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)

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)

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)

In reply to Geach's objection against expressivism, some have claimed that there is a plurality of truth predicates. I raise a difficulty for this claim: valid inferences can involve sentences assessable by any truth predicate, corresponding to 'lightweight' truth as well as to 'heavyweight' truth. To account for this, some unique truth predicate must apply to all sentences that can appear in inferences. Mixed inferences remind us of a central platitude about truth: truth is what is preserved in valid inferences. (...) The question is why we should postulate truth predicates that do not satisfy this platitude. (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.

Mixed inferences are a problem for those who want to combine truth-assessability and antirealism with respect to allegedly nondescriptive sentences: the classical account of validity has apparently to be given up. J.C. Beall's response is that validity can be defined as the conservation of designated valued (Beall 2000). I argue that since it presupposes a truth predicate that can be applied to all sentences, this suggestion is not helpful. I also consider problems arising from mixed conjunctions and discuss the deeper (...) worry that the distinction between truth which does and truth which does not entail realism is inferentially irrelevant. (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)

In a poetic conversation with Thierry Zarcone, the painter and calligrapher Fabienne Verdier exposes her deep and harmonious connection to nature. She tells of her garden, her house and her osmosis with nature. Painting is to her an art of living and being that recalls the Tao masters as well as some Christan mystics.

Neo-sentmentalism 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 concepts 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)

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)

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 replies to an argument due to Greenspan (1980) and to Morton (2002) against the view that emotions are perceptions of values. The argument holds that this view cannot make room for ambivalent emotions both of which are appropriate, such as when it is appropriate to feel fear and attraction towards something. This would make for a contradiction, for appropriate emotions are supposed to present things as they are. The problem, I argue, is that this line of thoughts forgets (...) that things can have positive and negative aspects: something can both be dangerous and attractive, for instance. (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)

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)

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)

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 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)

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In his critique of rational choice theory, Amartya Sen claims that committed agents do not (or not exclusively) pursue their own goals. This claim appears to be nonsensical since even strongly heteronomous or altruistic agents cannot pursue other people's goals without making them their own. It seems that self-goal choice is constitutive of any kind of agency. In this paper, Sen's radical claim is defended. It is argued that the objection raised against Sen's claim holds only with respect to individual (...) goals. Not all goals, however, are individual goals; there are shared goals, too. Shared goals are irreducible to individual goals, as the argument from we-derivativeness and the argument from normativity show. It is further claimed that an adequate account of committed action defies both internalism and externalism about practical reason. (shrink)

Evaluative concepts and emotions appear closely connected. According to a prominent account, this relation can be expressed by propositions of the form ‘something is admirable if and only if feeling admiration is appropriate in response to it’. The first section discusses various interpretations of such ‘Value-Emotion Equivalences’, for example the Fitting Attitude Analysis, and it offers a plausible way to read them. The main virtue of the proposed way to read them is that it is well-supported by a promising account (...) of emotions, namely the Perceptual Theory of Emotions, which emphasises the analogies between emotions and sensory perceptual experiences. The second section considers a worry about whether concepts such as admirable are really evaluative. It is maintained that even though the arguments used to show that thick terms and concepts are not inherently evaluative can be transposed to affective concepts, these arguments can be resisted. So there is no need to abandon the intuitive claim that affective concepts are inherently evaluative. (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’est avec tristesse qu’on a récemment appris la disparition d’Enrico Berti, survenue le 5 janvier 2022. L’histoire de la philosophie ancienne et des études aristotéliciennes en particulier perd ainsi l’un de ses plus éminents spécialistes, qui laisse derrière lui une somme colossale de travaux ayant apporté une contribution majeure à la compréhension des Anciens. Formé à l’Université de Padoue, où il rédige une thèse sur « Genesi e sviluppo della dottrina aristotelica della potenza e dell’at...

La conception aristotélicienne des principes divins est parcourue de tensions épistémologiques, archéologiques et proprement théologiques, qui constituent à la fois un défi pour Aristote lui-même et un ensemble de problèmes qu'il lègue à la tradition, qu'elle se revendique de lui, ou se fasse critique à son égard. Restituée au mouvement de la tradition, aux vicissitudes de ses relectures, la théologie aristotélicienne voit s'actualiser les potentialités qu'elle portait en son sein, et qu'Aristote lui-même, déjà, commençait d'explorer. Ce volume, sans prétendre à (...) l'exhaustivité, souhaite, par la diversité de ses contributions, donner à lire quelques-unes de ces actualisations, qu'elles soient exégétiques ou polémiques, et tracer quelques linéaments de leurs effets historiques. (shrink)

