As part of the annual conference of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions in Athens last June, I gave a presentation that became a paper called “Can Emotions Have Abstract Objects? The Example of Awe.”
Now that paper has been published in the journal Philosophia, and is available for free to anyone via the link above (which takes you to a full text, read-only version). I welcome any questions or comments you may have about it!
I’m thrilled to say that on January 21st, I’ll be joining what will likely be hundreds of thousands of others for the Women’s March on Washington. There is something amazing about the experience of publicly and collectively expressing what you value most deeply; I always look forward to opportunities to do that.
But on this occasion, I’m especially thankful that I’ll be meeting up with personal friends of mine who will be coming from various places across the country. While we are different in terms of gender, race, age, religion, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, political commitments, professions, and in all sorts of other ways, we all share a commitment to transforming our communities into ones in which the rights, dignity, and safety of all are protected and respected.
I hope you’ll join us in spirit, if not physically at one of the sister marches nearest you.
I became a fan of Grey’s Anatomy when I spent six weeks in Argentina – reruns were on television just about every moment of every day, so whenever I got lonely, or missed Seattle, or wanted to hear some English, it was there for me. Since then, I’ve often imagined a show that, instead of following medical students through surgical internships and residencies and beyond, would follow graduate students getting their PhDs in the humanities. If you’ve been through it, you know that there is a lot of dramatic potential there (and if any tv execs are out there and want to hear a more detailed pitch – I’m ready)! Plus, who doesn’t enjoy seeing lives like their own represented in mass media, so long as it isn’t as the butt of a joke or a mere token or an offensively simplified caricature or something?
Well, part of my wish has been fulfilled. This fall, NBC is airing a new show called The Good Place; the title refers to a place kind of like heaven, which is where it takes place, and one of the main characters (Chidi) is a moral philosopher! I never thought I would see a major network television show where a character holds up a copy of Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other and starts giving a brief introduction to contractualism, or where the lead character reads some Kant and Aristotle and starts using what she’s learned in her life outside the classroom!
Is it a perfect portrayal of the life of an ethicist? Of course not – it does play up certain stereotypes (though it violates others), and we could easily get nit-picky about the content of Chidi’s lectures if we wanted to (it isn’t like there is no critical thinking to be done about any given product of mass media). Nevertheless, for now, I’m pretty stoked about the fact that lots of different people might be getting their first exposure to the possibility of real people earning a living by thinking about morality, and the idea that maybe we do make valuable contributions to society sometimes.
Being a voter is important to me, and in fact, I can’t wait to vote in this fall’s election. Today I learned that I don’t have to wait as long as I thought! NPR put out a Complete Guide to Early & Absentee Voting on their website, and I learned that in Indiana, I can vote in person as early as October 12!
I’ve never voted early before, but since I’m volunteering to drive folks who need rides to the polls on Election Day, I’m thinking it might be good to vote early myself so that I’ve got the whole day available to help others who need help to get to their polling places.
If you need to know your state’s voter registration deadline, how to vote absentee in your state, or anything else like that, check out the guide at the link above to find what you need (and more).
As someone who has moved around quite a bit in the last few years, it can be hard to keep up with local and statewide elections, which don’t always get the kind of media attention that national elections do. That is one reason why I love Vote Smart!
As they say on their website, “Vote Smart’s mission is to provide free, factual, unbiased information on candidates and elected officials to ALL Americans.” My favorite tool on their website is Vote Easy, which asks you a few questions about your values and priorities and then lets you know which candidates in your area are the closest match to you. Because even if you already know who you want to vote for in the presidential election (I sure do), you may not know who is the best fit with your views on a statewide level, and those elections matter just as much.
Vote Smart is a truly nonpartisan organization that doesn’t accept money from any organization that supports or opposes any candidate or issue. 90% of the people who work for Vote Smart are volunteers committed to helping the rest of us access candidates’ voting records, interest group ratings, public statements, campaign finances and more information that helps exercise our right to vote in an informed way. Thanks for the good work you do, Vote Smart!
