 Philosophers don’t often write about the heart The Heart and Its Attitudes illuminates interpersonal phenomena that are, on the one hand, as local and commonplace as heartfelt connections and their rupture between friends and lovers, or, on the other, as nationally or internationally significant as the emotional injuries of racial and gender oppression and war. It is a work of philosophy that aims for rigor and analytical depth, but one that is unusual in its relevance to so much of ordinary life. Philosophers don’t often write about the heart. At least, analytical philosophers don’t. Why is this? Philosophers are said to live life “in their heads” rather than “from their hearts.” But even if philosophers tend to be head rather heart people, why don’t they think and write about the heart? It can hardly have escaped their attention that matters of the heart are central to what we human beings value most about our lives. “Without friends,” Aristotle said, “no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” Philosophers write a lot about friendship and love, but they tend to do so in terms that leave out the centrality of the heart and heartfelt connection. They speak rather of commitment to one another and each other’s well-being, or taking each other as ends, or sharing deliberative standpoints or living life together, or a whole host of other things, and much less about mutual emotional vulnerability and sharing and being in one another’s hearts. Surely one explanation of philosophers’ reticence is that talk of “the heart” seems unavoidably metaphorical. Analytic philosophers look for cash to underwrite metaphorical promissory notes. It turns out to be easy enough, however, to cash the metaphor in if we just take “heart” to refer to a cluster of emotional susceptibilities that have an essentially reciprocal and reciprocating structure. The heart aims at heartfelt connection—at shared experience of joy and sorrow, hope and fear, and other emotions “of the heart.” We seek naturally to share these feelings with others and must suppress our natural tendencies if we wish to avoid doing so. Our heart’s wish is to be open to other hearts in the hope that they will be open to ours, and thereby us, in return. Of course, we do not want the very same heartfelt connection with everyone. Rejection from some hurts us more than rejection from others; and likewise for heartfelt acceptance. Still, we are not completely indifferent to the indifference or coldness of even utter strangers, and we find it necessary to defend ourselves against it, for example, by humor or anger. “Cold-hearted” and “warm-hearted” . . . more metaphors. But we know instantly what they mean. Someone is cold-hearted if they hold their emotional cards close to their vest and close themselves to emotional engagement. And they are warm-hearted if they are contrariwise disposed. They are cold-hearted if they act without regard to others’ emotional vulnerabilities, to what will hurt others’ feelings, and warm-hearted if they are considerate of and responsive to others’ feelings, putting them at ease emotionally. Perhaps you can begin to see the topic opening before you. (Philosophical open-heart surgery?) When we talk about our feelings being hurt, we are not talking about bad sensations, like mere physical pain. “Hurt feelings” appears in P. F. Strawson’s catalogue of what he calls “reactive attitudes” in his justly famous and influential “Freedom and Resentment.” Strawson does not really define “reactive attitudes.” He gives some central characteristics (e.g., that they are felt from a “participant” or, as I put it, “second-person” standpoint), and his most influential examples, resentment, guilt, and blame—what he calls “indignation”—mediate mutual accountability. The Heart and Its Attitudes provides a systematic account, arguably the first, of reactive attitudes in general, both those involved in accountability and those that mediate heartfelt connection. The Heart and Its Attitudes has several intended audiences. I write, in the first instances, for philosophers and students of philosophy, at whatever stage, to try to convince them that the heart and heartfelt phenomena are rich sources of philosophical investigation. I believe this is so intrinsically and also because such investigations can shed light on phenomena that have proven philosophically puzzling. But I also intend this book for the general public. It hopes to show that understanding the nature of heartfelt attitudes and their role in mediating personal and social relations, including in healing profound emotional injuries—wounds to the heart—can help us to see what might repair even terrible harms, such as those of war or chattel slavery and its legacy in the United States. Feature image by Alexander Grey via Unsplash, public domain. