Uku Tooming
Biographic Data
| ID | 1530163 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Uku Tooming |
| GIVEN NAMES | Uku |
| FAMILY NAME | Tooming |
| SIGNATURE | TOOMING U |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tartu |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4632-7979 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The guise of the good in the story of one's life
According to the Guise of the Good (GG) thesis, desire represents its object as good in some respect. A common strategy for defending this thesis has been to appeal to intuitive cases where an agent's behavior can only be made intelligible by assuming that the motivating desire is evaluative. This article offers an alternative defense by demonstrating how a diachronic perspective, which considers an agent's desires over the course of her life, st…
What does pleasure want
Some philosophers and psychologists share an assumption that pleasure is by nature such that when an experience is pleasurable, an agent is motivated to continue having that experience. In this paper, I dispute this assumption. First, I point out how it does not make sense of the wanting-liking distinction in motivational neuroscience. Second, I present as a counterexample what I call’dynamic pleasure’ which does not motivate retaining one’s focu…
Fading prospects of hermeneutic mental fictionalism
This paper examines the prospects of hermeneutic mental fictionalism as a descriptive account of folk commitments regarding mental state discourse. According to fictionalism, mental state talk arises from interpreting behavior through the lens of these public, shared representations. However, this paper argues that this view struggles to adequately account for the developmental and cross-linguistic data on the acquisition and use of some mental s…
Imagination as a generative source of justification
One of the most exciting debates in philosophy of imagination in recent years has been over the epistemic use of imagination where imagination epistemically contributes to justifying beliefs and acquiring knowledge. This paper defends “generationism about imagination” according to which imagination is a generative source, rather than a preservative source, of justification. In other words, imagination generates new justification above and beyond …
Knowing When to Stop
What are the conditions under which an agent has an aesthetic reason to stop appreciating something? In this paper, I argue that such a reason is dependent not only on the aesthetic properties of the object of appreciation but also on the hedonic state of the agent. Virtuous aesthetic agents who are responsive to aesthetic reasons need to be sensitive to hedonic changes in relation to the object and to recognise when these changes make it appropr…
Desire's Own Reasons
In this essay I ask if there are reasons that count in favor of having a desire in virtue of its attitudinal nature. I call those considerations desire's own reasons. I argue that desire's own reasons are considerations that explain why a desire meets its constitutive standard of correctness and that it meets this standard when its satisfaction would also be satisfactory to the subject who has it. Reasons that bear on subjective satisfaction are …
Self-Knowledge of Desire
According to inferentialism about self-knowledge of desire, the basic way in which we come to know what we want is through inference. In this paper, I argue that in a wide range of cases of knowing one’s desire, inference is insufficient. In particular, I look at two inferentialist models, one proposed by Krista Lawlor and the other by Alex Byrne and look at the challenges that they face in securing safe self-ascriptions. In response to these dif…
How to keep up good appearances
It is not uncommon to think that having a desire involves taking its object to be good in some sense. This idea has been developed in two directions: either toward a view that understands the positive evaluation in terms of a judgment or belief or a view according to which the relevant evaluation is perception‐like. In this article, I defend a novel proposal that takes the positive evaluation of the object of desire to be a kind of imagining
Taste
Journal Article Taste: A Philosophy of Food Get access Taste: A Philosophy of Food Sarah E. Worth Reaktion books. 2021. pp. 256. £22.00 (hbk) Uku Tooming Uku Tooming University of Tartu, Estonia [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4632-7979 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, ayac027, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayac027 Published: 25 May 2023
Aesthetics of Food Porn
Enticing food photography which stimulates its viewers’ cravings, often given a dismissive label “food porn,” is one of the most popular contents in contemporary digital media. In this paper, I argue that the label disguises different ways in which a viewer can engage with it. In particular, food porn enables us to engage in cross-modal gustatory imaginings of a specific kind and an image’s capacity to afford such imaginings can contribute to its…
Politics of folk psychology
In this paper, I argue that by attributing beliefs the attributer is pushed toward taking a stand on the content of those beliefs and that what stand they take partially depends on the relationship between the attributer and the attributee. In particular, if the attributee enjoys a higher social standing than the attributer, the latter is disposed to adopt the attributed belief, as long as certain other conditions are met. I will call this view t…
Vividness as a natural kind
Imaginings are often characterized in terms of vividness. However, there is little agreement in the philosophical literature as to what it amounts to and how to even investigate it. In this paper, we propose a natural kind methodology to study vividness and suggest treating it as a homeostatic property cluster with an underlying nature that explains the correlation of properties in that cluster. This approach relies on the empirical research on t…
Being Familiar with What One Wants
Self‐ascriptions of desire seem to differ in their epistemic security. There are easy cases in which a sincere self‐ascription immediately counts as knowledgeable, and there are hard cases in which it is an open question whether an agent actually knows that they have the desire that they take themselves to have. In this paper, I suggest an explanation according to which whether a self‐ascription of desire is easy or hard depends on whether one is…
The Puzzle of Good Bad Movies
There are bad movies, and there are movies that are so bad that they are good. So-called good bad movies have received a lot of attention from critics and moviegoers in recent years. Many people, including those with good taste, are willing to invest their time and resources in watching and discussing them. In this paper, I will argue that the fact that aesthetically competent consumers of cinema are engaging with good bad movies challenges an in…
Vividness as a natural kind
