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Massin, Olivier
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Massin, Olivier
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- PublicationAccès libreThings could not have been otherwiseDans la philosophie occidentale contemporaine, il est presque incontesté que certaines choses pourraient être au moins quelque peu différentes de ce qu'elles sont. Je remets en question ce point de vue standard. Je prétends que rien ne peut être autrement, c'est-à-dire que tout est nécessairement ce qu'il est. Within contemporary western philosophy, it is an almost uncontroversial view that at least some things could be at least somewhat different from what they are. I challenge this standard view. I claim that nothing could be otherwise, i.e. everything is necessarily what it is.
- PublicationAccès libreA plea for descriptive social ontology(2023-08-18)
; Abstract Social phenomena—quite like mental states in the philosophy of mind—are often regarded as potential troublemakers from the start, particularly if they are approached with certain explanatory commitments, such as naturalism or social individualism, already in place. In this paper, we argue that such explanatory constraints should be at least initially bracketed if we are to arrive at an adequate non-biased description of social phenomena. Legitimate explanatory projects, or so we maintain, such as those of making the social world fit within the natural world with the help of, e.g., collective intentionality, social individualism, and the like, should neither exclude nor influence the prior description of social phenomena. Just as we need a description of the mental that is not biased, for example, by (anti)physicalist constraints, we need a description of the social that is not biased, for example, by (anti)individualist or (anti)naturalist commitments. Descriptive social ontology, as we shall conceive of it, is not incompatible with the adoption of explanatory frameworks in social ontology; rather, the descriptive task, according to our conception, ought to be recognized as prior to the explanatory project in the order of inquiry. If social phenomena are, for example, to be reduced to nonsocial (e.g., psychological or physical) phenomena, we need first to understand clearly what the social candidates for the reduction in question are. While such descriptive or naïve approaches have been influential in general metaphysics (see Fine 2017), they have so far not been prominent in analytic social ontology (though things are different outside of analytic philosophy, see esp. Reinach (1913). In what follows, we shall outline the contours of a descriptive approach by arguing, first, that description and explanation need to be distinguished as two distinct ways of engaging with social phenomena. Secondly, we defend the claim that the descriptive project ought to be regarded as prior to the explanatory project in the order of inquiry. We begin, in Section 2, by considering two different ways of engaging with mental phenomena: a descriptive approach taken by descriptive psychology and an explanatory approach utilized in analytic philosophy of mind. We take these two ways of approaching the study of the mind to be analogous to the distinction we want to draw in social ontology between a descriptive and an explanatory approach to the study of social phenomena. We consider next, in Section 3, how our approach compares to neighboring perspectives that are familiar to us from general metaphysics and philosophy more broadly, such as Aristotle’s emphasis on “saving the appearances”, Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, as well as Fine’s contrast between naïve and foundational metaphysics. In Section 4, we apply the proposed descriptive/explanatory distinction to the domain of social ontology and argue that descriptive social ontology ought to take precedence in the order of inquiry over explanatory social ontology. Finally, in Section 5, we consider and respond to several objections to which our account might seem to be susceptible. - PublicationAccès libreA Socratic essentialist defense of non‐verbal definitional disputes(2023-04-28)
; In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility that some apparently substantive definitional disputes may turn out to be verbal or conceptual, since this pluralist strategy, in our view, requires a commitment to more, rather than fewer, essences. What is more, a deflationary, metaphysically ‘light-weight’ construal of the essence-ascriptions in question leads to a peculiar conception of the pursuit of metaphysicians as behaving like deceptive (or self-deceived) grammarians pretending to be scientists. Moreover, this deflationary attitude, we argue, spreads beyond metaphysics and philosophy more broadly to apparently substantive definitional disputes in the sciences as well as other in other disciplines, such as art criticism. - PublicationAccès libreThe Reactive Theory of Emotions(2021-12-21)Evaluative theories of emotions purport to shed light on the nature of emotions by appealing to values. Three kinds of evaluative theories of emotions dominate the recent literature: the judgment theory equates emotions with value judgments; the perceptual theory equates emotions with perceptions of values, and the attitudinal theory equates emotions with evaluative attitudes. This paper defends a fourth kind of evaluative theory of emotions, mostly neglected so far: the reactive theory. Reactive theories claim that emotions are attitudes which arise in reaction to perceptions of value.
