After having completed graduate studies at King’s College London and at the University of London (M.A. 1989, M.Phil. 1992), I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Geneva under the supervision of Kevin Mulligan (PhD. 1996). I joined the Philosophy Department of the Université de Montréal in June 1997. Since 2009, I am heading a research group on normativity, the GRIN. In January 2012, I became Director of CREUM. I supervised its mutation into an interuniversity research centre, the CRÉ, which I head since its establishment in May 2014.

My main research interests lie in ethics and more specifically in meta-ethics and moral psychology. Research concerning moral realism and moral epistemology lead me to study the nature of emotions and their relation to value judgements. I thus argued that emotions consists in perceptual experiences of evaluative properties. (Tappolet 1995, 2000, 2016). Emotions are still one of my main research interests. My publications in this domain, some of which has been lead in collaboration with Luc Faucher (UQAM) and Mauro Rossi (UQAM), bear on the relation between emotions and attention, on the modularity and plasticity of emotions, and on the relationship between emotions and well-being. In collaboration with Ruwen Ogien (CNRS, Paris), I have also worked in normative ethics, and have examined the relationship between values and norms (Ogien & Tappolet 2009). I have also been interested in the relationship between practical judgements, actions and rationality, and more specifically the nature of phenomena such as procrastination and weakness of will (Stroud & Tappolet 2003). The nature of well-being and its links to emotions and values are at the heart of my current projects.