Doctoral Thesis

The Rationality of Anger

Our personal and academic stance towards anger is perhaps best characterized as intensely ambivalent. Condemned as a personal vice on the one hand, while commended as a justified attitude on the other, anger is often cast as a destructive force while at others hailed as necessary fuel for positive change. The Stoics and their modern supporters have famously advocated against anger. Nussbaum (2016), for example, claims anger is counterproductive and intrinsically immoral. Feminist theorists (Frye, 1983; Lorde, 1984; Narayan, 1988) on the other hand highlight the crucial motivational, moral, and epistemic value of anger in fighting against the oppressive status quo.
 
The liberatory potential bestowed upon anger by feminist philosophers has not received sustained attention in analytic philosophy of mind or epistemology. My doctoral thesis develops an empirically informed account of anger, and its rationality, that lays the foundations for the emotion to play the political roles feminists afford it. Four main findings emerge: that the dominant conception of anger should be revised, that anger is an effective and often constructive way of confronting social injustice, that anger, as an emotion, enjoys a sui generis relation to its reasons, and that this in turn allows anger to play distinctive and crucial epistemic roles.

Publications

2016

​Abrahamyan, A., Silva, L.L., Dakin, S.C., Carandini, M., Gardner, J.L. ‘Adaptable history biases in human perceptual decisions’ vol. 113 no. 25, PNAS.

Articles

Title omitted
(under review)

In this paper I oppose a prevalent view that takes anger to be counterproductive to securing the aims of the oppressed, namely fighting against social injustice. Attention to recent empirical work casts doubt on this dominant view. I argue we should rethink our theory of the nature of anger in light of this and outline a positive proposal to this effect. Crucially, contrary to the stipulations of many theories of emotion, specific behaviours should not be taken to be constitutive of emotion types. In so arguing I highlight anger’s epistemic aim for recognition, rather than retribution, as key. That is, anger often aims at making others acknowledge an injustice, rather than aiming at punishing those responsible for them.




Epistemic Perceptualsim and Outlaw Emotions
(in progress)

Can emotions justify evaluative beliefs? The contemporary debate on this issue centres around perceptual theories and whether the strong epistemic role they afford emotions is plausible. This epistemic role has gone by the name of Epistemic Perceptualism (EP). In this paper I put forward a novel and important objection to EP. I argue that, despite claims to the contrary, EP cannot account for the epistemic role of outlaw emotions. Outlaw emotions are recalcitrant emotions that go against many or most of one’s beliefs. They are therefore particularly prevalent under circumstances of oppressive ideology where feminist philosophers take them to play crucial epistemic roles. I argue that the perceptual theorist is left with a choice: either accept that EP denies outlaw emotions their epistemic role or modify EP such that it might survive my objection. I argue that attempts at the latter will risk straying too far from the core commitments of EP, while accepting the former leaves EP in tension with the epistemic role afforded outlaw emotions by not only feminist philosophers but many perceptual theorists themselves. 

Selected Talks

 Epistemology and Outlaw Emotions 
         Colloquium in the History of Moral and Political Philosophy:
                 The Politics of Emotions, University of Minho, Braga, 30/01/19
        Ethics Research Centre (CRÊ) lecture series, Montreal, 23/05/18

Anger and Social Justice 
     Cumberland Lodge UCL workshop 22/10/17
       UQAM Cognitio Conference, Montreal, 23/06/17 
       Experimental Philosophy workshop, Yale University, 27/04/17

Sui Generis Emotions: The Case From a Literary Experiment
     European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions,
       Complutense University of Madrid, 19/09/17

Epistemic Emotions Justified 
      Oficina de Filosofia Analitica, University of Lisbon, 11/02/17 
      Workshop on Mind, Language and Reasoning, Institute of Philosophy 23/11/15


Responses

Comment on ‘Silencing, subordination and the Mainstream Media’ by Andrew Knox, UCL Philosophy Graduate Conference, 28/09/17

Comment on ‘Slurs: Roles and Power’ by Mihaela Popa at Philosophy of Mind and Language Workshop, University of Barcelona, 23/09/16




​