- PublicationAccès libreResolve is always effortful(2021-4-26)Ainslie argues there are two main kinds of willpower: suppression, which is necessarily effortful, and resolve, which is not. We agree with the distinction but argue that all resolve is effortful. Alleged cases of effortless resolve are indeed cases of what Ainslie calls habits, namely stable results of prior uses of resolve.
- PublicationAccès libreDécrire, La Psychologie de Franz BrentanoPenser, entendre, juger, sentir, savoir, préférer, aimer, souhaiter, observer, remarquer, être conscient, prendre plaisir, vouloir, se souvenir... Pour atteindre une connaissance scientique de ces actes mentaux, nous devons pratiquer ce qui, aux yeux Brentano, constitue l’activité philo- sophique par excellence : décrire. Le point de départ de toute psychologie scientique, maintient-il, est la description des phénomènes mentaux, de ce qu’ils ont en commun, de leurs espèces, de leurs relations. Ce n’est que sur la base de telles descriptions que nous pourrons ensuite nous atteler à la tâche qui consiste à expliquer les actes mentaux, en déterminant leurs causes et les conditions physiologiques de leur genèse. Brentano appelle la partie de la psychologie qui cherche à décrire les actes mentaux « psychologie descriptive » (il parle aussi de « psychognosie »), et appelle psychologie « explicative » ou « génétique » celle qui cherche à établir des lois empiriques rapportant des relations de succession entre ces phénomènes. De Brentano, la philosophie contemporaine de l’esprit retient en général la thèse selon laquelle les phénomènes mentaux sont par nature intentionnels – dirigés vers des objets distincts d’eux-mêmes. S’il ne fait aucun doute que cette thèse de l’intentionnalité est au cœur de la psychologie descriptive de Brentano, il est non moins certain que celle- ci ne se résume pas à celle-là. La psychologie de Brentano fourmille de descriptions détaillées de maints actes mentaux et de leurs relations. L’objet de ce livre est de rendre justice à ces descriptions, qui, en dépit de leur influence déterminante sur les héritiers de Brentano et de leur pertinence contemporaine, demeurent largement négligées au sein des débats actuels en philosophie de l’esprit. Qu’est-ce qu’être conscient? sentir ? connaître ? juger ? préférer ? prendre plaisir ? Comment ces phénomènes mentaux sont-ils reliés? Outre leur intérêt intrinsèque, les réponses circonstanciées que Brentano apporte à chacune de ces questions illustrent, chacune à leur manière, la fécondité de la méthode qui consiste à prendre au sérieux la tâche de la description.
- PublicationAccès libreSuffering PainsThe paper aims at clarifying the distinctions and relations between pain and suffering. Three negative theses are defended: 1. Pain and suffering are not identical. 2. Pain is not a species of suffering, nor is suffering a species of pain, nor are pain and suffering of a common (proximate) genus. 3. Suffering cannot be defined as the perception of a pain’s badness, nor can pain be defined as a suffered bodily sensation. Three positive theses are endorsed: 4. Pain and suffering are categorically distinct: pain is a localised bodily episode, suffering is a non-localised affective attitude. 5. Suffering can be expressed, pains cannot. As a consequence, we can have compassion for the suffering of others, not for their pains. 6. The relation between pain and suffering is akin to the relation between danger and fear, injustice and indignation, wrongdoing and guilt: suffering is the correct reaction to pain. One upshot is that both the influential view that the experience of pain is incorrigible and the influential view that the ordinary conception of pain is paradoxical are false.
- PublicationAccès libre"'Unless I put my hand into his side, I will not believe'. The E"pistemic Privilege of Touch(New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)
; - PublicationAccès libreRealism’s KickSamuel Johnson claimed to have refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone. It is generally thought that Johnson misses the point of Berkeley's immaterialism for a rather obvious reason: Berkeley never denied that the stone feels solid, but only that the stone could exist independently of any mind. I argue that Johnson was on the right track. On my interpretation, Johnson’s idea is that because the stone feels to resist our effort, the stone seems to have causal powers. But if appearances are to be taken at face value, as Berkeley insists, then the stone has causal powers. I argue that such causal powers threaten not only Berkeley’s view that only minds are active, but also, and more fundamentally, his central claim that sensible things depend on perception.