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Awkward? We’d better own it We live in a golden age of awkwardness. Or so we’re told, by everyone from The Washington Post to Modern Dog Magazine. But we always have. A 1929 Life Magazine contributor writes, “These are awkward times, and I sympathize with the teashop waitress who approached a customer from behind and said brightly, ‘Anything more sir, I mean madam; I beg your pardon sir.’” What’s new isn’t awkwardness itself, but our upbeat attitude towards it; headlines tell us that post-Covid, “We’re all socially awkward now,” and public health campaigns urge us to “embrace the awkward” and talk openly about issues like mental health. But while reducing the stigma around mental health, addiction, and other issues is a good thing, we should be wary of our tendency to embrace awkwardness—or at least, we should be aware of the way in which we selectively celebrate awkwardness, and who gets left out of the embrace. The idea that being socially awkward is a personality trait—and a sign of superior intelligence—has become a mainstay of writing about the (predominantly white and male) worlds of tech and finance. From Mark Zuckerberg to the recently disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, the socially awkward genius is a familiar figure in the news these days. It’s found in fiction, too: Sherlock Holmes, even our beloved Mr Darcy. In these men, awkwardness is seen as not only excusable, but laudable—the true genius can’t be bothered with social niceties; he doesn’t notice such things. But this stereotype rests on a misconception about where awkwardness originates. In fact, people aren’t awkward—situations are. And one reason situations become awkward is because of individuals’ willingness to disregard others’ social cues, needs, and feelings. The myth of the awkward misfit is harmful when it’s used to license antisocial behavior, but it’s also used to exclude and stigmatize the neurodivergent, the disabled, and other marginalized groups. That’s not to discount the fact that some people have more difficulty than others at detecting social cues; these individuals may feel, and be perceived as, awkward. But when we label people “awkward,” we attribute the problem to them, rather than to our failure to make social expectations clear. Programs like Rochester Institute of Technology’s Career Ready Bootcamp train autistic students in the so-called “soft skills” needed to succeed in job interviews and the workplace—skills such as where to look while talking (between the eyes, as a substitute for eye contact) and how to interpret and respond to open-ended questions (like “tell me something about yourself”). But this shouldn’t be a one-way process: employers can make interviews more accommodating, too, by asking more specific questions, or de-emphasizing the roles of small talk and considerations of whether a candidate will be a good “fit” in hiring decisions. Indeed, the emphasis on awkwardness as a personality trait disproportionately burdens people who don’t conform, for various reasons, to our social norms regarding speech patterns, eye contact, or body type. It’s no coincidence that the “geniuses” I mentioned above are all relatively affluent, successful white men. When we see awkwardness as a property of individuals, our choice about whether or not to accept or even celebrate it intersects with other forms of bias and prejudice. Our cultural assumptions about awkwardness put women at a double disadvantage. Whether in the workplace or at home, women are disproportionately tasked with “emotion work” like facilitating social interactions, smoothing over social discomfort, and managing others’ feelings. When conversations get uncomfortable, it’s women’s work to repair them. On the other hand, we stigmatize conversations about salaries, periods, postpartum bodies, etc., and these conversations are bound to get uncomfortable. More problematically, we’re prone to see that awkwardness as caused by the person who brings them up, and not by the social norms or stigma around the issues themselves. Our fear of being perceived as awkward, or of being seen as “making things awkward,” can function as a form of silencing, suppressing conversations about important issues like salary gaps, menopause, and microaggressions. I’m not saying that the desire to embrace awkwardness, and to celebrate self-proclaimed awkward people, is a bad thing. Our fear of awkwardness and our desire to avoid awkward encounters is real, and we would be better off, in many cases, if we got more comfortable with discomfort. But all too often, we treat powerful people as if they’re immune from social expectations, tolerating or even celebrating their disregard for social norms as a sign of intelligence. As long as we embrace or celebrate awkwardness as an individual trait, we risk embracing a solution that reproduces existing social biases and inequality. The intersection of awkwardness, gender, and status empowers some to disregard social conventions, while using those same conventions to keep others quiet. What’s the alternative? First, we should be aware that awkwardness is a product of all of our discomfort with certain topics. It’s not something individuals cause or have. It’s the result of insufficient or inadequate social guidance for how to handle an issue. Second, where we do feel uncomfortable talking about issues, we should take that as an indication and an opportunity to improve our social infrastructure, clunky and odd as that process may seem. For example, many professors now ask students to share their pronouns on the first day of class. For some older faculty, this process may feel awkward. Over time, it becomes less so. And often, avoiding awkwardness comes at the expense of someone else’s discomfort: for example, the students who faced the choice between being the only ones to share pronouns or being consistently misgendered. The work of discussing menopause or menstruation should be shared by everyone—not left to women. New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ recent press conference discussing menopause and women’s orgasms