Si l’homme est un être doté de raison et se distingue des autres animaux par sa capacité à réfléchir sur ses actes tant avant de les poser qu’après, il lui arrive cependant d’être irrationnel. Tandis que certains s’en désolent, considérant les différentes formes d’irrationalité comme autant d’expressions de notre inaptitude à atteindre la sagesse, d’autres semblent plutôt s’en réjouir, estimant que la possibilité de ne pas se conformer à ce que dicte ou suggère la raison est une preuve de notre (...) radicale liberté. Mais quel que soit le jugement moral, explicite ou implicite, porté sur ces phénomènes, la plupart des philosophes ne se contentent pas de les constater. Ils tentent de les cerner, d’en comprendre les mécanismes, parfois de les justifier. Comment et pour-quoi? Telles sont les questions auxquelles voudrait répondre ce numéro portant sur la délibération et l’irrationalité dans l’histoire. (shrink)

This introduction consists in a historical overview of the debate about practical irrationality, as illustrated by weakness of will. After a brief reminder of the discussions after Davidson, we consider three important moments of the debate: the ancient debate from Socrates to Xenophon, the medieval debate from Augustine to Buridan, and the modern debate after Descartes. We suggest that it is useful to distinguish weakness of will (a failure to act as one wills) from so-called strict akrasia (a failure to (...) will according to one's better judgment) and raise the question of the metaphysical underpinnings of the internalism/externalism debate. (shrink)

The emotions we experience are crucial to who we are, to what we think, and to what we do. But what are emotions, exactly, and how do they relate to agency? The aim of this book is to spell out an account of emotions, which is grounded on analogies between emotions and sensory experiences, and to explore the implications of this account for our understanding of human agency. The central claim is that emotions consist in perceptual experiences of values, such (...) as the fearsome, the disgusting or the admirable. A virtue of this account is that it affords a better grasp of a variety of interconnected phenomena, such as motivation, values, responsibility and reason-responsiveness. In the process of exploring the implications of the Perceptual Theory of emotions, several claims are proposed. First, emotions normally involve desires that set goals, but they can be contemplative in that they can occur without any motivation. Second, evaluative judgements can be understood in terms of appropriate emotions in so far as appropriateness is taken to consist in correct representation. Third, by contrast with what Strawsonian theories hold, the concept of moral responsibility is not response-dependent, but the relationship between emotions and moral responsibility is mediated by values. Finally, in so far as emotions are perceptions of values, they can be considered to be perceptions of practical reasons, so that on certain conditions, acting on the basis of one's emotions can consist in responding to one's reasons. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic treatment of the requirements of democratic legitimacy. It argues that democratic procedures are essential for political legitimacy because of the need to respect value pluralism and because of the learning process that democratic decision-making enables. It proposes a framework for distinguishing among the different ways in which the requirements of democratic legitimacy have been interpreted. Peter then uses this framework to identify and defend what appears as the most plausible conception of democratic legitimacy. According to (...) this conception, democratic legitimacy requires that the decision-making process satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. (shrink)

There is consistent and strong empirical evidence for social inequalities in health, as a vast and fast growing literature shows. In recent years, these findings have helped to move health equity high on international research and policy agendas. This paper examines how the empirical identification of social inequalities in health relates to a normative judgment about health inequities and puts forward an approach which embeds the pursuit of health equity within the general pursuit of social justice. It defends an indirect (...) approach to health equity, which views social inequalities in health as unjust in so far as they are the result of an unjust basic structure of society in Rawls’ sense. (shrink)

After discussing de Sousa's view of emotion in akrasia, I suggest that emotions be viewed as nonconceptual perceptions of value (see Tappolet 2000). It follows that they can render intelligible actions which are contrary to one's better judgment. An emotion can make one's action intelligible even when that action is opposed by one's all-things-considered judgment. Moreover, an akratic action prompted by an emotion may be more rational than following one's better judgement, for it may be the judgement and not (...) the perception which is in error. By contrast, "cool" akrasia is genuinely puzzling; it is not clear whether it exists. (shrink)

