Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers' intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers' intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or epistemic conditions are more likely to resemble those of the (...) philosopher. We end by showing how our experimental findings can help us better understand the Knobe Effect. (shrink)

I argue that emotions are not only rational in-themselves, strictly speaking, but they are also instrumentally rational, epistemically rational, and evaluatively rational. I begin with a discussion of what it means for emotions to be rational or irrational in-themselves, which includes the derivation of a criterion for the ontological rationality of emotions (CORe): For emotion or an emotion there exists some normative standard that is given by what emotion or an emotion is against which our emotional responses can be judged (...) or evaluated in virtue of the fact that our emotions manifest our rationality. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this account. (shrink)

In this paper, I give readers an idea of what some scholars are interested in, what I found interesting, and what may be of future interest in the philosophy of emotion. I begin with a brief overview of the general topics of interests in the philosophy of emotion. I then discuss what I believe to be some of the most interesting topics in the contemporary discourse, including questions about how philosophy can inform the science of emotion, responses to aspects of (...) the mind–body problem, and concerns about perception, cognition, and emotion, along with questions about the place of 4E approaches and meta-semantic pluralist(e) approaches in the embodied cognitive tradition. I also discuss the natural kind–social construction debate in the philosophy of emotion, the emerging field of cultural evolution, the import of a dual-inheritance theory in this emerging field, and I propose a possible way to integrate the frameworks of dual-inheritance theory and meta-semantic pluralism(e) to demonstrate at least one way in which the philosophy of emotion can contribute to the emerging field of cultural evolution. I conclude with a brief summary of this paper and note at least one significant implication of my proposal for the natural kind–social construction debate in the philosophy of emotion. (shrink)

Cecilea discusses with Shelley Tremain her experience as a first-generation U.S. citizen and first-generation university graduate; why she was motivated to study philosophy and become a professional philosopher; the launching of the new, open access, online journal, the Journal of Philosophy of Emotions (JPE); the “mismatch” between what she seemed like “on paper” and what she is is capable of; how societal, institutional, professional, and philosophical practices and policies must be adjusted to enable others like her to flourish as professional (...) philosophers; and any resources—such as articles, books, and videos—that she would like to recommend on the topics and issues that she has addressed in this interview. (shrink)