Arguing first that the best way to understand what a continuant is is as something that primarily has its properties at a time rather than atemporally, the paper then defends the idea that there are occurrent continuants. These are things that were, are, or will be happening—like the ongoing process of someone reading or my writing this paper, for instance. A recently popular philosophical view of process is as something that is referred to with mass nouns and not count nouns. (...) This has mistakenly encouraged the view that the only way to think of process is as the stuff of events, and has obscured the possibility of thinking of processes as individual continuants. (shrink)

Rowland Stout presents a new philosophical account of human action which is radically and controversially different from all rival theories. He argues that intentional actions are unique among natural phenomena in that they happen because they should happen, and that they are to be explained in terms of objective facts rather than beliefs and intentions.

Starting from the assumption that one can literally perceive someone's anger in their face, I argue that this would not be possible if what is perceived is a static facial signature of their anger. There is a product–process distinction in talk of facial expression, and I argue that one can see anger in someone's facial expression only if this is understood to be a process rather than a product.

A natural picture to have of events and processes is of entities which extend through time and which have temporal parts, just as physical objects extend through space and have spatial parts. While accepting this picture of events, in this paper I want to present an alternative conception of processes as entities which, like physical objects, do not extend in time and do not have temporal parts, but rather persist in time. Processes and events belong to metaphysically distinct categories. Moreover (...) the category of events is not the more basic of the two. (shrink)

The traditional focus of debate in philosophy of action has been the causal theory of action and metaphysical questions about the nature of actions as events. In this lucid and lively introduction to philosophy of action, Rowland Stout shows how these issues are subsidiary to more central ones that concern the freedom of the will, practical rationality and moral psychology. When seen in these terms, agency becomes one of the most exciting areas in philosophy and one of the most useful (...) ways into the philosophy of mind. If one can understand what it is to be a free and rational agent, then one is some way to understanding what it is to be a conscious subject of experience. Although the book places the traditional Davidsonian agenda centre stage, it locates it historically by considering in particular Aristotle and Kant. It also takes the debate beyond Davidson by considering one of the most recent issues of interest in the philosophy of action, externalism. By focusing on the central issues of freedom and rationality as well as on the ontological structure of human action, Stout is able to offer readers a fresh and engaging treatment. (shrink)

Process, Action, and Experience offers a radical new approach to the philosophy of mind and action, taking processes to be the central subject matter. An international team of contributors consider what kinds of things processes are, and explore the progressive nature of action and conscious experience.

What someone’s behaviour must be like if we are to be aware of their emotions in it Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s11097-011-9224-0 Authors Rowland Stout, School of Philosophy, UCD Dublin, Dublin 4, Republic of Ireland Journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Online ISSN 1572-8676 Print ISSN 1568-7759.

The judgement that provides the content of intention and coincides with the conclusion of practical reasoning is a normative judgement about what to do, and not, as Anscombe and McDowell argue, a factual judgement about what one is doing. Treating the conclusion of practical reasoning as expressing a recommendation rather than a verdict undermines McDowell’s argument; the special nature of practical reasoning does not preclude its conclusions being normative. Anscombe’s and McDowell’s claim that practical self-knowledge is productive of action may (...) be accommodated by identifying the content of practical knowledge not with the conclusion but with a premise of practical reasoning – a kind of practical reasoning that occurs within rather than before action. (shrink)

A significant argument for the claim that knowing-wh is knowing-that, implicit in much of the literature, including Stanley and Williamson (2001), is spelt out and challenged. The argument includes the assumption that a subject's state of knowing-wh is constituted by their involvement in a relation with an answer to a question. And it involves the assumption that answers to questions are propositions or facts. One of Lawrence Powers' counterexamples to the conjunction of these two assumptions is developed, responses to it (...) are rebutted, and the possibility of rejecting the second rather than the first of these assumptions is explored briefly. (shrink)

Generosity is not the same thing as kindness or self-sacrifice. Presumptuousness is incompatible with generosity, but not with kindness or self-sacrifice. I consider a kind but interfering neighbour who inappropriately takes over the role of mother to my daughter; her behaviour is not generous. Presumptuousness is the improper exercise of a disposition to adopt a role that one does not have. With this in mind I explore the idea that generosity is the proper exercise of the disposition to adopt a (...) role that one does not have. It is a mean between meanness on the one hand (where that disposition is not exercised when it should be) and presumptuousness on the other hand (where that disposition is exercised when it should not be). Adopting a role is being motivated by the considerations that should motivate someone who actually has that role. The disposition to adopt roles you do not have is important in social situations where there is a need for a role that nobody is filling. It is also the basis of developing relationships like friendship; you have to act as if you are a friend before you become a friend. This model fits the parable of the Good Samaritan in an obvious way. It also explains charity and forgiveness. I suggest that forgiveness is demanded by a certain relationship – call it love. What makes forgiveness optional after someone has wronged you is that love itself may be optional after someone has wronged you. There is nothing generous about forgiving someone you love, though loving them may be generous. Forgiveness only counts as generous when you don’t love the person, and even then it can fail to be generous if it is presumptuous. (shrink)