What is the relation between the concept good and more specific or ‘thick’ concepts such as admirable or courageous? I argue that good or more precisely good pro tanto is a general concept, but that the relation between good pro tanto and the more specific concepts is not that of a genus to its species. The relation of an important class of specific evaluative concepts, which I call ‘affective concepts’, to good pro tanto is better understood as one between a (...) determinable and its determinates, whereas concepts such as courageous can be analysed in terms of affective concepts and purely descriptive concepts. (shrink)

Pour contrer le scepticisme au sujet de la connaissance des valeurs, la plupart soutiennent avec John Rawls qu’une croyance comme celle qu’une action est bonne est justifiée dans la mesure où elle appartient à un ensemble de croyances cohérent, ayant atteint un équilibre réfléchi. Christine Tappolet s’inspire des travaux de Max Scheler et d’Alexius von Meinong pour défendre une conception opposée au cohérentisme. La connaissance des valeurs est affirmée dépendre de nos émotions, ces dernières étant conçues comme des perceptions (...) des valeurs. (shrink)

Political decisions have the potential to greatly impact our lives. Think of decisions in relation to abortion or climate change, for example. This makes political legitimacy an important normative concern. But what makes political decisions legitimate? Are they legitimate in virtue of having support from the citizens? Democratic conceptions of political legitimacy answer in the affirmative. Such conceptions righly highlight that legitimate political decision-making must be sensitive to disagreements among the citizens. But what if democratic decisions fail to track what (...) there is most reason to do? What if a democratically elected government fails to take measures necessary to protect its population from threats related to climate change? Peter argues that the legitimacy of political decisions doesn't just depend on respect for the citizens' will; and defends a novel hybrid conception of political legitimacy, called the Epistemic Accountability conception. According to this conception, political legitimacy also depends on how political decision-making responds to evidence for what there is most reason to do. Grounds for Political Legitmacy starts with an overview of the main ways in which philosophers have thought about political legitimacy, and identifies the epistemic accountability conception as an overlooked alternative. It then develops the epistemic accountability conception of political legitimacy and discusses its implications for legitimate political decision-making. Considering the norms that should govern political debate, it examines the role of experts in politics, and probes the responsibilities of democratically elected political leaders and as well as of citizens. (shrink)

C an actions caused by emotions be free and autonomous? The so-called rationalist conception of autonomy denies this. Only actions done in the light of reflexive choices can be autonomous and hence free. I argue that the rationalist conception does not make room for akratic actions, that is, free and intentional actions performed against the agent’s best judgement. I then develop an account inspired by Harry Frankfurt and David Shoemaker, according to which an action is autonomous when it is determined (...) by the agent’s most central cares, where cares are defined in terms of emotional dispositions. (shrink)

Classical ethology encourages a causal approach to animal behaviour, using Tinbergen's four questions concerning evolution, function, mechanism and development of behaviour. It sets aside the study of mental processes, which could otherwise help to unify our picture of the relationships between animal and environment. Here the steps in research focused on the psychological meaning of a peculiar behaviour in the mouse — carrying its tail — and what this implies regarding the mouse's cognitive world are given. Initial empirical observations suggested (...) epistemic choices concerning space and object notions in the mouse; this led us to go beyond the first stage in exploring the significance of this behaviour. Later experiments showed the limitations of an explanation based on a cause-effect relationship. An interpretative model integrating a phenomenological conceptual framework is proposed. (shrink)

A critical review of John Cottingham's "Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, cartesian, and psychoanalytic ethics" Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

This paper reports on a manual monitoring of online representations of LGBT persons in the Republic of Cyprus for the period April 2015–February 2016. The article contextualizes the prevalence of “hate speech” in online Greek Cypriot comments against LGBT individuals, and, more generally, against non-heterosexuals. Adopting a Foucauldian position vis-à-vis the social and discursive construction of sexuality, we outline, first, the socio-historical context with a focus on LGBT rights in the Republic of Cyprus and the nationalistic project construing sexualities. We (...) then examine the different levels of discursive discrimination practices, providing a snapshot of the types of “hate speech” referring to this topic typically found in such an environment. The focus is on identification of the frames used to construct LGBT identities, and their perception.We use in our title the word subject as defined by post-modernists and by Butler in particular : subject refers to “a socially produced ‘agent’ and ‘deliberator’ whose agency and thought is made possible by a language that precedes that ‘I’. In this sense the ‘I’ is produced through power ”. This paper focuses on the socially produced definition of the LGBT community in the context under study. We thus address the way in which sexuality is constructed within a compulsory and hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity. We analyze our data i.e. comments focused on the LGBT community, with corpus linguistic tools as well as through a qualitative examination of the identified frames. Our analysis confirms an interface between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity in the Republic as well as the influence of the Orthodox Church and its beliefs. (shrink)

