The Thumos seminar, which is the main research activity of Thumos, the Genevan Research Group on Emotions, Values and Norms, takes place on Thursdays, 16h15-17h45 at UniP hilosophes (room PHIL001). The schedule can be found here. The archives of the Thumos seminar are available here.
December 19, 2024 / 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?
December 12, 2024
James Laing (Oxford)
A Puzzle about The Desire for Esteem
I will explore a tension which is liable to occur in our thinking about the desire for esteem. This tension emerges from the following two, to my mind plausible, thoughts. On the one hand, it is natural to think that the desire for esteem is an important feature of our life as social animals that seek to live a life in community with others of our kind. On the other hand, it is also natural to think that acting from the desire for esteem, even for fitting esteem, often renders one less admirable, and can constitute appropriate grounds for shame or self-disappointment. While the second of these thoughts might incline us to the thought that we should aspire to extirpate the desire for esteem from our conscious lives, the former suggests that this would constitute a problematic erosion of human sociality. How should these thoughts be reconciled?
December 05, 2024
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.
November 21, 2024
Francesca D’Alessandris (Geneva)
Aesthetic Disputes Revisited: An Experience-based View of Objectivism
TBA
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 14, 2024
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 7, 2024
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.
October 31, 2024
Céline Schöpfer (Geneva)
This presentation challenges the traditional concept of critical thinking by arguing that it is inherently flawed due to deep-seated conceptual incoherencies. One of the core issues lies in the dual epistemological nature of critical thinking, which encompasses both analytic and regulative dimensions. These two levels, while often treated as a unified whole, pursue fundamentally different objectives and operate on different temporal scales, leading to significant inconsistencies. I will argue that these inconsistencies manifest in three primary ways (1) The incompatibility of objectives, where analytic critical thinking aims for definitive judgments while regulative critical thinking focuses on self-reflection and bias mitigation, often leading to conflicting outcomes; (2) The imbalance between these levels, with an overemphasis on analytic thinking fostering intellectual arrogance, and an overemphasis on regulative thinking leading to indecision and paralysis; and (3) The self-referential paradox, where the regulative aspect of critical thinking must evaluate the analytic aspect, creating a loop that undermines the very process it seeks to regulate. Given these profound issues, I will explore potential solutions. Ultimately, this presentation invites a rethinking of critical thinking itself, questioning whether it can be salvaged or if it is time to move beyond it.
October 24, 2024 / 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 17, 2024
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 10, 2024
Gregory Currie
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 3, 2024
Agnès Baehni (Geneva)
Moral Blame "Yes!", Non-Moral Blame "No!"
Athletes, epistemic agents and artists often fall below certain athletic, epistemic, and aesthetic standards, and, one could argue, respectively merit athletic, epistemic, and aesthetic blame. Intuitions therefore seem to support the idea that appropriate blame and praise are not confined to the moral sphere. While we agree that certain kinds of non-moral blame may be permissible, we will argue that there are no reasons of the right kind for holding others responsible for non-moral failures or achievements, where responsibility is meant in the strong sense of accountability. We will demonstrate that absent second-order moral norms, cases usually used in support of non-moral accountability do no longer evoke the intuition that the agents in them merit accountability responses. This poses a challenge to the proponents of non-moral accountability: it seems that the best explanation for why some non-moral achievements or failures merit accountability responses while others do not is that the ones that do are also moral achievements or failures. Thus, we aim to shift the burden of proof to proponents of non-moral accountability. They will have to show what—if not implicit second-order moral norms—explains why we sometimes hold people accountable for failing or succeeding epistemically, athletically, or aesthetically.
September 26, 2024
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.
May 23, 2024
Sarah Protasi
On Courage
Courage is one of the cardinal virtues and was of paramount importance in ancient Greece and in other honor cultures. Yet, it is not nearly as investigated as wisdom or justice in today's philosophical discourse. Even in virtue ethics, most discussions of courage use it as a paradigmatic example of moral virtue but do not devote much time to a systematic understanding of its nature. Furthermore, when courage is investigated on its own, it's often from an armchair perspective. In this talk I start by reviewing some of the philosophical literature on courage and then I put it in conversation with current empirical work. I argue that both literatures converge on the existence of three types of courage: physical, moral and psychological. I delineate these three types and suggest that in all of them sociality plays a role that has so far been underestimated. I end by discussing some future avenues of research, most notably the central role of both courage and fear in ethics.
