: This paper addresses the significance of William James's theory of emotion in contemporary emotion theory. While many of James's detractors have pointed to the problems with his definition of emotion, the bearing his theory of emotion generation would have on modern approaches in psychology suggests a different point of view.

Philosophers who discuss the emotions have usually treated amusement as a non-emotional mental state. Two prominent philosophers making this claim are Henri Bergson and John Morreall, who maintain that amusement is too abstract and intellectual to qualify as an emotion. Here, the merit of this claim is assessed. Through recent work in neuroanatomy there is reason to doubt the legitimacy of dichotomies that separate emotion and the intellect. Findings suggest that the neuroanatomical structure of amusement is similar to other commonly (...) recognized emotion states. On the basis of these it is argued that amusement should be considered an emotion. (shrink)

Attempts to explain emotional responses to fiction such as Jenefer Robinson's use of research into the psychology of emotions. Robinson argues that triggers for emotion are much the same way whether a stimulant is real or imaginary. This does not explain the influence of our foreknowledge and continuing judgments during emotional episodes. We know beforehand and all along that the people and events we respond to in fiction are not real. Robinson's difficulty comes from her dependence on an input-output model (...) of the emotions. Research on mental processing improves on this by revealing a relationship between at least two types of processes: data-driven processing and hypothesis-driven processing (otherwise known as schema processing). It is this relationship that accounts for the emotional response to fiction. (shrink)

In light of the variety of uses of the term autonomy in recent bioethics literature, in this paper, I suggest that competence, not being as contested, is better placed to play the anti-paternalistic role currently assigned to autonomy. The demonstration of competence, I will argue, can provide individuals with robust spheres of non-interference in which they can pursue their lives in accordance with their own values. This protection from paternalism is achieved by granting individuals rights to non-interference upon demonstration of (...) competence. In this paper, I present a risk-sensitive account of competence as a means of grounding rights to non-interference. On a risk-sensitive account of competence individuals demonstrate their competence by exercising three capacities to the extent necessary to meet a threshold determined by the riskiness of the decision. These three capacities are the capacity to acquire knowledge, use instrumental rationality, and form and revise a life plan. (shrink)

In _Pharmaceutical Freedom_ Professor Flanigan argues we ought to grant people self-medication rights for the same reasons we respect people’s right to give (or refuse to give) informed consent to treatment. Despite being the most comprehensive argument in favour of self-medication written to date, Flanigan’s _Pharmaceutical Freedom_ leaves a number of questions unanswered, making it unclear how the safe-guards Flanigan incorporates to protect people from harming themselves would work in practice. In this paper, I extend Professor Flanigan’s account by discussing (...) a hypothetical case to illustrate how these safe-guards could work together to protect people from harms caused by their own ignorance or incompetence. (shrink)

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“Racial Justice Requires Ending the War on Drugs” is an impressively well evidenced argument for the need for drug reform. The authors outline how the war on drugs caus...