The recent literature on the epistemology of disagreement focuses on the rational response question: how are you rationally required to respond to a doxastic disagreement with someone, especially with someone you take to be your epistemic peer? A doxastic disagreement with someone also confronts you with a slightly different question. This question, call it the epistemic trust question, is: how much should you trust our own epistemic faculties relative to the epistemic faculties of others? Answering the epistemic trust question is (...) important for the epistemology of disagreement because it sheds light on the rational response question. My main aim in this paper is to argue—against recent attempts to show otherwise—that epistemic self-trust does not provide a reason for remaining steadfast in doxastic disagreements with others. (shrink)

Neo-sentimentalism is the view that to judge that something has an evaluative property is to judge that some affective or emotional response is appropriate with respect to it. The difficulty in assessing neo-sentimentalism is that it allows for radically different versions. My aim is to spell out what I take to be its most plausible version. I distinguish between a normative version, which takes the concept of appropriateness to be normative, and a descriptive version, which claims that appropriateness in emotions (...) is a matter of correspondence to evaluative facts. I argue that the latter version can satisfy the normativity requirement that follows from Moore’s Open Question Argument, that it is superior to the former with respect to the explanatory role of values, and with respect to the Wrong Kind of Reason Objection. Finally, I argue that the circularity that is involved is not vicious: understood epistemically, neo-sentimentalism remains instructive. (shrink)

Some situations appear to make moral demands on us – they call for a certain response. How can we account for such paradigmatic moral experiences? And what normative properties or relations are involved? This paper argues that we can account for such moral experiences in terms of moral affordances, where moral affordances are opportunities for fitting action. The paper demonstrates that the concept of affordances helps to generate new insight in moral inquiry, especially in relation to the moral significance of (...) fittingness. (shrink)

According to an often repeated definition, economics is the science of individual choices and their consequences. The emphasis on choice is often used – implicitly or explicitly – to mark a contrast between markets and the state: While the price mechanism in well-functioning markets preserves freedom of choice and still efficiently coordinates individual actions, the state has to rely to some degree on coercion to coordinate individual actions. Since coercion should not be used arbitrarily, coordination by the state needs to (...) be legitimized by the consent of its citizens. The emphasis in economic theory on freedom of choice in the market sphere suggests that legitimization in the market sphere is “automatic” and that markets can thus avoid the typical legitimization problem of the state. In this paper, I shall question the alleged dichotomy between legitimization in the market and in the state. I shall argue that it is the result of a conflation of choice and consent in economics and show how an independent concept of consent makes the need for legitimization of market transactions visible. Footnotes1 For helpful comments and suggestions I am most grateful to Marc Fleurbaey, Alain Marciano, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Thomas Pogge, Hans Bernhard Schmid, to seminar or conference participants in Aix-Marseille, Tutzing, Paris, and Amsterdam, and to two anonymous referees. (shrink)

Dans la culture occidentale, le paysage est le plus souvent reconnu comme une portion d'espace appréhendée à distance, selon un point de vue unique; l'étendue, telle qu'elle est circonscrite par le regard, l'emporte sur la temporalité qui se trouve négligée. Or, le territoire est affecté de changements incessants, que ceux-ci soient d'origine naturelle ou déterminés par l'intervention des hommes; les dispositifs techniques, qu'ils s'agissent des "machines de locomotion" ou des "machines de vision" contribuent à conférer une dimension temporelle à la (...) perception des sites. Le lieu est également le réceptacle des émotions, des souvenirs ou des anticipations de chacun. Paysages en devenir traite de la manière dont un certain nombre d'oeuvres artistiques contemporaines transcrivent et accompagnent les variations et les évolutions du paysage. (shrink)

« Les choses ont décidément changé en dix ans, les transformations du présent amènent à relire les textes passés, et la poésie française n’apparaît plus comme un grand désert de femmes. Il faut s’en réjouir » (p. 12). C’est avec ce commentaire enthousiaste que Christine Planté clôt l’avant-propos à la deuxième édition de l’anthologie qu’elle dirige, Femmes poètes du xixe siècle. Si l’édition de 1998 permit de faire découvrir une poésie de femmes que le lecteur ignorait, la nouvelle édition de...

