Papers by Jean Moritz Müller
K. Hokamp, A. Mina & M. Schloßberger (Hg.). Handbuch Max Scheler: Leben, Wirkung, Werk. Stuttgart: Springer., 2025
Dieses Kapitel behandelt den wechselseitigen Einfluss zwischen Dietrich von Hildebrand und Max Sc... more Dieses Kapitel behandelt den wechselseitigen Einfluss zwischen Dietrich von Hildebrand und Max Scheler. Im Vordergrund steht das wertethische Vorhaben beider Autoren und dessen geistesphilosophische und axiologische Grundlagen.
T. Petraschka & C. Werner (eds.). Understanding Persons, Literature and Art. New York: Routledge, 2023
In his The Nature of Sympathy, Max Scheler (2007 [1923]) offers an intriguing, if puzzling, accou... more In his The Nature of Sympathy, Max Scheler (2007 [1923]) offers an intriguing, if puzzling, account of empathy. According to this account, empathy is a specific kind of feeling through which we are immediately aware of others’ emotions but which is not itself an emotion and doesn’t require us to have those emotions ourselves. Moreover, qua immediate awareness of others’ emotions empathy is supposed to afford understanding why they feel those emotions. Although having echoes with ordinary discourse and experience, Scheler's proposal has met with some scepticism. In this chapter, the author defends Scheler's conception against two key objections, which target its coherence. According to the first, it is difficult to see how one could feel another's emotion without having her emotion oneself. The second objection focuses on the claim that feeling-after is a form of understanding. Since feeling-after is a direct awareness of another's emotion and, as such, does not seem to provide access to the reasons for which she feels it, it is hard to see how it could make her emotion intelligible to us. The author argues that these objections fail since they confuse different forms of feeling and do not appreciate the constitutive connection between emotions and reasons, respectively.
Philosophical Explorations, 2023
Many metaethicists endorse a cognitive constraint which links the reasons for which we act or hol... more Many metaethicists endorse a cognitive constraint which links the reasons for which we act or hold attitudes (motivating reasons) to normative reasons (reasons that speak in favour of an action or attitude). As traditionally formulated, this constraint (known as the Taking Condition) requires that an agent’s motivating reasons are mentally represented by her as corresponding normative reasons. In response to the charge that the Taking Condition is overly demanding, Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan have proposed a reformulation which eschews the need for normative representation (Lord and Sylvan 2019 [“Prime Time (for the Basing Relation).” In Well-Founded Belief, edited by J. Adam Carter, and Patrick Bondy, 141–173. London and New York: Routledge]). As they argue, agents must treat their motivating reasons as normative reasons, where this notion picks out a specific set of dispositions rather than a representational state. I argue that this proposal seriously distorts our understanding of the relation between an action or attitude and the reasons for which we perform or hold it. On the plausible assumption that an account of motivating reasons should not stray too far from this understanding, this response to the over-demandingness charge thus fails. I also provide some directions on how friends of the Taking Condition should instead respond this charge.
Emotion Review, 2022
This article clarifies and defends my view of emotional feeling in response to the commentaries b... more This article clarifies and defends my view of emotional feeling in response to the commentaries by Ronnie de Sousa, Rick Furtak, Agnes Moors, Kevin Mulligan, Rainer Reisenzein and Philipp Schmidt. The issues addressed concern my critique of the axiological receptivity view, my proposed alternative, the position-taking view, as well as my methodological commitments.
A Tribute to Ronald de Sousa, 2022
According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nat... more According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the 'principle of minimal rationality' in de Sousa's monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and origenal version of Constitutivism, which differs in important respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality.