may have made many viewers (myself included) cringe, but it’s a step in the right direction. Making topics like sex, health, disability, and neurodiversity less awkward to discuss will take work, and that work shouldn’t selectively burden members of marginalized groups. Finally, we should look for areas where our social cues may not be accessible to everyone, and make our expectations more explicit. And if, after all that, someone still seems to disregard others’ comfort and our social norms around workplace behavior? Maybe he’s not so awkward after all. Maybe he’s just a jerk. Feature image by Campaign Creators via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Beyond God and atheism What are we doing here? What’s the point of existence? Traditionally, the West has been dominated by two very different answers to these big questions. On the one hand, there is belief in the traditional God of the Abrahamic faiths, a supreme being who created the universe for a good purpose. On the other hand, there is the meaningless, purposeless universe of secular atheism. However, I’ve come to think both views are inadequate, as both have things they can’t explain about reality. In my view, the evidence we currently have points to the universe having purpose but one that exists in the absence of the traditional God. The theistic worldview struggles to explain suffering, particularly in the natural world. Why would a loving, all-powerful God choose to create the North American long-tailed shrew that paralyses its prey and then slowly eats it alive over several days before it dies from its wounds? Theologians have tried to argue that there are certain good things that exist in our world that couldn’t exist in a world with less suffering, such as serious moral choices, or opportunities to show courage or compassion. But even if that’s right, it’s not clear that our creator has the right to kill and maim—by choosing to create hurricanes and disease, for example—in order, say, to provide the opportunity to show courage. A classic objection to crude forms of utilitarianism considers the possibility of a doctor who has the option of kidnapping and killing one healthy patient in order to save the lives of five other patients: giving the heart to one, the kidneys to another, and so on. Perhaps this doctor could increase the amount of well-being in the world through this action: saving five lives at the cost of one. Even so, many feel that the doctor doesn’t have the right to take the life of the healthy person, even for a good purpose. Likewise, I think it would be wrong for a cosmic creator to infringe on the right to life and security of so many by creating earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters. Looking at the other side of the coin, the secular atheist belief in a meaningless, purposeless universe struggles to explain the fine-tuning of physics for life. This is the recent discovery that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in a certain, very narrow range. If the strength of dark energy—the force that powers the expansion of the universe—had been a little bit stronger, no two particles would have ever met, meaning no stars, no planets, no structural complexity at all. If, on the other hand, it had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity, and the universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the big bang. For life to be possible, the strength of dark energy had to be—like Goldilocks’ porridge—just right. For a long time, I thought the multiverse was the best explanation of the fine-tuning of physics for life. If enough people play the lottery, it becomes likely that someone’s going to get the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with enough variety in the numbers in their ‘local physics,’ then statistically it becomes highly probable that one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life to exist. However, I have been persuaded by philosophers of probability that the attempt to explain fine-tuning in terms of a multiverse violates a very important principle in probabilistic reasoning, known as the “Total Evidence Requirement.” This is the principle that you should always work with the most specific evidence you have. If the prosecution tells the jury that Jack always carries a knife around with him, when they know full well that he always carries a butter knife around with him, then they have misled to jury—not by lying, but by giving them less specific evidence than is available. The multiverse theorist violates this principle by working with the evidence that a universe is fine-tuned, rather than the more specific evidence we have available, namely that this universe is fine-tuned. According to the standard account of the multiverse, the numbers in our physics were determined by probabilistic processes very early in its existence. These probabilistic processes make it highly unlikely that any particular universe will be fine-tuned, even though if there are enough universes one of them will probably end up fine-tuned. However, we are obliged by the Total Evidence Requirement to work with the evidence that this universe in particular is fine-tuned, and the multiverse theory fails to explain this data. This is all a bit abstract, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose you walk into a forest and happen upon a monkey typing in perfect English. This needs explaining. Maybe it’s a trained monkey. Maybe it’s a robot. Maybe you’re