The paper defends a version of the perceptual account of bodily feelings, according to which having a feeling is feeling something about one’s body. But it rejects the idea, familiar in the work of William James, that what one feels when one has a feeling is something biological about one’s body. Instead it argues that to have a bodily feeling is to feel an apparent bodily indication of something – a bodily appearance. Being aware of what one’s body is apparently (...) indicating to one is being aware of something about one’s body, but the focus of attention is on what is apparently being indicated, which is not something about one’s body. This is one way of making sense of the idea in contemporary phenomenology that the body is conspicuous in feelings that do not take the body as an object of awareness. Bodily inclinations are apparent indications of what one is going to do, and it is argued that feeling one’s bodily inclinations constitutes an important class of bodily feelings – e.g. feeling like crying or feeling like being sick. Such inclinations are often felt through a process of resisting them. Bodily inclinations also have some intentionality, albeit quite limited, and this goes some way towards explaining Peter Goldie’s concept of feelings towards. (shrink)

An influential philosophical conception of our mind’s place in the world is as a site for the states and events that causally mediate the world we perceive and the world we affect. According to this conception, states and events in the world cause mental states and events in us through the process of perception. These mental states and events then go on to produce new states and events in the world through the process of action. Our role is as hosts (...) for these states and events that causally mediate the states and events on the input side and those on the output side. (shrink)

Practical reasons figure in both the justification and the causal explanation of action. It is usually assumed that the agent’s state of believing rather than what they believe must figure in the causal explanation of action. But, that the agent believes something is not a reason in the sense of being part of the justification of what they do. So it is often concluded that the justifying reason is a different sort of thing from the causally motivating reason. But this (...) means that in a causal process of acting the justifying reasons have done their work by the time the agent has the appropriate beliefs and desires. Transforming these into behaviour is not guided by reason. This conception of action in which there is no role for reason in the part of the process where anything actually gets done is not acceptable. So the original assumption that beliefs rather than the believed facts figure in the casual explanation of action should be challenged. (shrink)

Despite being somewhat long in the tooth at the time, Aristotle, Hume and Kant were still dominating twentieth century moral philosophy. Much of the progress made in that century came from a detailed working through of each of their approaches by the expanding and increasingly professionalized corps of academic philosophers. And this progress can be measured not just by the quality and sophistication of moral philosophy at the end of that century, but also by the narrowing of some of the (...) gaps between Aristotelian, Humean and Kantian philosophers. (shrink)

Arguing against the claim that beliefs are reasons for action.

I argue that while every betrayal is a breach of trust, not every breach of trust is a betrayal. I defend a conception of trust as primarily a feature of behaviour (i.e. trusting behaviour) and only secondarily a feature of a mental attitude. So it is possible to have the attitude of distrust towards someone while still trusting them in the way you behave. This makes sense of the possibility of Judas Iscariot breaching Jesus’ trust, and so betraying him, even (...) though Jesus presumably knew that Judas would do just that. This conception of trust may be spelt out in terms of making oneself reliant on somebody in a collaboration with them. Such collaborations include relationships like friendships and love affairs, as well as political activities or defending one’s country against aggression. I argue that only when these collaborations involve a commitment to loyalty is a breach of trust a betrayal. And loyalty is a feature of those collaborations or relationships that exclude others – us/them collaborations. (shrink)

