Reasons and Emotions

This conference looks afresh at these assumptions in the context of what is involved in explaining actions in terms of reasons and what role emotions can and should play in acts of reasoning involved in giving accounts of ourselves. Contributions will explore such questions as: Is reasoning best understood as a capacity of individuals? Might our reasoning capacities have an inherently social function? How does, and how should, reason relate to emotions? Do emotions necessarily taint reasoning, or can they sometimes improve it? Do emotions enjoy their own kind of intelligence? How do our capacities to reason and feel emotions relate to our ability to understand and explain ourselves in terms of reasons? 

Program

2.15pm Welcome

2.30pm Rational Believers, Irrational Beliefs 
Carolina Flores (Rutgers University) 

What are beliefs? The traditional conception of belief as an attitude that is closely tied to rational inquiry is under pressure given that we in fact believe in pervasively irrational ways. I develop an account of belief that does justice to the role which beliefs play in epistemic interaction without limiting beliefs to highly rational epistemic agents. To do so, I employ a capacities-first approach: belief requires the capacity for evidence sensitivity. I argue that we must accept such a necessary condition on belief to make sense of our practices of trying to change each other’s minds by appeal to evidence and argument. At the same time, because the relevant capacities are fallible and may be masked by other (internal and external) factors, this account allows for beliefs to be routinely formed and held in epistemically sub-par ways. Further, these capacities come in degrees of sophistication, which both allows non-linguistic and cognitively less sophisticated agents to have beliefs and yields an attractive naturalistic picture in which beliefs gradually emerge from a ground of simpler capacities to respond to one’s environment.

3pm Emotion, reason, and skilful action
Dr Elena Walsh (University of Sydney) 

There is a growing consensus that emotional processes -- automatic, instinctive and unconscious -- form the basis of the judgments that feature in many of our practical reasoning processes, and can thereby lead to biases in reasoning. However, extant accounts have not yet considered the role of the developmental niche in moderating this function of emotion. In this talk I introduce a novel framework that explains how emotional dispositions develop in individuals using tools drawn from dynamical and developmental systems theory. Focusing on the case of anger, I use the framework to explain how a series of early experiences of abuse or hostility can lead an individual to experience anger habitually in later life. An interesting feature of the account I develop is that anger can initially function accurately (detecting and responding to genuinely hostile intent presenting in the external environment) and later function like an `over-calibrated' device, i.e., one that can be set off even in the absence of the initial set of triggering themes the emotion is designed to respond to. I close by suggesting that debate about whether and/or how emotions are intelligent depends crucially on an individual's life history. In particular, the ability of a particular individual's emotional disposition to lead to habitually skilful action in their current social and material environment depends much on the extent to which that environment matches their `training' environment (i.e., the environment they experienced in early life).

3.30pm coffee break

3.45pm The Habitual Basis of Empathy 
Katsunori Miyahara (University of Wollongong) 

Empathy is often considered as an emotional form of social understanding, where one understands another’s perspective in an engaged, non-theoretical manner. Many think of this in terms of mental simulation. However, this widespread view fails to explain the possibility of empathy with people with radically different backgrounds – which is often when the presence or absence of empathy matters most. I propose to explain the basis of empathy with radical others in non-simulation terms by drawing on John Dewey’s account of habits. Empathizing with radial others, I suggest, is an interactive process that leads to the constitution of a shared perspective; it requires an interrelated network of habits, including those often described as intellectual virtues.

4.15pm Suffering, Reason, and Compassion: Skepticism over Empathy in the Middle Ages
Juanita Feros Ruys (University of Sydney)

Recent scholarship (McNamer, 2010) aims to resituate the birth of a modern sense of empathy into the Middle Ages, particularly through the feeling and expression of compassion with the sufferings of Christ in religious art and ritual. But a counterpoint approach to suffering and empathy co-existed in the writings and philosophy of the medieval philosopher-theologians known as the Scholastics. These men, who took their intellectual inheritance from the Stoics of the ancient world (who extolled the virtue of apatheia—freedom from emotions), were skeptical of empathy for its emphasis on feeling over rational thought. Studying Scholastic approaches to the practice of almsgiving and the foundation myths of the Christian religion, including the fall of humans and the evil angels, we can see their concerns articulated. For the Scholastics, empathy (or in Medieval Latin, compassio) could derail rightful judgment and the course of moral action. There are those today in the fields of legal studies, moral philosophy, and anthropology who would agree.

Presenter biographies

Carolina Flores is a graduate student in philosophy at Rutgers, New Brunswick. She works primarily at the intersection of philosophy of mind and social epistemology. She is also an organizer for MAP (Minorities and Philosophy) International.

Dr Elena Walsh’s research focuses on how emotional dispositions are constructed in individuals over time. Her work takes a broadly naturalistic approach and draws on psychology, neuroscience, dynamical systems theory, and developmental systems theory. In the future, she hopes to apply this framework to understanding the developmental origins of health and disease phenotypes. Her other philosophical interests include predictive processing models of mind and Buddhist philosophy. Elena is currently acting as a sessional lecturer at the University of Sydney and as research administrator for the Theory and Method in Biosciences lab at the Charles Perkins Centre (directed by Paul Griffiths). She has previously worked in the government sector as a policy analyst, and as a researcher at the Australian Institute for Public Policy and Governance and the Practical Justice Initiative (University of New South Wales).

Dr Katsunori Miyahara is a post-doc researcher at School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong. His research examines the background significance of the body and the environment in perception, cognition, and action. He develops his philosophical thinking by drawing on various philosophical traditions, including phenomenology, pragmatism, embodied-enactive approaches to mind and cognition, and Japanese Zen Buddhism. His specific research topics include skill, habit, sociality, pain, and consciousness. His most recent paper is “Enactive pain and its sociocultural embeddedness” (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09630-9).

Dr Juanita Feros Ruys is a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre. She is also Director of the Sydney Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and Honours and Postgraduate Co-ordinator of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre. Juanita is undertaking a number of research projects within the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Her primary project is a study of the attribution of emotions to demons in the High Middle Ages, and associated with this is a study of the role of the European demonic in colonial responses to the Australian landscape. With director and documentary filmmaker Cassie Charlton, she is producing a documentary about this Australian experience.