hallucinating. What would not explain the data is postulating millions of other monkeys on other planets elsewhere in the universe, who are mostly typing nonsense. Why not? Because, in line with the Requirement of Total Evidence, your evidence is not that some monkey is typing English but that this monkey is typing in English. In my view, we face a stark choice. Either it is an incredible fluke that these numbers in our physics are just right for life, or these numbers are as they are because they are the right numbers for life, in other words, that there is some kind of “cosmic purpose” or goal-directedness towards life at the fundamental level of reality. The former option is too improbable to take seriously. The only rational option remaining is to embrace cosmic purpose. Theism cannot explain suffering. Atheism cannot explain fine-tuning. Only cosmic purpose in the absence of God can accommodate both of these data-points. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Flow of time: reality or illusion? Real time of space-time is one of the dimensions on which we comprehend and describe reality. Time neither flows, nor flies, or drags on; it doesn’t run out and is not a commodity that can be wasted. But human feelings and sensations of the passage of time are diametrically different: human time flows, speeds up or slows down. We can also be short of it, or we can be called time-wasters. So, human time does not appear to be in the least like physicist’s time. And yet they are intimately related: the first emerged from the latter, together with humans, their consciousness, societies they built, and languages they speak. But what exactly is this flow of time? And what do different languages tell us about the nature of human time? What theories can we plausibly put forward in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, or linguistics (to name a few) to explain this phenomenon? Does it even exist in the first place, or, perhaps, as many philosophers argue, the feeling of time passing is merely an illusion? Perhaps it is not a sensation of time flow but instead a sensation of something else, like the experienced change of events that we describe to ourselves erroneously as the flow of something we just call “time,” to give this big unknown a helpful label. Time becomes that thing that we (think we) experience, and an entrenched concept in our beliefs (say, that time passes quickly or slowly), knowledge (that death is inevitable), or fears (that I am going to be late). Speaking about timeIn order to understand human time, we have to ask not only how we think and speak about time but also what it is that makes us think and speak about it in a certain way. We have to look into the experience of time passing, the relation between time and emotions, or the role of time in understanding the evolving (and ageing) self. An important source of information is expressions we use for locating events in time. This can be done through grammar (grammatical tense, such as past, present or future), aspect (such as an activity being in progress or being completed), and modality (such as certainty or the mere possibility of an event); the repository of “time words” a language has (yesterday; in September; within six hours); and through the implied, suggested meanings where the sentence does not contain any of the above overt devices because the specification of the location in time would feel redundant, as in: A: Shall we watch Netflix? B: I’m doing my homework.
What languages reveal and hideLanguages do fascinating things with time. In some, like English, a sentence clearly indicates whether an event has already happened, is happening, or will happen. Other languages do no such thing: they have no grammatical tenses. And these are not just flukes of human invention—examples are ample: Yucatec Maya, Mandarin Chinese, Paraguayan Guaraní, Burmese (Sino-Tibetan), Dyirbal (Australian Aboriginal, Pama-Nyungan), West Greenlandic (Kalaallisut, Eskimo-Aleut), Hopi (Uto-Aztecan), or Hausa (Chadic, Afroasiatic), to name a few. Yet others, like Thai, use their tenses sparingly. This opens up the possibility to draw attention to different aspects of the same reality through different ways of speaking about it—perhaps focusing not on when, but on how exactly, to what extent; or whether what the speaker is saying is reliable or just hearsay. Or perhaps whether the event is desired or not. The latter can be exemplified in Yucatec Maya. For example: Tàak in xok-ik le periyòodiko-o’ DES 1Sg read-INC(3Sg) DEF newspaper “I want/wanted/will want to read the paper.” Adapted from Bohnemeyer, Jürgen, 2002. The Grammar of Time Reference in Yukatek Maya. München: Lincom Europa, p. 6
“DES” is a marker of desiderative aspect-mood. It shows that the grammar of Yucatec Maya foregrounds the fact that reading the newspaper is the speaker’s wish. This information takes precedence over information as to whether the object of the wish was, is, or will be the case, which remains unspecified. “INC” stands for a grammatical marker of the incomplete status of the activity of reading a newspaper, “1/3Sg” for the grammatical person and number (compare English “I” and “it”), and “DEF” for a marker of definiteness (compare English “the”). Moreover, the human understanding of time can follow the “time stays we go” way or the “time flows” way, as in examples (1) and (2) respectively, both using the metaphorical schema of time as space. - We are approaching the New Year.
