Thumos Seminar
On this page, we advertise the research activities that are of interest to members and friends of Thumos, especially the Thumos seminar, which is the main research activity of our group. Thumos seminars take place on Thursdays, 16h15-17h45 at UniPhilosophes (PHIL116). Archives of the seminar are available here.
Members of the Swiss Doctoral School in Affective Sciences get credits if they participate to the seminar and their travel expenses can be reimbursed within Switzerland.
We also indicate events that may be of interest to students of the emotions or that happen on the same day :
- The CISA Lecture series take place on Tuesday, 12h15-13h15 at the Campus Biotech (seminar room will be communicated by e-mail to the members).
- The Quodlibeta takes place on Tuesdays, 18h15-20h00 at the PHIL211
- The PhilEAs talks usually takes place on Thursdays, 18h15-20h00 (PHIL201)
September 25, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Jean Moritz Müller (joint work with Olivier Massin) (Tübingen)
The Reactive Character of Fear: In Defense of the Reactive View of Emotion
According to the reactive view of emotion (reactivism, for short), an emotion is a reaction—or, as some prefer, a response—to something that appears to be (dis)valuable. In this context, the term ‘response’ is not used in a purely causal sense, but specifies a reason for which we have a certain emotion (a motivating reason, in common philosophical parlance). Reactivism has been attracting an increasing attention in the recent debate on emotion, not least since it opposes the currently dominant emotion-theoretic paradigm, according to which emotions are forms of value awareness. In this paper, we defend reactivism against a set of objections put forward by two proponents of this paradigm (Diaz & Tappolet, forthcoming). Díaz & Tappolet put pressure on two central considerations offered in support of reactivism: (i) reactivism captures the intentionality of emotion; (ii) reactivism is borne out by ordinary explanations and justifications of emotion. Most centrally, they adduce linguistic evidence based on corpus analysis and experimental studies to challenge (ii). According to their findings, explanations of emotions explicitly citing value properties as reasons are less frequent than reactivists suppose. Moreover, those citing non-evaluative reasons need not be read as presupposing evaluative reasons, as reactivists have argued. In response, we indicate several reasons for thinking that Díaz & Tappolet’s objections miss their mark. We will argue that there are serious problems both with their linguistic methodology as well as with the interpretation of their findings. In fact, we show that the results put forward by Diáz and Tappolet support reactivism and backfire against the dominant paradigm.
October 2, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Antonin Broi (Geneva)
Toward Meta-Ethical Hedonism
Ethical hedonism has been mostly discussed within two broad approaches, namely a naturalistic approach that sought to infer it from psychological hedonism and a – nowadays dominant – intuitions-based approach. In this paper, I defend hedonism by taking a third approach – an introspection-based approach – that puts on center stage our introspective access to pleasure. The position that I defend complements hedonism with two meta-ethical claims, which together make for a particularly compelling position: at the epistemological level, it is acquaintance with pleasure and displeasure that plays a crucial epistemic role; at the metaphysical level, pleasure and displeasure, as well as their value, are taken to be irreducible to physical entities.
October 9, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Katja Crone (Dortmund)
Remembering Feelings of Former Life Phases
What does it mean to remember how it felt during your school days, or when you started your first job in a new city? This talk explores the nature of such affective recollections — of feelings that were characteristic of particular phases of life. In the first part, I examine whether this kind of remembering can be fully explained by the standard phenomenology of episodic memory, such as the familiar sense of mentally “reliving” a past experience. Based on a modified version of Mac Cumhaill's notion of 'phasic memory', I argue instead that these recollections often involve the reactivation of a former existential feeling — a global sense of relating to the world — which becomes part of the present experience. In the second part, I will explore the broader question of whether a present feeling directed at a past event of phase can be considered a memory.
October 16, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Kael McCormack (Geneva)
Pursuing the Good, Moved by the Good: How Desires Motivate
Desires have a puzzling dual character. In one sense, desires are passive. Desires are spontaneous, and not the result of reasoning or voluntary choice. The experience of desiring is spontaneous: I find myself moved to acquire the object of desire. Desires look like a constraint on agency. Yet, in another sense, desires are active. My desire is not something separate from me and I don’t simply observe it as an inner event. Rather, the desire consists of my moving myself in pursuit of the object of my desire. Desires look like an exercise of agency. So, my desire is both a constraint on my agency and an exercise of my agency: what simply happens to me is something I do. How is the dual character of desire possible? I explore several possible answers that attempt to “split” the self into two, or the event of desiring into two mental states, or the intentionality of desires into two distinct relations. I use this discussion to motivate my own preferred view that explains the duality of desire in terms of a more fundamental unifying factor. On this view, the active and passive dimensions of desires result from a discrimination of value.