The transition from summer to fall is a really pleasant time of year for me – I’m back in the swing of my schedule at school, the weather is mellowing out, and I get a break from living out of a suitcase (not to complain about my travels to Chicago, Greece, Portland, and Boulder, which were all lovely). The thing I miss most about summer is all the time I get to spend reading; it was even more packed with good books than usual this year: Tell the Wolves I’m Home, Mycophilia, The Pale King, My Year of Meats, The People of the Book, Negroland: A Memoir, The Bone Clocks, and The Better Angels of Our Nature, just to name a few from my list that would be worth checking out.
But one book that deserves special mention is Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond, which was easily one of the best books I’ve read in years. Desmond sheds a penetrating light on the massive increases in American residential evictions during the past few decades, and, crucially, on the devastating, long-lasting impact evictions have on people across a broad spectrum of demographic differences. After embedding with families on both sides of the renter / landlord divide over a period of years, Desmond vividly recounts their personal narratives, carefully analyzes and clearly present massive amounts of relevant data, and even makes some recommendations for policy changes that seem our best bets for addressing the housing crisis we must all face together. I’m not alone in being blown out of the water by this book, and I can’t overstate how strongly I recommend it to, well, everyone.
When it rains, it pours! This week I actually had two book reviews published – what a weird coincidence. The second was a review of Love and Its Objects: What Can We Care For?, a collection edited by Christian Maurer, Tony Milligan, & Kamila Pacovská. I was invited to write the review for the Hypatia special issue, “Feminist Love Studies in the 21st Century,” which was guest edited by Dr. Margaret Toye and Dr. Ann Ferguson. My book review is available for free here (as are 11 others to go with the special issue). The full special issue on love is not available yet, but that is something to look forward to.
In fact, in case you didn’t know, all new Hypatia book reviews are available for free, regardless of whether you have a subscription, by visiting Hypatia Reviews Online. I worked hard on the creation of this new website back when I was the editorial assistant for the journal, and it is great to see the archive really filling up with reviews of new feminist scholarship! Even better, the new editorial team is creating podcasts of the reviews, if listening is more your style!
Just about one year ago, I started reading Adrienne Martin’s book, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology, which I had been asked to review for the journal Mind. I really enjoyed reading it, especially Martin’s dualist theory of motivation, and the book review was a good project to work on during my stay in Seattle that summer. Over these last months, I had nearly forgotten about my book review, but then I got an email this week saying that it is now available via advance access. You can read the full text here, or a pdf here. You don’t have to be a Mind subscriber to access the review for free via these links (thank you, Mind)!
Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting a paper at the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE) in Athens, Greece. I have to say that it was a wonderful experience!
I also presented at the group’s inaugural conference in Lisbon in 2014, and both times, it was the kind of conference I really look forward to: the attendees included people from all sorts of different places who were friendly and supportive while still giving interesting and challenging feedback, which was informed by a wide range of different philosophical methods and areas of expertise. I highly recommend EPSSE to anyone who has a philosophical interest in the emotions!
I would like to mention just a handful of my favorite talks from the conference, which include “Admiration and Moral Responsibility,” by Alfred Archer, “Affective Consciousness and Moral Responsibility,” by Alex Madva, “The Break-Up Check: Testing Theories of Romantic Love in Relationship Terminations,” by Pila Lopez-Cantero, “Moral Regret and the Psychological Constitution of the Kantian Agent,” by Katherine Giambastiani, “Emergent Emotion,” by Elaine O’Connell, and “Scaffolded Affectivity,” by Achim Stephan and Sven Walter. Now if only my paper would revise itself in light of everything I learned …
I want to express my appreciation to the organizers of NUSTEP for inviting me to serve as commentator at this year’s conference; I had a really good time. The highlight for me was Nomy Arpaly’s talk about “good old-fashioned benevolence,” which was an excellent model of how to make precise and rigorous argument using well-crafted examples but without using any jargon, while expressing a great sense of humor, all at the same time!
Of course, some nice walks along Lake Michigan and good local food were also very welcome. Regarding food in Evanston, Found Kitchen deserves a special mention – the many dishes I tried were all delicious, the space had a great atmosphere, and the people involved enact a worthy social mission of hiring and training people coming out of homelessness.