- The New Year is approaching.
This can be done by viewing the future as lying ahead of us, as in English, or as being behind us, unknown, and as such still hidden from view, as in Māori. And yet, most linguists and philosophers agree that what lurks under the surface of this immense cross-linguistic variation is something universally human—something imposed on our conceptualization of reality by the very fact that we are human and share the human way of perceiving and processing reality; we are born and then endure through life, stringing along everything that happens as part of one story: a life story. Once we have reached this level of understanding of human time—time as weaving life stories by humans, on the level of reality on which human consciousness emerged—we can go so much further. We can begin to understand that, ultimately, the universe may not have any “past” or “future” written into them; or it may not even have an “arrow of time,” but instead be symmetrical, directionless. And then we can go back and ask again: If the universe does not have flowing time, or even is directionless, then how is the experience of flowing time possible? Perhaps it itself is an illusion? And how can we get to the bottom of this feeling of time passing? At that point, possible answers are beginning to emerge. Getting togetherThe sensation that we call the passage of time and the concept of time itself are still big unknowns. But chipping at human time from the direction of the nature of the universe on the one hand and human nature on the other has recently produced important dents in this unknown. For example, we are beginning to understand how free will can be reconciled with the tenet that it emerged from the universe where the past and the future might be equally determined in that the universe itself might be symmetrical. We are also beginning to understand how the immense diversity with which we express temporal thoughts in different languages and cultures is only a patina on something universal. We are also getting better at scientific accounts of the incorrect judgements of time intervals and their causes—that is, time “speeding up” or “slowing down,” say, under the influence of emotions. But all this takes dedicated, concerted, inter- and cross-disciplinary efforts to tackle this big unknown, to understand human time—serious conceptual and experimental work but generating lots of excitement and fun in the process! Featured image via Unsplash (public domain) OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 The art of philosophy The “philosophy of art” in Anglo-American analytical philosophy has had barely any influence on the main epistemological, ethical, and metaphysical concerns of that philosophy. By setting up a specific domain of questions concerning the ontological status of “art and its objects,” the meaning of “expression,” “do I like it because it is beautiful or is it beautiful because I like it?,” and the like, reflection on whether participation in art might itself be a means of doing philosophy is effectively precluded. For analytical philosophy, art is instead an object to be explained like any other. In contrast, if one looks at the history of aesthetics in modern philosophy, a central concern is its initiation of new ways of questioning the status of “subjective” and “objective” that are occasioned by fundamental social, economic, and political changes. One manifestation of this questioning is precisely a concern with the potentially damaging effects of an exclusively objectifying stance towards the world, where nature is seen in solely “mechanical” terms, as a system of laws. The dominant philosophical alternative to the emergence of modern aesthetics derives from sceptical questions prompted by Descartes’ attempt to make the subject the ground of philosophy. The ensuing questions have a considerable influence on subsequent philosophy, but, looked at within their historical context, can also seem somewhat puzzling. At the moment when, not least via figures like Descartes himself, the modern mathematically based sciences begin to produce knowledge claims that generate more and more practically useable results—and plausible explanatory theories—a significant part of modern philosophy consists of repeated, never definitive, attempts to refute epistemological scepticism. This situation is what leads John Dewey to see modern philosophy, in The Quest for Certainty, as involving: “the complete hold possessed by the belief that the object of knowledge is a reality fixed and complete in itself, in isolation from an act of inquiry which has in it any element of production of change.”