October 23, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
José Camillo (Geneva)
Singular Thought and Episodic Memory
Singular thought (or reference) refers to the capacity to single out entities or events among others—that is, to capture their numerical identity. Philosophers typically explain this capacity either in conceptual terms or in perceptual ones (De Carvalho, 2016). For example, Strawson (1959) argued that distinguishing two identical objects requires spatiotemporal concepts, while perceptual accounts claim that singular content arises from automatic processes of object individuation (Green & Quilty-Dunn, 2021). Yet, perceptual approaches struggle to explain how agents distinguish between two objects with identical properties. To address this, some have proposed an intermediate view: abstract object representations in the prefrontal cortex support perceptual processes, thereby enabling both individuation and identification (De Carvalho & Newen, 2019). So far, however, most philosophical accounts of singular thought have neglected empirical research on episodic memory. Evidence shows that the hippocampus organizes event representations through spatiotemporal coordinates and binds object properties to these coordinates (Yonelinas, 2013; Eichenbaum, 2017; Ekstrom & Yonelinas, 2020). This suggests that objects can be represented as clusters of properties individuated by their spatiotemporal coordinates—without requiring an explicit concept of space and time. In light of this, I argue that episodic memory contributes to singular thought by automatically assigning objects unique spatiotemporal coordinates. Moreover, because the hippocampal system integrates temporally distant coordinates, it enables the reidentification of objects across time. In this way, episodic memory provides a naturalistic basis for singular thought that avoids reliance on conceptual schemes and sidesteps the limitations of purely perceptual accounts.
October 30, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Brian McElwee (Southampton)
The Demandingness of Moral Duties Towards Elderly Parents
The philosophical literature on moral demandingness has been dominated by consideration of global poverty, focusing on the question: How much are we morally required to do for the sake of strangers in need? This domination may skew our understanding of moral demandingness in important ways. Comparatively little attention has been given to the parallel question: How much are we morally required to do for the sake of our loved ones? I focus here on one specific case: How much are we morally required to do for our elderly parents?
In Section 1, I defend a Reciprocity View of filial duties, against the leading alternative, the Special Goods View, though I note that the strongest forms of each type of view have significant overlap. In Section 2, I outline the various factors that influence how extensive our duties towards our elderly parents are. In Section 3, I discuss more generally the variability of moral demands: the issue of what factors make a difference to how much different individuals are morally required to do. I conclude with a brief account of how we can work out just how much we are required to do for our elderly parents in individual cases.
November 6, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Federico Lauria (Lisbon)
Values in the Air: Musical Contagion, Social Appraisal and Metaphor Experience
Music can infect us. In the dominant approach, music contaminates listeners through emotional mimicry and independently of value appraisal, just like when we catch other people’s feelings. Musical contagion is thus considered fatal to the mainstream view of emotions as cognitive evaluations. This paper criticizes this line of argument and proposes a new cognitivist account: the value metaphor view. Non-cognitivism relies on a contentious model of emotion transmission. In the competing model (social appraisal), we catch people’s emotions by appraising value through their emotional expressions. Social appraisal debunks the main motivation for non-cognitivism and offers fruitful insights into musical contagion. Combining it with metaphor theory, I claim that musical contagion involves experiencing the music as a metaphor for emotions and values. Just like people infect us as we appraise value through their emotional expressions, music contaminates listeners because they hear it metaphorically-as some emotional expression and hereby appraise it metaphorically-as some value. As infectious music “sounds like” emotions and values, cognitivism is safe.
November 13, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Olivier Massin (Neuchâtel)
Happiness Is No Balance Sheet
What is happiness? Contemporary theories that seek to understand it in affective rather than satisfactionist terms typically construe it as a “balance” of positive and negative states. They differ over which states ought to be included in this balance (sensory pleasures, attitudinal pleasures, emotions, moods, sentiments, etc.), but they converge on the idea that happiness is such a balance. I will argue, first, that this notion of balance is an abstraction with no psychological reality. I will then develop an affective conception of happiness that dispenses with the idea of balance and, instead, rests on the felt capacity to endure evils and to enjoy goods.