May 16, 2024
Christiana Werner
Navigating Empathy: A Simulation-based Exploration of Judgments on the Appropriateness of Other’s Emotions
In debates on social cognition, simulation is often regarded not only as a tool for predicting the actions and behaviours of others but also as a means of gaining insight into their perspectives. In certain instances, a person my report their emotions to the simulator. As a result of simulating being in the speaker’s situation, the simulator may develop the belief that they would have exhibited different emotional reactions than those disclosed. The simulator might additionally believe that their simulated response would be appropriate, prompting the formation of a belief that the reported emotions were, in turn, inappropriate. We know that factors such as personality traits and a person's social background have an influence on how one reacts emotionally. Hence, there is something highly problematic about the idea of taking a simulated emotional reaction as the (only) appropriate response. The paper delves into the consequences of such normative beliefs regarding another person's emotions in the context of affective and epistemic injustice.
May 2, 2024
Patrik Engisch
The Naturefactual
Philosophers usually distinguish between three kinds of objects (natural, artificial, and artifactual ones), and are happy to leave it at that. But folk ontology often attempts to distinguish further between two kinds of artifacts, non-natural and natural ones. Standard examples supporting this distinction include things like natural food, natural wine, or natural gardens. This aspect of folk ontology is often dismissed as a simple category mistake: an object cannot be both an artifact and a natural object. In this paper, I argue that this dismissal misses the point. The idea of natural artifacts is not to be conceived in terms of some objects falling under two (admittedly incompatible) kinds: artifacts and natural objects. Rather, they should be conceived in terms of a subset of artifacts that possess a substantial property of naturalness. In other words, they should be conceived as what I call “Naturefactual Objects”. Why does this matter? I will argue that we must recognize the existence of the naturefactual because it constitutes a distinct and substantial appreciative kind that value theorists have so far ignored.
April 25, 2024
Sebastian Aeschbach
Hierarchical Organization of Values: Philosophical Premises and Empirical Hypotheses
The presentation will list and discuss the philosophical premises of the idea that human values are organized hierarchically, a concept deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition of realist phenomenology as espoused by Scheler, Hartman, and others. We address the fundamental question of whether values exhibit a structured hierarchy as revealed in individual and collective behaviour. The philosophical underpinnings suggest that values are not arbitrary but are arranged in a manner that reflects their relative importance to the individual and society. To empirically examine this theoretical framework, we propose six hypotheses aimed at understanding the relationship between value hierarchies and emotional responses. These include: (H1) the consistency of value hierarchies within cultural or social groups; (H2) the specific emotional reactions triggered by value violations; (H3) the intensity of emotional responses correlating with the importance of violated values; (H4) the social and collective nature of moral emotions in response to value violations; (H5) the reflection of value hierarchies in normative language; and (H6) the modulation of perceived appropriateness of emotional responses by the hierarchical standing of violated values. This research bridges the gap between philosophical inquiry and psychological empirical methods, providing a comprehensive examination of how human emotional and moral responses are ingrained with value hierarchies.
April 18, 2024
Andrea Rivadullo Duró
You Can Get Some: Satisfaction! Imagination, Symbolic Action, and Symbolic Satisfaction.
Symbolic actions appear in the analytic literature as counterexamples to the Humean model of action rationalization, in which all actions are explained by a desire and a means-to-end belief. Symbolic actions, which tend to involve inanimate objects, are apparently done for no further end. To provide a satisfactory explanation of symbolic actions, authors have appealed to emotions (Hursthouse, 1991; Smith, 1998), imaginings (Goldie, 2000), and redirected responses in the animal realm (Kovach & De Lancey, 2005; Scarantino & Nielsen, 2016). In this paper, I argue that these accounts are unsatisfactory and provide a novel account. My account combines Goldie’s appeal to the imagination with Scarantino and Nielsen's appeal to displaced action tendencies. Symbolic actions are symbolically displaced imaginings. At their core, these actions carry frustration concerning the impossibility of acting in the grips of an emotion. In performing them, two phenomena occur synchronically. First, thwarted action tendencies are displaced in a non-arbitrary way and released. Second, while displacing such action tendencies, the subject imagines she is performing the denied action. The release of these tendencies on an object symbolically related to the object that causes the emotion provides a sui generis, symbolic satisfaction.
April 11, 2024
Nils-Hennes Stear
Authentic Games
Our intense emotional investment in many competitive games - from sporting fixtures to impromptu games of Monopoly - is puzzling. We often find ourselves emotionally invested in them despite our awareness that they don't matter very much if at all. In 2017, I dubbed this the 'puzzle of sport'. One solution to this puzzle is to model our emotional engagement with competitive games on our emotional engagement with fictions or games of make-believe. I have criticized this approach. Among the criticisms is that the make-believe account leaves what I call 'authenticity' unexplained: roughly, why our investment depends on players really trying. This criticism has since itself been criticized. In this paper I take a closer look at this criticism, at authenticity, and at how they bear on the puzzle of sport.