Imaginings are often characterized in terms of vividness. However, there is little agreement in the philosophical literature as to what it amounts to and how to even investigate it. In this paper, we propose a natural kind methodology to study vividness and suggest treating it as a homeostatic property cluster with an underlying nature that explains the correlation of properties in that cluster. This approach relies on the empirical research on t…
Being Familiar with What One Wants
Self‐ascriptions of desire seem to differ in their epistemic security. There are easy cases in which a sincere self‐ascription immediately counts as knowledgeable, and there are hard cases in which it is an open question whether an agent actually knows that they have the desire that they take themselves to have. In this paper, I suggest an explanation according to which whether a self‐ascription of desire is easy or hard depends on whether one is…
The Puzzle of Good Bad Movies
There are bad movies, and there are movies that are so bad that they are good. So-called good bad movies have received a lot of attention from critics and moviegoers in recent years. Many people, including those with good taste, are willing to invest their time and resources in watching and discussing them. In this paper, I will argue that the fact that aesthetically competent consumers of cinema are engaging with good bad movies challenges an in…
Aesthetics of Food Porn
Enticing food photography which stimulates its viewers’ cravings, often given a dismissive label “food porn,” is one of the most popular contents in contemporary digital media. In this paper, I argue that the label disguises different ways in which a viewer can engage with it. In particular, food porn enables us to engage in cross-modal gustatory imaginings of a specific kind and an image’s capacity to afford such imaginings can contribute to its…
Politics of folk psychology
In this paper, I argue that by attributing beliefs the attributer is pushed toward taking a stand on the content of those beliefs and that what stand they take partially depends on the relationship between the attributer and the attributee. In particular, if the attributee enjoys a higher social standing than the attributer, the latter is disposed to adopt the attributed belief, as long as certain other conditions are met. I will call this view t…
Vividness as a natural kind
Imaginings are often characterized in terms of vividness. However, there is little agreement in the philosophical literature as to what it amounts to and how to even investigate it. In this paper, we propose a natural kind methodology to study vividness and suggest treating it as a homeostatic property cluster with an underlying nature that explains the correlation of properties in that cluster. This approach relies on the empirical research on t…
Desire's Own Reasons
In this essay I ask if there are reasons that count in favor of having a desire in virtue of its attitudinal nature. I call those considerations desire's own reasons. I argue that desire's own reasons are considerations that explain why a desire meets its constitutive standard of correctness and that it meets this standard when its satisfaction would also be satisfactory to the subject who has it. Reasons that bear on subjective satisfaction are …
Self-Knowledge of Desire
According to inferentialism about self-knowledge of desire, the basic way in which we come to know what we want is through inference. In this paper, I argue that in a wide range of cases of knowing one’s desire, inference is insufficient. In particular, I look at two inferentialist models, one proposed by Krista Lawlor and the other by Alex Byrne and look at the challenges that they face in securing safe self-ascriptions. In response to these dif…
How to keep up good appearances
It is not uncommon to think that having a desire involves taking its object to be good in some sense. This idea has been developed in two directions: either toward a view that understands the positive evaluation in terms of a judgment or belief or a view according to which the relevant evaluation is perception‐like. In this article, I defend a novel proposal that takes the positive evaluation of the object of desire to be a kind of imagining
Taste
Journal Article Taste: A Philosophy of Food Get access Taste: A Philosophy of Food Sarah E. Worth Reaktion books. 2021. pp. 256. £22.00 (hbk) Uku Tooming Uku Tooming University of Tartu, Estonia [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4632-7979 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, ayac027, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayac027 Published: 25 May 2023
Imagination as a generative source of justification
One of the most exciting debates in philosophy of imagination in recent years has been over the epistemic use of imagination where imagination epistemically contributes to justifying beliefs and acquiring knowledge. This paper defends “generationism about imagination” according to which imagination is a generative source, rather than a preservative source, of justification. In other words, imagination generates new justification above and beyond …
Knowing When to Stop
What are the conditions under which an agent has an aesthetic reason to stop appreciating something? In this paper, I argue that such a reason is dependent not only on the aesthetic properties of the object of appreciation but also on the hedonic state of the agent. Virtuous aesthetic agents who are responsive to aesthetic reasons need to be sensitive to hedonic changes in relation to the object and to recognise when these changes make it appropr…
What does pleasure want
Some philosophers and psychologists share an assumption that pleasure is by nature such that when an experience is pleasurable, an agent is motivated to continue having that experience. In this paper, I dispute this assumption. First, I point out how it does not make sense of the wanting-liking distinction in motivational neuroscience. Second, I present as a counterexample what I call’dynamic pleasure’ which does not motivate retaining one’s focu…
Fading prospects of hermeneutic mental fictionalism
This paper examines the prospects of hermeneutic mental fictionalism as a descriptive account of folk commitments regarding mental state discourse. According to fictionalism, mental state talk arises from interpreting behavior through the lens of these public, shared representations. However, this paper argues that this view struggles to adequately account for the developmental and cross-linguistic data on the acquisition and use of some mental s…
The guise of the good in the story of one's life
According to the Guise of the Good (GG) thesis, desire represents its object as good in some respect. A common strategy for defending this thesis has been to appeal to intuitive cases where an agent's behavior can only be made intelligible by assuming that the motivating desire is evaluative. This article offers an alternative defense by demonstrating how a diachronic perspective, which considers an agent's desires over the course of her life, st…
Philosophy (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Free Will and Agency (6 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (5 works)