Anthony Hatzimoysis specializes in the Philosophy of Emotions. He has held academic posts at the University College London, the University of Manchester, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he is Associate Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Athens, and a regular visiting professor in the Philosophy of Social Sciences at Manchester Business School. Anthony is co-founder of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions; he has worked extensively on the philosophy of values, and on the nature of self-knowledge. His main books in English include the volumes Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press), Self-Knowledge (Oxford University Press), and the monograph The Philosophy of Sartre (Routledge). Anthony Hatzimoysis is  EHESS visiting professor invited by Pascal Engel (CRAL).

 

 Conferences

 

The rationality of mood

 

Rationality and the Phenomenology of Moods

Dans le cadre du séminaire de Pascal Engel « raisons dans tous leurs états »

• Lundi 6 mai 2019, de 15 h à 17 h - EHESS (salle 5), 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris

Attention to the phenomenology of affectivity is not an optional means for enriching the analysis of mood; according to several philosophers, phenomenology provides the right methodological tools for making sense of the apparently diffuse and all-enveloping character of mood experience. Instead of treating moods as a surface colouring of an evaluatively neutral environment, that approach sets moods as the inescapable background of our cognitive, perceptual, and desiderative engagement with reality. I address the approach to moods as background feelings and raise some doubts about the ability of that approach to provide standards of assessment of a mood state, standards that would permit appraising the mood itself as rational.              

 

Moods, reasons and values

Dans le cadre du séminaire de Pascal Engel «  raisons dans tous leurs états »

• Lundi 13 mai 2019, de 15 h à 17 h - EHESS (salle 5), 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris

A sad mood can affect our way of thinking by slowing down our reasoning process, making us pay more attention to detail. Elation appears to have the opposite effect, allowing an abundance of information to flow through our senses. Moods set the stage for a variety of human activities, enabling or obstructing our projects, setting limits on the potency of practical reason. However, the question I purport to address is not how moods affect reason, but whether moods themselves can be rational. The answer commonly offered to that question is negative; and the denial of rationality for moods is linked to their apparent lack of intentionality: given that moods do not seem to bear an intentional relation to an object, it is hard to see how they can be in the offing for rational assessment. I shall explore that issue in the context of the debate over the evaluative content of affective states.

 

"Sartre on emotions"

• Mercredi 15 mai 2019, 10h-12h - Université Sorbonne Université, 1 rue Victor cousin, 75005 Paris

 

The epistemic function of moods

Dans le cadre de l’atelier « raisons et sentiments »

• Vendredi 24 mai 2019, de 13h30 à 18h30 - Institut Nicod (salle L361), 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris.

Affective states seem to discharge the epistemic task of drawing an agent’s attention to the presence of values, enabling, under certain conditions, an acute awareness of events that bear upon her well-being. An issue that is still underexplored in the philosophical literature is how precisely moods might fulfil the role of informing the agent about facts which are salient in her situation. I look at an account that is encountered in the literature in the psychology and physiology of affects, an account which sets moods as mechanisms whose function is to monitor the balance between the demands raised by our situation, and the physical or psychological resources we may expend in meeting those demands. I argue that, despite its initial appeal, the account leads to counter-intuitive results about the epistemic dimension of mood phenomena.