Université de Montréal

Faculty Member, Philosophy

Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Metaethics

About

My research interests lie mainly in ethics, and more specifically in meta-ethics and in moral psychology, a field which lies at the intersection of moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and empirical psychology. My work on the moral realism debate and in moral epistemology has led me to focus on the nature of emotions and their relation to value judgements. I thus argue that emotions are perceptions of value properties (Tappolet 1995, 2000). Emotions remain one of my main research interests. Recent work in this area, some of which resulted from a collaboration with Luc Faucher (UQAM), bears on questions such as the influence of emotions on attention, the modularity of emotions, and the plasticity of emotions. Moreover, I have cultivated in collaboration with Ruwen Ogien (CNRS, Paris) an interest in normative ethics and one of its core questions, that is, the question of how value judgements relate to deontic judgments (Ogien & Tappolet 2009). I also have an ongoing interest in the relation between evaluative judgements and action, and more specifically in phenomena like weakness of the will (Stroud and Tappolet 2003). The question of the relationship between autonomy, responsibility, and emotion is at the core of my current research projects.

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