I introduce the Belief-Desire Appraisal Theory of Emotion (BDA). BDA makes three main claims: (a) Emotions are psychological episodes whose paradigmatic instances are constituted by coordinated changes in appraisals, action tendencies, bodily responses, and subjective feelings; (b) appraisals-which are rapid, low-level evaluations of situational relevance to one's concerns-drive and explain the changes in the other components; and (c) appraisals are operations on belief-desire pairs (this is BDA's central claim). Thus, BDA treats belief-desire pairs as the central explanatory components of emotions. This enables unificatory and parsimonious explanations of psychological phenomena across philosophy and cognitive science.
Monism regarding hypocrisy's wrongness maintains that there is a single, sui generis wrong of hypocrisy. This paper challenges hypocrisy monism and offers an alternative, hypocrisy disjunctivism, which maintains that the wrongness present in any token case of hypocrisy is always reducible to other, more basic wrongs. Hypocrisy disjunctivism, however, faces a fruitfulness challenge: Why have a concept that names a disjunction of wrongs at all in our normative vocabulary? I answer that "hypocrisy" solves a unique practical problem in allowing speakers to hold normatively inconsistent agents accountable for the wrongs, whatever they may be, that beget these agents' normative inconsistency.
External world skepticism is often thought to entail that we should suspend judgment about the existence of the external world. I challenge this orthodoxy by arguing that, when combined with a plausible principle of ontological parsimony, the skeptical challenge intensifies into an argument for outright disbelief in the external world. The principle in question instructs us to prima facie disbelieve in undetectable postulates. This bears on the skeptical challenge because, by the skeptic's lights, the external world and its constituents qualify as undetectable. This result poses problems for concessive responses to skepticism, such as entitlement-based and pragmatic strategies.
Modal views of luck, influential in epistemology, hold that luck is characterized by modal fragility. They face a well-known challenge: Lackey's Buried Treasure cases, which suggest that an event can be both lucky and modally stable. I argue that this challenge assumes that if two events are each modally stable, their conjunction is also modally stable. This assumption fails for conjunctions of independent, contingent events. When component events arise from independent, uncoordinated causal chains, their convergence can be modally fragile even though each component is modally stable. This handles Buried Treasure and reestablishes the plausibility of modal views of luck.
I develop an axiomatic system of mereology that accounts for the ways in which musical works can be said to have parts. I distinguish two fundamental modes of composition that musical works exhibit: successive composition, whereby sound events are concatenated in time, and simultaneous composition, whereby sound events occur at the same time. I define various relations of parthood in terms of these operations and study the general principles governing them. I prove that they share some basic properties with the relation of parthood of classical mereology but depart from classical mereology in important respects concerning decomposition and composition principles.
