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
Discussions of style in 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 catalogue 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
What – if anything – distinguishes actions from "mere" bodily happenings? What makes building, breakdancing and baking distinct from blushing, breathing, or blinking? A widely accepted view suggests that behaviors qualify as actions in virtue of the fact that they are guided by their agents. In this paper, I defend a novel account of action guidance that can accommodate many cases that extant theories struggle with. In brief, I argue that agential guidance can be accomplished by the interplay between two kinds of personal-level, affective-motivational reactions that occur during an action's performance, which I call consummatory and anticipatory affect. Such responses do not directly issue from deliberative or consciously reflective processes, yet they allow agents to track their standing vis-à-vis the demands of their action situation given their goals. As I demonstrate, the framework I am defending can account for a highly diverse set of human performances, across varying domains and timescales, with reference to a very small set of mental elements
Often, people want to listen to music that matches their moods, emotions, and other affective states. We prefer, that is, music that doesn’t kill, but that preserves, maintains and indulges our vibes. Call such proclivity the Vibe Indulgence Preference (or VIP, for short). Despite its prevalence, the VIP is perplexing: why should undergoing a certain affective state give rise to a reason to seek emotionally congruent music, from the listener’s perspective? I argue that extant accounts of the relationship between emotions and music cannot answer this question in full, and I advance a complementary explanation. Drawing on both empirical and philosophical sources, I suggest that emotionally congruent music promotes emotional elucidation. Listening to vibe-indulgent music can help listeners clarify, specify, and contextualize otherwise opaque, inchoate, or unintelligible emotions. Emotionally congruent music is a technology for cultivating self-understanding.
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 selfknowledge 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