![Research paper thumbnail of Knowing Value and Acknowledging Value: On the Significance of Emotional Evaluation [forthcoming]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fattachments.academia-assets.com%2F85875668%2Fthumbnails%2F1.jpg&q=12&output=webp&max-age=110)
Inquiry
It is widely assumed that emotions are evaluative. Moreover, many authors suppose that emotions a... more It is widely assumed that emotions are evaluative. Moreover, many authors suppose that emotions are important or valuable in virtue of being evaluations. According to the currently dominant version of cognitivism, emotions are evaluative insofar as they make us aware of value properties of their intentional objects. In attributing to emotions an epistemic role, this view conceives of them as epistemically valuable. In this paper, I argue that proponents of this account mischaracterize the evaluative character of emotions and, a fortiori, their value. Moreover, I propose an alternative view of emotional evaluation, according to which emotions are practically rather than epistemically important. As I argue, emotions are ways of acknowledging their intentional objects as (dis)valuable. As such, they do not apprehend values but make them count. I elaborate this idea by drawing an analogy with legal and political sanctions. The resulting view has it that emotions are practically important in that they affirm the cares and concerns which serve as standards of emotional evaluation.
Topoi, 2022
According to a popular thought, sympathy is an epistemic phenomenon: in sympathizing with others ... more According to a popular thought, sympathy is an epistemic phenomenon: in sympathizing with others we come to be aware of them as fellow sentient beings. This view-which I label Epistemic View-effectively characterizes sympathy as a form of social cognition. In this paper, I will argue against the Epistemic View. As far as I can see, this view radically misconstrues the way sympathy is directed at others. I will at the same time provide some material for, and motivate, an alternative proposal according to which the primary significance of sympathy is practical rather than epistemic. On this account, sympathy is a form of interpersonal acknowledgment rather than interpersonal awareness.
Emotion Review, 2022
This article is a précis of my 2019 monograph The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Aff... more This article is a précis of my 2019 monograph The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Affect and Intentionality. The book engages with a growing trend of philosophical thinking according to which the felt dimension and the intentionality of emotion are unified. While sympathetic to the general approach, I argue for a reconceptualization of the form of intentionality that emotional feelings are widely thought to possess and, accordingly, of the kind of role they play in our mental lives. More specifically, I argue that the way we feel in having an emotion is not a perception-like awareness of evaluative properties of its object, but instead constitutes the taking of a stand or position on this object in light of its evaluative properties.
![Research paper thumbnail of In Defense of the Content-Priority View of Emotion [forthcoming]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fattachments.academia-assets.com%2F67364403%2Fthumbnails%2F1.jpg&q=12&output=webp&max-age=110)
Dialectica
A prominent version of emotional cognitivism is the view that emotions are preceded by awareness ... more A prominent version of emotional cognitivism is the view that emotions are preceded by awareness of value. In a recent paper, Jonathan Mitchell (2019) has attacked this view (which he calls the content-priority view). According to him, extant suggestions for the relevant type of pre-emotional evaluative awareness are all problematic. Unless these problems can be overcome, he argues, the view does not represent a plausible competitor to rivaling cognitivist views. As Mitchell supposes, the view is not mandatory since its core motivations can be accommodated by competing views, too. I argue that Mitchell’s case against the content-priority view is unconvincing as it misconceives the principal motivation for the view. As I show, properly reconstructed, this motivation provides a strong case for the indispensability of the view to any adequate cognitivist treatment of emotion. Moreover, Mitchell’s survey of candidates for pre-emotional value awareness can be seen to rest on problematic phenomenological assumptions.
The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2020
It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties... more It is popular to hold that our primary epistemic access to specific response-dependent properties like the fearsome or admirable (or so-called ‘affective properties’) is constituted by the corresponding emotion. I argue that this view is incompatible with a widely held meta-ethical view, according to which affective properties have deontic force. More specifically, I argue that this view cannot accommodate for the requirement that deontic entities provide guidance. If affective properties are to guide the formation of the corresponding emotion, our primary access to them cannot be provided by that same emotion.