I argue against the claim that the fundamental form of trust is a 2-place relation of A trusting B and in favour of the fundamental form being a 4-place relation of A, by ψ-ing, trusting B to φ. I characterize trusting behaviour as behaviour that knowingly makes one reliant on someone doing what they are supposed to do in the collaborative enterprise that the trusting behaviour belongs to. I explain how trust is involved in the following collaborative enterprises: knowledge transfer (...) – i.e. telling someone something; maintaining a relationship; and passing responsibility for an action on to someone else. And I finish by showing how our talk of trust in non-collaborative contexts – e.g. trusting a branch to support one’s weight – may be explained by reference to the central sort of collaborative trust. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the metaphysics of emotion. It defends the claim that all emotional states, whether dormant or active, are dispositional, arguing against the prevailing view that dispositional emotional states are dispositions to go into actual emotional states. A clear distinction may be made between first-order and second-order emotional dispositions, where second-order emotional dispositions are dispositions of emotional sensitivity and first-order emotional dispositions are the emotional states themselves. Active emotional states are treated as dispositional emotional states in the (...) process of being manifested, not as different states altogether. Describing active states as occurrent states is misleading as it suggests an exclusive distinction between active/occurrent and dispositional, which is what is being questioned. The idea that dispositional states have no subjectivity is challenged, as is the argument that being flooded with a feeling as a result of an encounter with a frightening or aggravating situation cannot be the manifestation of a disposition. (shrink)

In chapter 14 of Zahavi’s recent book, Self and Other, the notion of shame is discussed. In feeling shame one experiences oneself as experienced by others. For Sartre, that experience in itself is sufficient for shame, as one experiences oneself as determined in the experience of others and hence as shamefully not self-determining. But Zahavi introduces an extra condition for shame, which is a ‘global decrease in self-esteem’. This paper questions the need for this condition and argues that seeing oneself (...) as shameful in the eyes of others needs to be spelt out in a pragmatist way in terms of certain shame-involving practices rather than in a purely phenomenological way. (shrink)

in O’Rourke, F. (ed.), Human Destinies (Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).

The central claim of philosophical behaviourism is this: what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way. Most philosophers think that this claim is obviously false. They also think it is offensive. They think it is offensive because it appears to reduce or eliminate what is most valuable to us – our minds. It puts the notion of behaviour in the place of mind, and so removes what distinguishes (...) us from automata. B. F. Skinner, one of the most famous (notorious) behaviourists, thought that behaviourism was a tool for social control, albeit a very liberal sort of control. He thought that by understanding how to condition people’s behaviour we would know how to achieve a better society. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA concept of empathy as openness to the emotional perspective of another is developed in opposition to a concept of sympathy as agreement with the emotional perspective of another. Empathy involves knowledge of how things are emotionally for the other person, which is not the same thing as knowledge of the other person’s emotions. Being open to another perspective requires the capacity to hold two perspectives in mind simultaneously – one that is one’s own perspective and at the same time (...) the adopted perspective. This is why empathy can be so challenging for someone suffering from some kinds of anxiety. (shrink)

The purely theoretical notion of fitness or optimality that is employed for instance in optimization theory has come under attack from those who think that only a more historically based notion of fitness could have a central role in evolutionary explanation. They argue that the key notion is proven usefulness rather than theoretical usefulness. This paper articulates a notion of theoretical usefulness and defends its role in functional evolutionary explanations.

I argue that while every betrayal is a breach of trust, not every breach of trust is a betrayal. I defend a conception of trust as primarily a feature of behaviour (i.e. trusting behaviour) and only secondarily a feature of a mental attitude. So it is possible to have the attitude of distrust towards someone while still trusting them in the way you behave. This makes sense of the possibility of Judas Iscariot breaching Jesus’ trust, and so betraying him, even (...) though Jesus presumably knew that Judas would do just that. This conception of trust may be spelt out in terms of making oneself reliant on somebody in a collaboration with them. Such collaborations include relationships like friendships and love affairs, as well as political activities or defending one’s country against aggression. I argue that only when these collaborations involve a commitment to loyalty is a breach of trust a betrayal. And loyalty is a feature of those collaborations or relationships that exclude others – us/them collaborations. (shrink)

[1] In chapter 2 of _The Concept of Mind_, “Knowing How and Knowing That”, and especially in the section on “Understanding and Misunderstanding”, Ryle rejects two approaches to the question of the interpretation of other minds that correspond quite closely with what are now called functionalism, or theory theory, and simulation theory. There is a painful irony here that the functionalist approach to the philosophy of mind, which developed in the late 60s and 70s, has widely been regarded as completely (...) superseding Ryle’s own approach. (shrink)

The book is an extended argument against neuralism (or against a sort of argument for neuralism), where neuralism is understood to be the identification of mental events with neurophysiological events. So an event of a trying is not supposed to be inner in the sense that a brain event is. And although Pietroski accepts Descartes metaphysical distinction between mental events and physical events, he does not need to extend this to the thought that mental events occupy a special mental realm. (...) So there seems to be no underlying theoretical motivation for denying the natural thought that tryings are usually ‘out there’ in.. (shrink)