Loving, wondering and knowing: our mental life and all its aspects

Our mental lives are composed of various, diverse aspects. For example, we know some facts, believe things to be a certain way, enquire into some mysteries, ask ourselves some questions, love some people, animals, and objects, like and enjoy some activities, foods and colours, hope for some things to happen, etc.

In philosophy there has always been a tendency to prioritize knowledge and belief, so that the other crucial and vast parts of our mental lives have been either simply disregarded or analyzed on the model of knowledge and belief.

Knowledge and belief are traditionally taken to be attitudes toward propositions, which are generally taken to be abstract, complex, mind- and language-independent entities that are either true or false and that are not part of this world, but inhabit instead a curious Platonic heaven, where many think we can also find, for example, things like numbers, kinds and values. Thus the tendency has been to hold that we can analyse all our mental lives homogeneously, by seeing all its aspects as boiling down to relations to abstract propositions.

My project aims at opposing this tendency in various different ways that stem from an interdisciplinary approach to these themes, in which considerations in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and linguistics will all be crucial in solving the problems these themes lead to and the wider issues they raise.