I argue that interpreting our own values, cares, concerns, and other elements of our identities can significantly transform our evaluative, motivational, and affective lives. More specifically, I develop an empirically informed account of how applying lexical concepts to our evaluative-motivational perspectives (paradigmatically, in contexts of sincere, intimate dialogue) can reshape those very perspectives, often bringing them into closer alignment with the contents those concepts ascribe to them. In short, I show that self-interpretation is, in the usual case, a mode of self-formation. In fact, I argue, it is a particularly valuable mode of changing—and holding on to—who we are.
Discussions of style in analytic philosophy have been confined almost exclusively to aesthetics, yet many of our bodily actions seem to exhibit styles as well. We can have an aggressive or a placid style of driving; a sloppy or a meticulous style of washing the dishes; an idiomatic or a weird way of playing jazz. We often use the notion of style not just to catalog different behavioral patterns, but also to explain, predict, and excuse them. In this paper, I develop and defend a novel and substantive account of style, and I argue that all our habitual and skilled bodily actions are styled in this sense. The phenomenon of style turns out to far outstrip artistic performances and to constitute an important dimension of our agency. No theory of human action, then, can be considered comprehensive if it cannot account for action styles
People tend to think of our intellectual characters as at least partially malleable. We can become more – or less – virtuous or vicious epistemic agents. However, people also tend to think of characterological change as typically slow and incremental. I use recent empirical work on the effects of psychedelic experiences on personality to argue that such circumscribed experiences may be epistemically transformative, for better or worse. We have good, if tentative reasons to believe that psychedelics can alter their user's character traits in ways that may lead her to become a more (or less) virtuous epistemic agent after as little as one or two trips. This, in turn, means that even if psychedelics do not drastically alter our stock of, say, true or justified beliefs, they can still drastically change our epistemic standing. Since, plausibly, the value (or disvalue) of epistemic traits is not exhausted by their capacity to assist or hinder the attainment of the ends of inquiry, psychedelic experiences are epistemically valuable (or disvaluable) in ways hitherto little explored by philosophers of psychedelics.
Acts of self-ascribing values, reasons, cares, and concerns seem capable of altering their utterers' evaluative-motivational outlook. On the other hand, such self-ascriptions also appear to be constrained by the speaker’s preexisting emotional realities. How can self-ascriptions both be constrained by and change who we are? I resolve this puzzle by suggesting that articulating our cares can be a matter of specification, or determination. Certain self-ascriptions shape who we are by making our determinable affective dispositions into determinate modes of caring and valuing.
A large body of empirical research suggests that a person’s capacity to interpret, label, or articulate her own affective states in specific, fine-grained ways is closely connected to her ability to regulate them effectively. This paper develops a novel account of this connection between emotional interpretation and regulation. I consider and reject one potential explanation—the Knowledge Account—according to which interpretive acts primarily yield theoretical knowledge of our cares, values, and goals. On this view, such affective self-knowledge can then be used by the interpreter to adopt more effective strategies for coping with her emotions. I argue that the Knowledge Account is inadequate, and that the connection between emotional interpretation and regulation is better explained by the claim that many of our affects are impish: acts of interpreting, labeling, or articulating them can directly transform them. On my preferred Commitment Account, self-interpretation often involves making provisional commitments to care about certain things. These commissive acts causally shape affective states, rendering them better aligned with the content of the interpretation. In the usual case, talking about our emotions amounts to directly shaping our evaluative-motivational perspectives
Recently, several authors have attempted to rekindle a sense of appreciation for the self-opaque, inaccessible, sub-rational aspects of our minds. Here, I offer a novel contribution to this trend. I do so by responding to a worry that seems to plague accounts of self-knowledge that treat it as a form of agential achievement. As Russell forcefully argues (2024), such views are prone to construe self-opacity as pathological or defective. In reply to this concern—and inspired by Charles Taylor—I develop an agentialist account of self-knowledge that not only centers and celebrates our self-opacity; but that can help us further articulate its value and significance. On the agentialist, Taylorian account I recommend, our self-opacity guarantees that humans are profound.
What do we aim at when we engage in aesthetic discourse? Riggle has argued that such discourse aims to establish a form of community that is compatible with a strong divergence in community-members’ attitudes towards the object under consideration. In response, inspired by Cavell, Hansen and Adams suggest that when we discuss aesthetic matters, we hope that our attitudes will converge. I argue that Cavell himself can provide resources to reconsider this latter suggestion in favor of a strong communitarian view (in a sense, stronger than Riggle’s). On this reading, when discussing aesthetic matters, we do not hope for convergence, but attempt to reach a state in which participants actively shape each other’s experience. Aesthetic discourse, on my Cavellian view, aims at intimacy.
Narrativists hold that a life’s value for its subject partly consists in narrative-like relations among that life’s episodes. A dominant version of the view, progressivism, claims that such value depends on an ‘upward’ life trajectory, in which an agent’s earlier efforts enable later successes. Against progressivism, I argue that often, there is no fact of the matter about the direction of one’s life. Drawing on Martin Buber, I defend a non-progressivist narrativism. I argue that a life’s narrative unity may consist in the presence of motifs: recurring patterns that organize a life around significant ‘centers of gravity.’