As suggested by the title, Descartes’ Passions of the Soul deals primarily with states of the soul that he calls ‘passions.’ This designation includes all mental states that are actively caused by the body and passively received by the soul. However, as Descartes points out to the reader, there is a more specialized or proper usage of ‘passion’ that picks out a subclass of these and which aligns more-or-less with what we might now call ‘emotions.’ In this paper, I will address how Descartes classifies these ‘proper passions,’ paying special attention to how he distinguishes them from the other species of the passions in general. One of my primary aims will be to highlight an under-appreciated feature of the proper passions; namely, that they are distinct from other perceptions in their systematic divergence in terms of their distal or ‘first’ cause, their intentional object, and how they are ‘referred.’ After arguing for this distinctive feature of the proper passions, I show how it enables Descartes to provide a nuanced and multi-faceted account of our emotional experiences that incorporates external sensory perceptions, internal or bodily perceptions, and various cognitive assessments.

The long history of research and debate surrounding expertise has emphasized the importance of both automaticity and intelligent deliberation in the control of skilled, expert action – and often, their mutual exclusion of one another. To the contrary, recent developments in the cognitive science of skill implicate the likelihood of a third, hybrid line of interpretation and a new path forward. This paper surveys these recent developments, arguing that hybrid models of expertise and skill are the most fruitful way forward in interpreting and conducting research on experts. I categorize a new set of interpretations of skill as ‘sophisticated hybrid models’ owing to the fact that they deny the mutual exclusion of automaticity from intelligent action control. I then argue that this interpretive strategy is the most fruitful way forward to making clear much of the complexity of skilled action and expertise.

I conceive of Spinoza’s substance monism as a response to Aristotle’s prohibition against actual infinity for one key reason: nature, being all things, is necessarily infi nite. Spinoza encapsulates his substance monism with the phrase, “Deus sive Natura,” implying that there is only one infinite substance, which also possesses an infi nity of attributes, of which we are but modes. These logical delineations of substance never actually break up God’s reality. Aristotle’s well-known argument against the reality of an actual infinity in his Physics prohibits the existence of an actually infinite bodily substance because it would necessarily “destroy” (Physics 204b26-27) all other elements or bodies. On Aristotle’s view, there is a fundamental and concrete distinction between things: each substance is primarily a this (Categories 3b10). I maintain that Spinoza’s rationalism and radicalization of the principle of sufficient reason lends him greater explanatory potential than Aristotle to justify the (non) existence of actual infinity.

Although fantastical thought-experiments about personal identity abound, these seemingly cannot bring home the conviction one way or the other, when it comes to the nature of diachronic (or synchronic) personhood. Per Kathleen Wilkes, these thought-experiments suffer from being divorced from the necessary background conditions. In this paper, I aim to rectify this by developing an empirically-informed thought experiment (that fill in these blanks) focusing on feral children, or children who have grown up in near-complete isolation from all human interaction. After detailing the significance of these cases and discussing a present-day case, I move to construct the background for thought-experiments on these cases. As an upshot, I apply the experiment to a contemporary theory of personhood (namely, constitutionalism), analyze its shortcomings, and make recommendations for future improvements.

This paper will explain three reasons why pro-choice advocates should move away from arguments in favor of abortion choice that is dependent upon the fetus’ non-personhood, and more towards generating arguments in favor of abortion choice that embraces a more respectful view of fetal life. First, the future of the legal right to an abortion in the United States may depend on generating an argument that does not rely on denying fetal personhood. Second, pro-choice advocates should be more respectful of fetal life because the hesitancy of doing so has not gone over well in the general public. Even individuals who are sympathetic to a pro-choice perspective are sometimes hesitant to align themselves with the pro-choice community because of the perception that it is antithetical to the value of fetal life. The third reason is that some women who choose abortion regard it as a morally significant act precisely because they regard the fetus as a morally significant being.