La linguistique se penche sur les émotions afin de décrire les moyens langagiers de les exprimer ou de les représenter, tant au niveau de la structure de la langue que de l'interaction dans le discours. Par là même, elle met en exergue l'ubiquité des émotions dans le langage. Les contributions du volume Cartographie des émotions s'attachent à mettre à plat les liens entre langues et émotions. Elles cherchent à catégoriser, délimiter, appréhender les affects pour mieux comprendre les enjeux linguistiques et (...) sociolinguistiques de l'expression émotionnelle. On observera ainsi les champs lexicaux et les différents réseaux sémantiques qui s'y mettent en place, les combinatoires lexicales dans de grands corpus, les stratégies intonatives et syntaxiques auxquelles les locuteurs ont recours, les différences et les ressemblances entre les langues au niveau de l'expression des émotions, ainsi que la dimension pragmatique de l'expression émotionnelle et son impact sur les discours et leur interprétation. L'ouvrage ne s'adresse pas seulement aux étudiants et chercheurs en sciences du langage, communication, sociologie, traductologie, mais aussi à tous ceux qui travaillent sur l'interface émotion et communication et que passionne la complexité du langage et des langues. (shrink)

Le mouvement des femmes contre les agressions sexuelles pointe la responsabilité du patriarcat, d’un système de classement binaire qui organise la domination des hommes sur les femmes. La sociologie française préfère parler d’une domination masculine, expliquée par la volonté des hommes de s’approprier la fécondité des femmes pour Françoise Héritier, ou de construire un monde de l’entre-soi pour Pierre Bourdieu. Pour Carol Gilligan et Naomi Snider, le patriarcat est une force de hiérarchisation genrée qui s’applique à toutes les relations sociales, (...) mais qui rencontre aujourd’hui une résistance, celle des femmes et celles de toutes les minorités sexuelles. (shrink)

Les cinq articles réunis dans ce dossier sont le résultat d’une journée d’étude sur le change dans l’économie antique organisée à Lille 3 le 24 avril 2015. Ils traitent de l’organisation du change à l’époque hellénistique en s’arrêtant plus particulièrement aux exemples de Délos et de l’Égypte, où la richesse des inscriptions et des papyrus fait apparaître deux situations très différentes : le change était libre dans la place commerciale de Délos, alors qu’il était soumis à un monopole royal en (...) Égypte ptolémaïque. Une analyse approfondie de la documentation permet d’observer ce que cela entraîne pour la circulation des monnaies, l’établissement des taux de change et le statut des changeurs dans les deux régions. Cette rencontre a également permis de confronter les points de vue divergents des auteurs sur l’allagè et le kollybos ptolémaïque. Les trois derniers articles mettent en évidence les différences d’interprétation qui en découlent. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the notion of facework in the context of unfinished turns in French conversation. Unfinished turns in French conversation normally occur in the environment of talk that can be characterized as delicate or problematic. They provide a mechanism for dealing with such talk in a way that both manages misalignment and divergence between the participants and minimizes possible threats to the participants' face. They provide a subtle avoidance or minimization mechanism in that they enable the participants (...) to hint at what remains unarticulated, whilst registering enough of the type of actions that they seek to accomplish. I conclude that, although unfinished turns can be seen as one way in which participants engage in facework, their analysis suggests that only an interactional-sequential account reveals the work that they accomplish, and insists upon a conceptualization of face/facework as interactional. (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)

Cet ouvrage collectif réunit quatorze contributions d’anthropologues, dont les recherches ont intégré la dimension du genre dans les questions de parenté. Elles ont été menées dans des aires géographiques très diverses, tant en Amérique du Sud et du Nord qu’en Asie. Les études se sont centrées, pour la plupart, sur l’observation de sociétés restreintes contemporaines, tout en faisant référence à l’histoire et aux mythes qui déterminent leur mode de construction du genre. En réunissant tous ce...

A Triadic Theology is often attributed to Numenius. This presentation of his thought must be clarified. In Fragment 19 F, he mentions three gods, but the third one turns out to be the second aspect of the second god. In the testimonies, he mentions a third intellect (30 T = Proclus, In Tim. III 103, 28‑32 D.) and a third god, who is identified with the world (29 T = Proclus, In Tim. I 303, 27‑304, 5 D.) The third intellect (...) of 30 T seems to have to be identified with the third god as second aspect of the second god of 19 F. However, the third god of 29 T is quite different from them. In our opinion, it really corresponds to the generated and divine world represented in the Timaeus. This world is endowed with a rational soul in which an intellect is located, the source of all divinity. Such would be the third god of Numenius, ontologically distinct from the second one. This definition makes it impossible to turn it into a third principle at the origin of the world. A paradoxical proof of this interpretation is given by the Christians. When, in Platonism, they try to show the existence of a divine Triad that can be compared with the Christian Trinity, they do not quote Numenius. Cyril uses him to explain the relation between Father and Son (CJ III 35/23 F). But when he wants to find in him some Trinitarian assertions, he rewrites his text (CJ VIII 29/19 F). It is not surprising that Eusebius preferred Plotinus, reread by Porphyry, to find an equivalent to the Christian Trinity in a Platonic Triad. Thus, Numenius names three gods. But the identity of the third one must be clarified according to the context of his discourse and cannot be considered as a third principle. Numenius keeps a place for a third god because of his fidelity to the Pythagoreanism he attributes to Socrates, that he reads in the Timaeus and finds in Hesiod’s Theogony interpreted through the light of the Cratylus. He is however attached to a duality of divine principles, perhaps because of a fidelity to a more ancient Pythagoreanism he thinks more genuine than that of his predecessors as well as of his contemporaries. (shrink)

Introduction to the dossier on Imagination and Moral Reasoning.

