The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

Some experimental results in science are productively surprising or beautiful. Such results are disruptive in their epistemic nature: by violating epistemic expectations they mark the phenomenon at hand as worthy of further investigation. Could it be that there are emotions beyond these two which are also useful for the epistemic evaluation of scientific experiments? Here, I conduct a structured sociological survey to explore affective experiences in scientific experimental research. I identify that learning the results of an experiment is the high (...) emotional point in the experimenting process. Thus, experimental results can be challenging, beautiful, or boring, and they can worry, amuse, make one sad, and so on. They can also drive meta-cognitive evaluations as well as motivate specific research-related actions. From this, I advance two claims: that emotions beyond surprise and disruptive beauty are epistemically useful in empirical research, and that emotions help to overcome specific challenges of reasoning about new experimental results. (shrink)

In the so-called “erotic dialogues”, especially the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato explained why erotic desire can play an epistemic function, establishing a strong connection between erotic desire and beauty, “the most clearly visible and the most loved” among the Ideas. Taking the erotic dialogues as a background, in this paper I elucidate Plato’s explanation in another context, the one of the Phaedo, for discussing the epistemic function of erotic desire in relation to the deficiency argument and the affinity argument. (...) My claim is that the erotic desire of the philosopher is activated by the recognition of traces of the Ideas as something that the material world lacks and that, nevertheless, his soul is familiar with. This desire for the Ideas triggers the process of recollection, and thus erotic desire acquires a decisive role in the acquisition of knowledge in the Phaedo. In the final section of the paper, I highlight the contemporary relevance of Plato’s epistemology of erotic desire. (shrink)

This paper explores the intersection between affect, emotion, social imaginaries, and institutions through the lens of epistemic power in the academy. It argues that attending to this intersection is critical for a fuller understanding of how affective and emotional dynamics can assist to entrench, but also disrupt, asymmetries of epistemic privilege that cut across lines of race, sex, and other markers of social difference. As part of this discussion the paper reflects on the possibility of intervening in dominant social imaginaries (...) that become sedimented in the routine operations of the modern university, and which produce affective ecologies that sustain epistemic exclusions within academic institutions. (shrink)