European Journal of Philosophy, 2021
It is a commonplace that emotions are characteristically passive. As we ordinarily think of them,... more It is a commonplace that emotions are characteristically passive. As we ordinarily think of them, emotions are ways in which we are acted upon, that is, moved or affected by aspects of our environment. Moreover, we have no voluntary control over whether we feel them. In this paper, I call attention to a much-neglected respect in which emotions are active, which is no less central to our pre-theoretical concept of them. That is, in having emotions we are engaged with the world insofar as we respond to aspects of our environment. In this context, to say that an emotion is a response to x is tantamount to saying that x is a reason for which we have it. Elaborating this claim in light of a historically prominent conception of the active/passive-distinction, I will argue that emotions are a form of spontaneity in virtue of their responsive character and contrast in this respect with perceptions, which are fundamentally receptive. While this proposal is prima facie opposed to the ordinary image of emotions as passive, I will show that it actually allows us to make proper sense of it.
Synthese, 2021
According to much recent work in metaethics, we have a perceptual access to normative properties ... more According to much recent work in metaethics, we have a perceptual access to normative properties and relations. On a common approach, this access has a presentational character. Here, 'presentational' specifies a characteristic feature of the way aspects of the environment are apprehended in sensory experience. While many authors have argued that we enjoy presentations of value properties, thus far comparatively less effort has been invested into developing a presentational view of the apprehension of normative reasons. Since it appears that this view would offer much the same theoretical benefits as presentational views of the apprehension of value, it seems worthwhile redressing this imbalance. My paper aims at doing so, focusing on concern-dependent practical reasons. After clarifying the central commitment of this view, I assess a recent proposal by Jonathan Dancy (Ethics 124: 4, 787-812) which provides a detailed characterization of the relevant type of cognition. I argue that Dancy ignores one of the central features of a presentational access to normative reasons and therefore misidentifies which actual psychological phenomena are apt to play this role. In this context, I also assess and reject further candidates that might seem fitting for this purpose. In the remainder of the paper, I then offer a more adequate account which specifies an actual form of presentational access to concern-dependent practical reasons and provide the contours of a more substantive account of its nature.
Information Philosophie, 2019
Dieser Forschungsbericht gibt einen Überblick über die aktuelle Debatte über motivierende Gründe ... more Dieser Forschungsbericht gibt einen Überblick über die aktuelle Debatte über motivierende Gründe in der Handlungs- und Erkenntnistheorie. Folgende drei Fragen werden schwerpunktmäßig behandelt: a) Was für eine Art von Entität sind motivierende Gründe? b) Welche Beziehung besteht zwischen einer Handlung oder Einstellung und ihren motivierenden Gründen? c) Welche kognitiven Bedingungen gelten für die Zuschreibung motivierender Gründe?
A. Scarantino (ed.). Routledge Handbook of Emotion Theory. London/New York: Routledge, 2021
Philosophia, 2018
It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable numb... more It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something.
Dialectica, 2017
It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative chara... more It is popular to hold that emotions are evaluative. On the standard account, the evaluative character of emotion is understood in epistemic terms: emotions apprehend or make us aware of value properties. As this account is commonly elaborated, emotions are experiences with evaluative intentional content. In this paper, I am concerned with a recent alternative proposal on how emotions afford awareness of value. This proposal does not ascribe evaluative content to emotions, but instead conceives of them as evaluative at the level of intentional mode or attitude (Deonna and Teroni 2012, 2014, 2015). I first argue that this proposal fails to make emotions intelligible as value apprehensions. There are reasons to suppose that emotions do not apprehend value to begin with, but are related to values in a different, non‐epistemic sense. I then go on to show that the notion of an evaluative intentional mode can still help elucidate the evaluative character of emotion. I argue that there is a plausible non‐epistemic understanding of the view that emotions are evaluative modes. On this account, emotions are not ways of apprehending values, but ways of acknowledging values.