March 21, 2024
Miloud Belkoniene
Moral Intuitionism: Between Reasons and Inclinations
This paper examines moral intuitionism as formulated by Tropman. In Tropman’s view, moral intuitionism is best construed as the claim that some moral beliefs can be justified without being based on reasons. While this construal of the view has several advantages, it raises an important question: how can a subject be doxastically justified in believing a moral proposition without that belief being based on reasons? I argue that a plausible answer can be provided in light of a specific conception of the bases of intuitively justified beliefs. Such beliefs result from doxastic inclinations and because those inclinations can, depending on the circumstances, explanatorily cohere with the support provided to their object by reasons, beliefs that result from those inclinations can be justified.
March 14, 2024
Hichem Naar
The Puzzle of Emotional Reasons-Responsiveness
The idea that emotions display genuine responsivity to reasons is commonplace in contemporary philosophy of emotion. Emotions, according to this common thought, are – like belief – responses one can acquire and regulate on the basis of reasons, rather than being merely caused in a non-rational way, in turn making the agent a suitable target of rational praise and criticism. Emotions thus can be justified or unjustified in a sense analogous to that of belief and action when they are based on adequate reasons. That emotions can be justified in this way has been taken by many philosophers as a piece of datum that any adequate theory should accommodate. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of a genuinely rational acquisition and regulation of emotions can be cast into doubt, in light of both the nature of reasons- responsiveness and the nature of emotions. The puzzle of emotional reasons-responsiveness, as I call it, asks us how emotions can count as rational (in the sense of reasons-responsive) given that in crucial respects they look like arational mental entities. I discuss possible solutions and sketch my own. I argue that to secure the idea of emotional reasons-responsiveness while accommodating the apparent arationality of some emotions, we should attend to the various ways we can relate to emotions, in particular the question of the source of our emotions in our minds.
March 7, 2024
Stacie Friend
Emotional Engagement
Fictional characters do not exist; fictional events have not occurred. So why do we care about fictional characters and what happens to them? Why do we sympathize with Elizabeth Bennet as she seeks happiness (in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), pity the slave Cora as she suffers savage abuse (in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad), condemn Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna (in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), or admire Anjum for her resilience (in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness)? Why do we fear for Ellen Ripley (in Ridley Scott’s Alien) or hope that Ada will find love (in Jane Campion’s The Piano)? Philosophical debate about emotional responses to fiction have focused on two issues. The first is descriptive: What is the nature of emotions toward fictional characters and situations? Specifically, do these responses differ in kind from emotions in other contexts? The second is normative: Is there something irrational or otherwise inappropriate in responding emotionally to what does not exist? Or are emotions toward fiction governed by different norms than emotions in other contexts?
Standard approaches to these questions fail to recognize the role played by truths, including truths about existence and nonexistence, in our emotional engagement with fiction. Once we grasp this role, we will see that emotions in different contexts differ from each other to various degrees along multiple dimensions—not because they are (or are not) responses to fiction or fictional characters, but because they turn on facts about the real world in different respects.
March 28, 2024
Stéphane Lemaire
Intrinsic Norms for Emotions and the Internalist Condition
Terms such as admirable, amusing or disgusting refer to affective values that should plausibly be analyzed along a buck-passing of fitting attitude analysis account. Briefly put, the suggestion is that an object is admirable if and only if and because there are reasons, or it is fitting, to admire it. However, the former account faces the wrong kind of reason problem and the latter a very similar one. One main strategy to overcome the problem is to claim that pragmatic considerations such as incentives cannot be reasons for emotions. To justify the claim, one often appeals to an internalist constraint. Roughly, the general idea is that a consideration cannot be a reason to have an emotion if one cannot react to this consideration by having the emotion. In the present paper, I show that the internalist criterion, however it is formulated, fails with regard to emotions, at least insofar as it is supposed to exclude pragmatic considerations. Moreover, I show that, given that most emotions are learned, the internalist constraint on reasons as it has been formulated lacks justification. Starting from these elements, I offer a very different and novel internalist constraint on reasons for emotions. However, if it is correct, then reason for emotion must be pragmatic though not all pragmatic considerations will be reasons. I conclude that philosophers attracted by a BPA of FAA should either give up on the internalist criterion or revise it seriously and hence change what they take as the reasons to have emotions, and thus the direction in which a BPA or FAA should be envisaged.
February 29, 2024
András Szigeti
Focusing Forgiveness
This paper aims to forge a link among the topics of forgiveness, moral responsibility, Strawsonian reactive attitudes, and the philosophy of emotions. I argue that forgiveness has an important affective component, and more specifically, that forgiveness is the positively-valenced counterpart of resentment.