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.
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.
October 10, 2024
Gregory Currie (York)
TBA
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 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 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.
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.
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 21, 2024
Francesca D’Alessandris (Geneva)
TBA
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.
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 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?