You are invited to the first session of the 2025–2026 edition of the CRÉ Graduate Fellows’ Seminar.

On this occasion, Melissa Hernandez-Parra and Vincent Rochelle will present their work. Each presentation will last approximately 20 minutes and will be immediately followed by a discussion of about 25 minutes.

The aim of the Seminar is to provide our graduate fellows with constructive feedback and critical discussion in order to help them strengthen their research projects. It also offers them the opportunity to practise delivering an academic presentation in a format comparable to that of scholarly conferences. We very much hope that many of you will join us for this activity, which we intend to be especially formative.

Both presentations will be in French, but questions may be asked either in French or English. 

Program

        1) 3:00–3:45 p.m. – Presentation by Melissa Hernandez-Parra, PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Christine Tappolet.

En défense du relativisme modéré des attributions de responsabilité 

This presentation is part of a research project devoted to the variability of moral and legal responsibility attributions and their normative implications. Starting from the observation that our responsibility-attribution practices vary significantly across social, cultural, and institutional contexts, the project questions the idea that there are unique and universal criteria for determining, independently of practice, who is responsible and under what conditions.

In the first part, I present the relativist argument from genuine disagreement. According to this argument, the persistence of deep and rationally intractable disagreements about the conditions of responsibility provides reason to doubt a strict normative objectivism regarding responsibility. I then examine several classic objections to this position, including the risk of scepticism and the difficulty of accounting for moral critique and moral progress.

In the second part, I defend a pluralist response to these objections. I argue that responsibility attributions can be objectively justified within plural normative frameworks structured by distinct values and aims. This pluralism makes it possible to acknowledge genuine disagreement while preserving a form of normative objectivity tied to the function of moral responsibility, as well as the possibility of critique across frameworks. The goal is thus to propose an account of responsibility attributions that is sensitive to the diversity of practices without abandoning the idea of a shared criterion of responsibility attribution across different social groups.

        2) 3:45–4:30 p.m. – Presentation by Vincent Rochelle, PhD candidate in Philosophy at Université Laval, under the supervision of Catherine Rioux. Vincent will present via Zoom (link below).

Penser une théorie cohérente des sentiments existentiels

Theories appealing to existential feelings have flourished since Matthew Ratcliffe (2008) introduced this class of mental states, described as pre-intentional feelings of the subject’s relation to the world (Ratcliffe 2009, 2012, 2018). These states make it possible to name everyday affective experiences that lack specific objects and that the philosophy of emotions typically relegates to mere figures of speech (feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, in harmony with the world, alive, etc.), while also allowing for a more accurate description of the phenomenology of psychopathological states (such as loss of motivation in depression or feelings of unreality in schizophrenia). They also provide a way of theorizing affective states more fundamental than standard emotions, such as basal hope (Calhoun 2018; Milona and Stockdale 2018), which may function as a condition of possibility for particular hopes. One can also anticipate potential implications for other affective states—such as deep boredom or certain forms of anxiety—that the philosophy of emotions has so far struggled to adequately capture (Elpidorou and Freeman 2019).

These new applications of existential feelings regularly criticize theoretical shortcomings in Ratcliffe’s original account (Saarinen 2018; Fitzpatrick 2023), in particular his appeal to the category of the pre-intentional. These divergences have prevented the development of a coherent and unified theory of existential feelings that would genuinely articulate the various intuitions put forward by different authors.

I propose an alternative conception of existential feelings, departing from Ratcliffe’s account, whose aim is to establish coherent definitional criteria and to unify these theories. The central claim is that existential feelings are indeed intentional, but that they possess objects that differ markedly from those of emotions. I argue that the objects of existential feelings are the states of possibility faced by an agent, and that these feelings are individuated by the modal—rather than evaluative—properties they represent. On this view, existential feelings provide a necessary (though not sufficient) cognitive basis for emotions of uncertainty and for their motivational character. Finally, I describe four existential feelings that appear to account for the phenomena discussed by the various authors.

Chair: Ryoa Chung (UdeM)

To attend via Zoom, click here (Meeting ID: 818 6254 4190; Passcode: 9Me2EW).