Un lieu d’accueil spécifique pour des femmes d’un quartier de Marseille a développé un dispositif social expérimental qui repose sur une approche globale et transversale des problématiques. La situation économique, sociale, culturelle de ces femmes les retranche dans la précarité et demande une réponse adaptée, qui tienne notamment compte de la dimension psychologique des difficultés qu’elles rencontrent. Elles sont pour la plupart issues de l’immigration, voire primo-arrivantes. Le Centre ressources femmes s’est entouré de partenaires de terrain spécialisés et s’est appuyé (...) sur des dispositifs qu’il a fait évoluer en fonction de la spécificité du public. La philosophie de ce dispositif global d’accompagnement repose avant tout sur le respect de la temporalité de chaque individu et de sa singularité en offrant un espace favorisant la construction identitaire dans un pays qui est culturellement étranger. (shrink)

Introduction to the dossier on Imagination and Moral Reasoning.

Fabienne Peter on whether difficult political decisions should be made by experts.

The debate over rival conceptions of political legitimacy tends to focus on first-order considerations—for example, on the relative importance of procedural and substantive values. In this essay, I argue that there is an important, but often overlooked, distinction among rival conceptions of political legitimacy that originates at the meta-normative level. This distinction, which cuts across the distinctions drawn at the first-order level, concerns the source of the normativity of political legitimacy, or, as I refer to it here, the grounds of (...) political legitimacy. If we focus on the grounds of political legitimacy, there are three main conceptions of political legitimacy: will-based, belief-based, and fact-based conceptions. I present an objection to each of those main conceptions and defend a hybrid account of the grounds of political legitimacy. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to identify a type of fact-given warrant for action that is distinct from reason-based justification for action and defend the view that there are two types of practical warrant. The idea that there are two types of warrant is familiar in epistemology, but has not received much attention in debates on practical normativity. On the view that I will defend, normative facts, qua facts, give rise to entitlement warrant for action. But they do (...) not, qua facts, give rise to reason-based warrant. Normative practical reasons, I will argue, are true propositions that represent fact-based favouring and that are made true by normative facts. (shrink)

Le Laboratoire d’ANalyse Cognitive de l’Information (LANCI) effectue des recherches sur le traitement cognitif de l’information. La recherche fondamentale porte sur les multiples conceptions de l’information. Elle s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux modèles cognitifs de la classification et de la catégorisation, tant dans une perspective symbolique que connexionniste. La recherche appliquée explore les technologies informatiques qui manipulent l’information. Le territoire privilégié est celui du texte. La recherche est de nature interdisciplinaire. Elle en appelle à la philosophie, à l’informatique, à la linguistique (...) et à la psychologie. Volume 6, Numéro 2007-02 – Août 2007 Publication du Laboratoire d’ANalyse Cognitive de l’Information Directeurs : Luc Faucher, Jean-Guy Meunier, Serge Robert et Pierre Poirier Université du Québec à Montréal Document disponible en ligne à l’adresse suivante : www.lanci.uqam.ca Tirage : 5 exemplaires Aucune partie de cette publication ne peut être conservée dans un système de recherche documentaire, traduite ou reproduite sous quelque forme que ce soit - imprimé, procédé photomécanique, microfilm, microfiche ou tout autre moyen - sans la permission écrite de l’éditeur. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. / All rights reserved. No part of this publication covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical - without the prior written permission of the publisher. Dépôt légal – Bibliothèque Nationale du Canada Dépôt légal – Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec.. (shrink)

A conception of legitimacy is at the core of normative theories of democracy. Many different conceptions of legitimacy have been put forward, either explicitly or implicitly. In this article, I shall first provide a taxonomy of conceptions of legitimacy that can be identified in contemporary democratic theory. The taxonomy covers both aggregative and deliberative democracy. I then argue for a conception of democratic legitimacy that takes the epistemic dimension of public deliberation seriously. In contrast to standard interpretations of epistemic democracy, (...) however, the conception I put forward avoids procedure-independent standards of correctness. Instead, it relies on a procedural social epistemology and defines legitimacy entirely in terms of the fairness of procedures. I call this conception of democratic legitimacy `Pure Epistemic Proceduralism'. I shall argue that it should be preferred over `Rational Epistemic Proceduralism', the conception of legitimacy that underlies the standard interpretation of epistemic democracy. Key Words: legitimacy • deliberative democracy • epistemic democracy • social epistemology. (shrink)