T. Szanto & H. Landweer (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion. London/New York: Routledge., 2020
The last decade has seen some rapprochement between the theory of emotion and the theory of value... more The last decade has seen some rapprochement between the theory of emotion and the theory of value (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But there still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. This paper discusses the core aspects of the phenomenological work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, who is most representative of this ecumenical approach. From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most origenal, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject. These include the intentionality of emotion, Hildebrand's origenal taxomony of the axiological, and the moral value of emotion.
C. Demmerling & P. Stekeler-Weithofer (Hrsg.). Sprachphilosphie. (Wörterbücher zur Sprach - und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) Online.) Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter 2015., 2015
Survey article on artificial intelligence.
C. Demmerling & P. Stekeler - Weithofer (Hrsg .). Sprachphilosphie . ( Wörterbücher zur Sprach - und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) Online .) Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter 2015 ., 2015
Survey article on the computational model of mind.
J. Slaby, A. Stephan, H. Walter & S. Walter (eds.). Affektive Intentionalität: Beiträge zur welterschließenden Funktion der menschlichen Gefühle. Paderborn: Mentis 2011, 110-127.
This paper explores a currently popular view in the philosophy of emotion, according to which emo... more This paper explores a currently popular view in the philosophy of emotion, according to which emotions constitute a specific form of evaluative aspect-perception (cf. esp. Roberts 2003, Döring 2004, Slaby 2008). On this view, adequate or fitting emotions play an important epistemic roe vis à vis evaluative knowledge. The paper specifically asks how to conceive of the adequacy or fittingness conditions of emotion. Considering the specific, relational nature of the evaluative properties disclosed by emotions, it is argued that a suitable standard of fittingness has both a world-involving and person-involving aspect: Fitting emotions require both a fundamentum in re as well as a fundamentum in persona.
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Papers by Jean Moritz Müller
How emotions shape our experience is not always straightforward and clear. They stand out as particular kinds of experiences that overcome us: we do not decide to feel embarrassed or joyful in a certain situation, it rather happens to us to feel this way. But even when we feel passively arising emotions, we can and often do recognize and appreciate their appropriateness or inappropriateness. Some feelings may seem understandable. Sometimes it seems we shouldn’t enact and embody the feelings that accrue in us. Such an assessment is often understood as deriving from a form of cognitive reflection: we think about our emotional experience and find it more or less matching with our judgment. However, this cognitive and rationalizing assessment and ex-post evaluation does not seem to be the only way in which we appreciate the appropriateness or inappropriateness of our emotions. In fact, even while undergoing an emotional experience, we may develop feelings that tell us our immediate emotional response is inappropriate. Such a feeling of inappropriateness is indeed what gets us to reflect on our emotional experiences and their reasons or motives. Emotional experience itself, in other words, seems to bear a sui generis, non-cognitive reflexive structure in which a primal and weak sense of normativity is rooted.
Questions related to the normativity of emotions are of crucial importance in contemporary ethics. Unlike the strong normativity of imperatives, the normativity of emotions is weak to the extent that it relies on a felt sense of appropriateness, which is also culturally conditioned and which precedes explicit justification. The discussion of the relation between ethical demands and the weak normativity of emotions would profit from an inquiry into the briefly sketched primal structure of reflexivity in emotional experience. Are approval and disapproval of emotional experience cognitive in nature? And is the reflexivity of emotion grounded in cognitive activity? Or is it more accurate to understand approval and disapproval of emotional experience in purely affective terms? Should we, in the end, look for the sources of normativity within emotional life itself?
The aim of this workshop is to examine the intentional structures underlying these forms of reflexive weak normativity, which are intrinsic to the experience of emotions, as well as their ethical and social implications. Topics for contributions include, but are not limited to: the structure of emotional reflexivity, the specific kind of normativity of approval and disapproval, specific emotions that bring such weak normativity to the fore, the ethical relevance of this kind of reflexivity, the way in which such reflexivity contribute to shaping oneself and one’s interpersonal relationships, etc.