November 20, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Aarón Álvarez González (Valencia)
Emotional Epistemic Basing
The epistemic role of emotion has been widely discussed during the last decades. Particularly, much attention was devoted to the purported quasi-perceptual justificatory role of emotion vis-à-vis the worldly instantiation of evaluative properties. However, epistemic justification involves at least two ingredients: reasons and the basing relation. Reasons are familiar stuff, and they are what is supposed to be revealed by emotional experience if perceptualists are right. The basing relation is less known in the emotion literature. It is the relation that holds between reasons and the judgements or beliefs that they support. Crucuially, one is justified in making evaluative judgements only if one has good reasons and bases one's judgement on them. In this paper I want to argue that only emotion, or more concretely emotional experience, can deliver the correct basing relation between evaluative judgements and the (evaluative or non-evaluative) reasons for them. The basing aspect of justification is as important as the reason aspect. If only emotions can account for the basing relation between evaluative judgements and the evidence for them, then emotions are epistemically indispensable irrespectively of their role vis-à-vis the reason aspect of justification.
November 27, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
David Pineda Oliva (Girona)
A Dual-Mechanism View of Emotional Recalcitrance
I will intend to offer a new account of emotional recalcitrance. The philosophical discussion up to now has overlooked the crucial fact that in many cases, when a subject notices a conflict between their emotion and a certain evaluative judgment, the emotion vanishes. Only in some cases does the emotion persist. My account can by contrast explain this crucial fact. I will argue that the emotional response persists when it is subserved by a stimulus-driven mechanism, or some other sort of mechanism involving an associative operation. Also, I will explain the conflict involved in emotional recalcitrance in terms of the tight association between emotions and certain axiological concepts. In recalcitrant emotion, the subject finds that conflicting criteria for the application of an evaluative concept (the emotion, on the one hand, and the reasons grounding a certain evaluative judgment, on the other) pull in two opposite directions. Since the conflict cannot be resolved by dropping the emotion, and the subject has experience of their emotional responses as being in general sensitive to axiological reasons, the recalcitrant subject thinks of their failure as involving some sort of irrationality.
December 4, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Anaïs Giannuzzo (Geneva)
What Is a Narrative?
In the 2020 New York Times article “Justice Dept. Aids Trump’s False Narrative on Voting,” Michael S. Schmidt and Nick Corasaniti describe the future President’s "narrative" as a “misleading impression of widespread voter fraud.” The aim of this talk is to clarify what we mean by "narrative" in cases like these. Specifically, I will consider four possibilities: that a narrative is a story, a mental representation, a characterization, or a viewpoint. I will also discuss the purpose of labelling the President's account of the events a narrative and examine the function of the narrative itself. This will help clarify the kind of phenomenon the term "narrative" refers to.
December 11, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Alessandra Fussi (Pisa)
Autobiographical Perspectives and Affective Scaffolding of Grief. Reflections on Aftersun (2022)
The paper is divided into two parts. The first outlines the narrative structure of grief and the role of affective scaffolding provided by environments and practices. The second turns to Charlotte Wells’s film Aftersun (2022) as a case study.
Grief is not episodic but a temporally extended process (Goldie 2011, 2012; Ratcliffe 2022). While Freud (1917) claimed that mourning ends with the dissolution of the libidinal bond, such bonds often persist, with memories gradually transforming from painful to cherished (Solomon 2004; Higgins 2013). A narrative framework captures this ongoing renegotiation of the relationship with the deceased, supporting a “continuing bonds” rather than a “relinquishment” model (Higgins 2013).
Aftersun illustrates these dynamics: grief is shown as open-ended, sustained by love, and tied to questions of identity. By staging an empathic reconstruction of the past, and by realizing a fusion of temporal perspectives, the film conveys the gap that free indirect style (Goldie 2012, Wood 2008) seeks to bridge in a grieving mind.
December 18, 2025 – Thumos Seminar
Bence Nanay (Antwerp)
The Translucent Mind
Some of our mental states are translucent: we can't fully elaborate some parts of their content, by which I mean we can't make some of the represented properties more determinate. More generally, mental states come on a spectrum when it comes to whether and how much we can elaborate some parts of their content. I argue that translucency is an overlooked but extremely important feature of mental states and I give case studies of this importance in the case of translucent beliefs, translucent emotions, translucent memories and translucent desires.