Political legitimacy is a virtue of political institutions and of the decisions—about laws, policies, and candidates for political office—made within them. This entry will survey the main answers that have been given to the following questions. First, how should legitimacy be defined? Is it primarily a descriptive or a normative concept? If legitimacy is understood normatively, what does it entail? Some associate legitimacy with the justification of coercive power and with the creation of political authority. Others associate it with the (...) justification, or at least the sanctioning, of existing political authority. Authority stands for a right to rule—a right to issue commands and, possibly, to enforce these commands using coercive power. An additional question is whether legitimate political authority is understood to entail political obligations or not. Most people probably think it does. But some think that the moral obligation to obey political authority can be separated from an account of legitimate authority, or at least that such obligations arise only if further conditions hold. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that there are two kinds of normative concepts : evaluative concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. The question that is raised by this distinction is how it is possible to claim that evaluative concepts are normative. Given that deontic concepts appear to be at the heart of normativity, the bigger the gap between evaluative and deontic concepts, the less it appears plausible to say that evaluative concepts are normative. After having presented the (...) main differences between evaluative and deontic concepts, and shown that there is more than a superficial difference between the two kinds, the paper turns to the question of the normativity of evaluative concepts. It will become clear that, even if these concepts have different functions, there are a great many ties between evaluative concepts, on the one hand, and the concepts of ought and of reason, on the other. (shrink)

Collective deliberation is fuelled by disagreements and its epistemic value depends, inter alia, on how the participants respond to each other in disagreements. I use this accountability thesis to argue that deliberation may be valued not just instrumentally but also for its procedural features. The instrumental epistemic value of deliberation depends on whether it leads to more or less accurate beliefs among the participants. The procedural epistemic value of deliberation hinges on the relationships of mutual accountability that characterize appropriately conducted (...) deliberation. I will argue that it only comes into view from the second-person standpoint. I shall explain what the second-person standpoint in the epistemic context entails and how it compares to Stephen Darwall’s interpretation of the second-person standpoint in ethics. (shrink)

The macro-level debate on the economic impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is still unsettled. This article explores micro-level evidence by examining what Fortune Global 250 firms themselves report about their economic impact. Such reporting embodies corporate attempts to account for their economic implications, in addition to the environmental and social aspects of their activities that have traditionally received more attention in the context of corporate responsibility. Firms' reports turn out to provide a rich illustration of the mechanisms through which MNEs (...) (can) affect economic development (including sheer size, technology transfer, and backward linkages) and of how such impacts are being operationalized and measured. The authors test which MNEs are most likely to disclose information on the various mechanisms and find that it is influenced by region, sector, and size but not by profitability. Implications of this exploratory study for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to provide an epistemological argument for why public reasons matter for political legitimacy. A key feature of the public reason conception of legitimacy is that political decisions must be justified to the citizens. Critics of the public reason conception, by contrast, argue that political legitimacy depends on justification simpliciter. Another way to put the point is that the critics of the public reason conception take the justification of political decisions to be based on reasons (...) that are agreement-independent. I call such reasons objective reasons. Public reasons are, however, agreement-dependent. The debate between defenders and critics of a public reason conception of political legitimacy focuses on whether objective reasons or public reasons are the right basis for the justification of political decisions. My defense of the public reason conception will grant to its critics that there are objective reasons and allow that such reasons can affect the legitimacy of political decisions. But I will show, focusing on epistemic constraints on the justification of political decisions, that it does not follow that the justification of those decisions is necessarily agreement-independent. In the epistemic circumstances that are typical of political life, public reasons will be required for the justification of political decisions. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider the question of whether there exists an essential relation between emotions and wellbeing. We distinguish three ways in which emotions and wellbeing might be essentially related: constitutive, causal, and epistemic. We argue that, while there is some room for holding that emotions are constitutive ingredients of an individual’s wellbeing, all the attempts to characterise the causal and epistemic relations in an essentialist way are vulnerable to some important objections. We conclude that the causal and epistemic (...) relation between emotions and wellbeing is much less strong than is commonly thought. (shrink)

