Aristotle tells us that in order to develop virtue, one needs to come to love and hate the right sorts of things. However, his description of the virtuous person clearly privileges love to hate. It is love rather than hate that is the main driving force of a good life. It is because of her love of knowledge, truth and beauty that the virtuous person organizes her life in a certain way and pursues these rather than other things (such as (...) pleasure). When hate comes into the picture, it is merely an unavoidable consequence of loving those noble and beautiful things. The virtuous person hates things that are contrary to her values, but does not concentrate on them, much less constructs her life in the pursuit of their destruction. But why privilege love over hate in this way? Why could not a good (happy) and virtuous life be a life driven primarily by hate (in particular, one aimed at eradicating what one (correctly) considers shameful and evil)? Without appealing to any consequences or harmful effects that hate might have on other People, the paper gives two answers to this question. First, allowing hate (rather than love) to dominate one’s life would undermine the right relationship between the two parts of the soul (the rational and the non-rational one) that Aristotle recognizes. Virtue involves establishing the right kind of internal ordering of one’s soul and this cannot be done if one’s soul is dominated by hate. Second, hate has negative cognitive effects insofar as it renders one insensitive to the beauty of human nature and behavior and actively precludes one from acquiring knowledge and understanding. Accordingly, if a good life is a life that involves virtue and knowledge, a life fueled by hate cannot but fall short of that ideal. (shrink)

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

The main aim of my thesis is to ascertain whether empathy has the required qualities of an emotion. Disagreement is rife regarding the process leading to the arousal of an emotion, which creates uncertainty as to what exactly an emotion is, and how it appears. This is the first issue I tackle in my work, as I concentrate on examining some of the significant cognitive and feeling theories of emotions. My study of these theories outlines their downsides, and I instead (...) propose to retain a hybrid definition that combines the advantages of both families of theories to provide a balanced approach that recognises the importance of both physical changes and cognitions. The focus of my work then moves specifically onto empathy, with the intention of precisely defining this term too, its functioning, as well as the meaning of the expression ‘feeling empathy for someone’. The existing literature on empathy fails to provide a clear understanding of empathy’s classification as an emotion or a skill. My work is original in that I avoid assertions and clearly establish that empathy constitutes an emotion based on the definition of emotion I advance in the first part of my work. (shrink)

I argue that Plato, in theTimaeus, draws deep theoretical distinctions between sensation and affect, which comprises pleasure, pain, desire and emotion. Sensation (but not affect) is both ‘fine-grained’ (having orderly causal connections with its fundamental explanatory items) and ‘immediate’ (being provoked absent any mediating psychological state). Emotions, by contrast, are mediated and coarse-grained. Pleasure and pain are coarse-grained but, in a range of important cases, immediate. TheTheaetetusassimilates affect to sensation in a way theTimaeusdoes not. Smell frustrates Timaeus because it is (...) coarse-grained, although unlike pleasure and pain it is so by accident of physiology. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses the possibility of moral enhancement with ambient intelligence technologies and artificial intelligence presented in Savulescu and Maslen (2015). The main problem with their proposal is that it is not robust enough to play a normative role in users’ behavior. A more promising approach, and the one presented in the paper, relies on an artifi-cial moral reasoning engine, which is designed to present its users with moral arguments grounded in first-order normative theories, such as Kantianism or utilitarianism, (...) that reason-responsive people can be persuaded by. This proposal can play a normative role and it is also a more promising avenue towards moral enhancement. It is more promising because such a system can be designed to take advantage of the sometimes undue trust that people put in automated technologies. We could therefore expect a well-designed moral reasoner system to be able to persuade people that may not be persuaded by similar arguments from other people. So, all things considered, there is hope in artificial intelli-gence for moral enhancement, but not in artificial intelligence that relies solely on ambient intelligence technologies. (shrink)

Aunque las emociones se encuentran en el núcleo de quienes somos, su naturaleza y estructura continúa siendo hoy en día un amplio campo de investigación para diferentes disciplinas científicas. No obstante, como muchos otros temas de investigación actual, las emociones tienen unos antecedentes, una historia que conviene tener presente para ubicar los conceptos, los debates y las diversas aproximaciones teóricas en el marco cultural y las tradiciones de pensamiento que les dieron origen. En este artículo, realizaremos un breve recorrido por (...) la historia de las emociones en la época antigua de tal manera que el lector pueda reconocer, a grandes rasgos, las interpretaciones y posturas originales que desencadenaron diversas comprensiones teóricas en torno a estos fenómenos físicos y mentales que conforman nuestra existencia. (shrink)

Theories of deliberative democracy have faced the charge of leading to the unjust exclusion of voices from public deliberation. The recent rhetorical turn in deliberative theory aims to respond to this charge. I distinguish between two variants of this response: the supplementing approach and the systemic approach. On the supplementing approach, rhetorical modes of political speech may legitimately supplement the deliberative process, for the sake of those excluded from the latter. On the systemic approach, rhetorical modes of political speech are (...) legitimate within public deliberation, just so long as they result in net benefits to the deliberative system. I argue that neither of these two approaches adequately meets the unjust exclusion charge. Whereas the supplementing approach does not go far enough to incorporate rhetorical speech into public deliberation, the systemic approach goes too far by legitimising forms of rhetoric that risk only exacerbating the problem of unjust exclusion. More constructively, I draw on Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric, as an art that is a counterpart to dialectic, to argue for a constitutive approach to rhetoric. I show how this approach provides a more expansive notion of deliberation that remains normatively orientated. (shrink)

The core sense of pistis as understood in Posterior Analytics, De Anima, and the Rhetoric is not that of a logical relation in which cognitively grasped propositions stand in respect to one another, but the result of an act of socially embedded interpersonal communication, a willing acceptance of guidance offered in respect to action. Even when pistis seems to have an exclusively epistemological sense, this focal meaning of pistis is implicit; to have pistis in a proposition is to willingly accept (...) that proposition as a basis for some kind of activity (albeit possibly theoretical) as a result of some kind of communicative act. This is in accordance with Aristotle’s understanding of argumentation as a social practice, entered into in order lead others to certain actions, for certain ends. Understanding pistis in this way allows us to understand how it is that pistis admits of quantitative variation. (shrink)

Résumé Lors d’un procès, les questions introductives en début d’interrogatoire peuvent aider non seulement à mettre le témoin à l’aise, mais également à le personnaliser, c’est-à-dire de le présenter sous un jour particulier, ce qui peut jouer sur sa crédibilité et l’empathie du décideur à son endroit. Cet article vise à mettre en évidence les mécanismes discursifs sous-jacents à ce processus et à illustrer empiriquement comment les réponses aux questions introductives y participent. À l’aide de l’approche ventriloque de la communication, (...) un extrait du témoignage d’un ex-maire de la ville de Montréal à la Commission Charbonneau est analysé en profondeur. L’analyse que nous proposons contribue à mieux comprendre ce qui se joue lors d’un témoignage, celui-ci devenant, selon notre perspective, ce lieu constamment disloqué dans lequel plusieurs figures se mettent à littéralement faire des choses et dire des choses afin qu’un témoin gagne ou perde la faveur du décideur. (shrink)