Seeking to ground cognitive relationships to the world in such terms can lead to a neglect of the fact that knowing things is only one of the ways in which we relate to them, and so can distort philosophical interpretations of the world. Further historical changes, which help give rise to the “aesthetic” alternative at issue here, are that the scientific developments are accompanied by the emergence of the modern philosophical concern with art and the beauty of nature; by new conceptions of language that see it as an active part of “human nature,” not as something divinely created; and by the commodification of objects in the new capitalist economy, which changes the very nature of what an object may be. Commodification can be linked to the modern sciences insofar as in both the value of particular things is subordinated to objectifying forms of identification, in the rendering equivalent of objects qua exchange values, and in the form of general scientific laws. The new concern with aesthetics can be construed in part as a reaction to what is neglected by such forms of identification, and this links to a new attention to the manifold ways in which what Cassirer terms “symbolic forms,” which include both language and the arts, constitute the world we inhabit. If more weight is given to these developments, a different trajectory of modern philosophy emerges. Rather than priority being given to questions of knowledge and the construction of theories in separate epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical domains, in this alternative account the ways in which sense is both made and put at risk when the idea of a “ready-made world” is put in doubt become the main concern. Epistemological scepticism is interpreted in this view as itself a symptom of a wider concern in modernity with “meaning,” as what connects us to a post-theological world and makes things matter. An epistemological response to this is seen here as inherently one-sided because it gives primacy to an observational stance that involves a scepticism-inducing separation of subject and object, whereas our main mode of existence is actually through active participation in the world, in which global sceptical doubts play little, if any, role. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor refer to “contact theories” in this respect, as opposed to “mediational theories” of the kind that result from the perceived subject-object split. “The arts can in significant respects be seen themselves to be philosophical.”
The “aesthetic dimensions” become manifest when the world is regarded as a shifting context of meanings, rather than as the totality of knowable objects. This is why the associated changes in conceptions of nature, that occur from the latter half of the eighteenth century onwards, are linked to fundamental changes in how language is conceived. From being that which designates things in a pre-existing world order, it becomes what constitutes a world of meanings. Cassirer suggests that language is now not primarily to be thought of in terms of logic, but rather in terms of aesthetics, because particular languages and forms of language give rise to differing kinds of understanding, expression, and articulation. The world in this sense can now be seen, for example, through ways in which participation in music may alter how we relate to it. This is reflected in the simultaneous change in status of music in the eighteenth century that meant it was no longer just attached to religious ritual or a mere accompaniment to social activities, and—as the rapid development of music from Bach to Schoenberg shows—explores how what previously made no sense can make sense in new musical configurations. At the same time, the world is also what is fundamentally transformed when commodification changes the very sense of what objects are. Attention to ways in which the ensuing objectification and obscuring of the particular value of things can be questioned are crucial to the role of the arts in constituting new perspectives on nature in modernity. Most importantly, the changes at issue here mean that the arts can in significant respects be seen themselves to be philosophical. If modern philosophy seeks to make sense of the world without relying on metaphysical guarantees, the arts can be regarded as forms of philosophical practice. Alva Noë asserts in Strange Tools that art “is itself a mode of investigation, a style of research, into the crucial questions that interest us, e.g. our human nature.” It is obviously not the case that participation in the arts therefore results in epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, or theoretical arguments. Through what the early German Romantics saw as its “infinite interpretability,” art responds instead to the always partial nature of our takes on the world and creates new ways of participating in the world. Given that philosophical theories almost constitutively fail to achieve the kind of consensuses that form much of the basis of the modern sciences, and are therefore inherently provisional, exclusion of the arts from philosophy is essentially a form of dogmatism. As I try to show in Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy, exploring these issues points to the need for a philosophical approach that sees the arts themselves as philosophical resources, and in which the aesthetic implications of the work of thinkers as diverse as Montaigne, Hume, Kant, Schelling and the early German Romantics, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Karl Polanyi, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, and Adorno, can reveal neglected or repressed dimensions of a world in which so much is now in question. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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