many forms of emotional difference pose no epistemological threat, either because the emotions are normatively compatible or because apparent conflicts stem from differences in nonethical information. The deeper challenge arises from cases of “fundamental” emotional conflict, where agents share the same nonethical information yet respond with incompatible emotions. I offer two complementary replies: a modest reply, which questions whether such conflicts are as pervasive as is often assumed, and a more ambitious reply, which draws on externalist epistemology to show how emotion-based ethical knowledge can remain possible even in the face of fundamental disagreement. The result is a defence of Moral Empiricism with implications for how we should think about ethical disagreement and deliberation in times of affective polarisation.

April 30, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Ashley Shaw (Dublin)

Desire as an Emotion

In this talk, I defend an account of desire as a type of emotion. I motivate a particular formulation of the view, one that sets it apart from other affective theories of desire, such as the hedonic and perceptualist views. I argue that reflection on the rational profile of desire suggests that desire involves a form of cognition that is constitutively responsive to affective experiences.

Mai 7, 2026 – Thumos Seminar

Lorenza d’Angelo (Barcelona)

Qualities of Pleasure

The so-called “doctrine of swine” objection against hedonism rests on the idea that pleasure and pain are basic and primordial kinds of experience which can only vary quantitatively, i.e. in intensity and duration. Given this, claiming that they are the only measure of the good life, as the hedonist does, implies that a person can reduce to the most basic and primordial version of herself without significant loss to her well-being, and this implication seems false. In response to this objection, I argue that (i) intensity and duration are qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, properties; (ii) intensity and duration are not the only qualitative properties with respect to which pleasurable and painful experience varies; and thus (iii) they are not the only determinants of the prudential value of a pleasurable or painful experience. This allows the hedonist to explain in a principled way why some pleasures – notably those associated with aesthetic appreciation, scientific inquiry, moral and political activism, and loving relationships – may be experienced as of higher quality and therefore assigned greater prudential value, even though they are less intense than the pleasures of bodily satisfaction. It also explains why some of the corresponding forms of suffering, e.g. emotional and cognitive, may have a higher negative impact on our well-being than bodily pain.