Emotions have long been accused of all sorts of mischief. In recent years, however, many have argued that far from constituting an obstacle to reason and morality, emotions possess important virtues. According to a plausible conception, emotions would have a crucial cognitive function: they would consist in the perceptual experience of evaluative properties. To fear a dog, for instance, would consist in having the perceptual experience of the dog as fearsome. There has been and still is a lively debate about (...) the plausibility of such a conception. A consideration that has been neglected, however, is that certain kinds of emotions, such as hatred, spite, envy or jealousy, appear to be less plausible candidates for such a revalorisation. What such nasty emotions make clear is that by contrast with seems true of sensory perceptions, emotions can be assessed in evaluative terms. This makes for an asymmetry between emotions and sensory perceptions, which threatens the argument by analogy that supports the claim that emotions are a kind of perceptual experiences. In this paper, I plan to account for this asymmetry within the general framework of the perceptual theory of emotions. (shrink)

This entry specifies the possible relations between values and emotions.

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)

Neo-sentmentalism 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 concepts 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)

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)

Dans son dialogue Sur le Bien (19 F = fr. 11 dP), Numénius écrit que le dieu qui est « deuxième et troisième est un ». Par là, il désigne un dieu considéré selon deux aspects qui correspondent à la double orientation de son attention. Dans le second, il est tourné vers le monde et joue le rôle de démiurge. Selon la plupart des chercheurs, ce démiurge serait à identifier à l’âme du monde que les fragments parvenus du dialogue ne (...) mentionnent pas. L’article montre que cette interprétation ne rend peut-être pas compte du propos de Numénius. Il indique les raisons théoriques et polémiques expliquant qu’en réalité, même si le démiurge a la fonction de l’âme du monde, Numénius ne l’identifie pas avec celle-ci. Il veut définir les principes qu’il identifie à l’être, conçu comme incorporel. Le mouvement intrinsèque à l’âme et l’immanence qui la caractérise, d’après la tradition platonicienne que suit Numénius et la tradition stoïcienne à laquelle il s’oppose, interdisent de donner à cette âme le statut de pur intelligible – le lui accorder serait précisément céder à l’immanentisme et au corporalisme stoïciens. Enfin, il n’est pas davantage utile de reconnaître dans le second aspect du deuxième dieu, un moment nommé « troisième dieu » dans le dialogue, le troisième dieu que Numénius aurait identifié au monde d’après le témoignage de Proclus (29 T = fr. 21 dP). Ce troisième dieu-là peut réellement correspondre au monde dont Platon fait un dieu, à condition que ce monde soit considéré comme le produit du seul intellect, ordre (κόσμος) qui comporte certes une âme, et même un intellect en elle, mais qui n’est réduit ni à l’une ni à l’autre. (shrink)

Consider a typical fear episode. You are strolling down a lonely mountain lane when suddenly a huge wolf leaps towards you. A number of different interconnected elements are involved in the fear you experience. First, there is the visual and auditory perception of the wild animal and its movements. In addition, it is likely that given what you see, you may implicitly and inarticulately appraise the situation as acutely threatening. Then, there are a number of physiological changes, involving a variety (...) of systems controlled by the autonomic nervous system. Your heart races, your breathing becomes strained and your start trembling. These changes are accompanied by an expression of fear on your face: your mouth opens and your eyes widen while you stare at the wolf. There is also a kind of experience that you undergo. You are likely to feel a sort of pang, something that might consist in the perception of the physiological changes you are going through. Moreover, a number of thoughts are likely to cross your mind. You might think that the wild beast is about to tear you into pieces and that you’ll never escape from this. In addition to this, your attention focuses on the wolf and its movement, as well as, possibly, ways of escaping or defending yourself. Last, but not least, your fear is likely to come with a motivation, such as an urge to run away or to strike back. Whatever the details of the story, it is clear that a typical emotion episode involves a number of different components. Roughly, these components are a) a sensory perception or more generally an informational component, b) a kind of appraisal, d) physiological changes, c) conscious feelings, d) cognitive and attentional processes, and e) an actiontendency or more generally a motivational component. One central question in the theory of emotion is which, if any, of these components, constitute the emotion.. (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)

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we believe that they are fearsome. (...) Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful. Many of these cases involve a conflict between one’s emotion and one’s evaluative judgement. Emotions that are thus conflicting with judgement can be called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The question I am interested in is whether or not recalcitrant emotions amount to emotional illusions, that is, whether or not these cases are sufficiently similar to perceptual illusions to justify the claim that they fall under the same general heading. The answer to this depends on what emotions are. For instance, the view that emotions are evaluative judgments makes it difficult to make room for the claim that emotional errors are perceptual illusions. Fearing an innocuous spider would simply amount to making the error of judging that the spider is fearsome while it is in fact innocuous. This might involve an illusion of some sort, but it certainly does not amount to anything like a perceptual illusion. In this chapter, I argue that recalcitrant emotions are a kind of perceptual illusion.. (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)