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient (...) Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to _Discipline and Punish_, _Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling_ will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought. (shrink)

At the core of political liberalism is the claim that political institutions must be publicly justified or justifiable to be legitimate. What explains the significance of public justification? The main argument that defenders of political liberalism present is an argument from disagreement: the irreducible pluralism that is characteristic of democratic societies requires a mode of justification that lies in between a narrowly political solution based on actual acceptance and a traditional moral solution based on justification from the third-person perspective. But (...) why should we take disagreements seriously? This – epistemic question – has not received the attention it deserves so far. I argue that the significance of public justification can be explained through the possibility of reasonable disagreement. In a reasonable disagreement, the parties hold mutually incompatible beliefs, but each is justified to hold the belief they do. I shall use the notion of a reasonable disagreement to explain the possibility of an irreducible pluralism of moral and religious doctrines and, on that basis, why the justification of political institutions has to be public. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism–the view that political equality is only instrumentally valuable. I reject (...) instrumentalism on two grounds: (i) because it fails to respect reasonable value pluralism and to recognize the constitutive role of democratic procedures for legitimacy in pluralist societies, and (ii) because it neglects the constructive function of democratic decision-making. I then consider two alternatives to pure epistemic proceduralism: David Estlund's version of epistemic proceduralism and a Deweyan account of epistemic democracy. I argue that only pure epistemic proceduralism can make good on both shortcomings of instrumentalism, whereas each of the other two approaches only makes good on one and neglects the other. (shrink)

Cognitive Theories of emotions have enjoyed great popularity in recent times. Allegedly, the so-called Perceptual Theory constitutes the most attractive version of this approach. However, the Perceptual Theory has come under increasing pressure. There are at least two ways to deal with the barrage of objections, which have been mounted against the Perceptual Theory. One is to argue that the objections work only if one assumes an overly narrow conception of what perception consists in. On a better and more liberal (...) understanding of perception, the objections lose their force. The other is to stress that the differences between emotions and sensory perceptions can be explained by focusing on a new analogy. As I will argue, emotions have interesting similarities with magnitude representations, such as the representation of distance. Such representations are plausibly thought to be analog and non-conceptual, but by contrast to sensory perceptions, such as colour perceptions, they do not lie at the sensory periphery. This new analogy makes room for a novel and attractive theory of emotions, the Receptive Theory, which allows for a positive and epistemologically fruitful characterization of emotions. (shrink)

This paper reports on a manual monitoring of online representations of LGBT persons in the Republic of Cyprus for the period April 2015–February 2016. The article contextualizes the prevalence of “hate speech” in online Greek Cypriot comments against LGBT individuals, and, more generally, against non-heterosexuals. Adopting a Foucauldian position vis-à-vis the social and discursive construction of sexuality, we outline, first, the socio-historical context with a focus on LGBT rights in the Republic of Cyprus and the nationalistic project construing sexualities. We (...) then examine the different levels of discursive discrimination practices, providing a snapshot of the types of “hate speech” referring to this topic typically found in such an environment. The focus is on identification of the frames used to construct LGBT identities, and their perception.We use in our title the word subject as defined by post-modernists and by Butler in particular : subject refers to “a socially produced ‘agent’ and ‘deliberator’ whose agency and thought is made possible by a language that precedes that ‘I’. In this sense the ‘I’ is produced through power ”. This paper focuses on the socially produced definition of the LGBT community in the context under study. We thus address the way in which sexuality is constructed within a compulsory and hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity. We analyze our data i.e. comments focused on the LGBT community, with corpus linguistic tools as well as through a qualitative examination of the identified frames. Our analysis confirms an interface between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity in the Republic as well as the influence of the Orthodox Church and its beliefs. (shrink)

Ethical thought is articulated around normative concepts. Standard examples of normative concepts are good, reason, right, ought, and obligatory. Theorists often treat the normative as an undifferentiated domain. Even so, it is common to distinguish between two kinds of normative concepts: evaluative or axiological concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. This encyclopedia entry discusses the many differences between the two kinds of concepts.

Journal of Economic Methodology, Volume 19, Issue 2, Page 165-167, June 2012.