Christine Tappolet is a philosopher, academic, and author. She is a Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Montreal, and has authored and edited several books including, Emotions, Values, and Agency, and Philosophy of Emotion: A Contemporary Introduction.
Tappolet's research interests revolve around the field of ethics, with a particular focus on metaethics, moral psychology, and emotion theory. Her main research interest is the philosophy of emotion, including the role emotions play in values, beliefs, and actions.
Tappolet served as the President of the Société Analytique de Philosophie (SOPHA) from 2012 to 2015 and the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) from 2020 to 2022.
Education
Tappolet completed undergraduate studies at the University of Geneva, in Philosophy, German and English studies. She then graduated with an MA from King's College London in 1989, and subsequently earned an M.Phil. in 1992 at the University of London. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Geneva under the supervision of Kevin Mulligan in 1996.
Career
Tappolet started her academic career in 1997 as an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Montreal. She was promoted to associate professor in 2002, and subsequently to Full Professor in 2008. She also was the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Metaethics at the University of Montreal between 2004 and 2013. She was invited as the Distinguished Visiting professor in the Centre for Moral and Political Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2019.
Between 2009 and 2021, Tappolet was steering an interuniversity research group on normativity, Le Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur la Normativité (GRIN). From 2012 until 2014, she directed an ethics research center, the Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM). As its Founding Director she supervised this center’s transformation into an interuniversity research cluster funded by the FRQ, the Centre de Recherche en Éthique (CRÉ), which she directed until 2021.
Research
Tappolet has published close to 100 journal articles and book chapters. Her research interests include epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical ethics, especially metaethics and moral psychology, as well as, centrally, the philosophy of emotions and values.
The nature of emotions
While investigating emotions, Tappolet developed an account of emotions in terms of perceptual experiences. She argued that emotions have representational, evaluative content: they involve represenstations of their intentional objects as possessing evaluative features. When you admire an artist, for instance, you represent the artist as being admirable. Furthermore, according to her, such affective states are analog representations that have non-conceptual contents, that is, contents that are not conceptually articulated. Accordingly, there is no need to possess an evaluative concept such as admirableness to experience admiration. According to the so-called Perceptual Theory, emotions play a central role in human agency: emotions are closely connected to values, decision and action. With Mauro Rossi, she has argued that the Perceptual Account is better placed than the Attitudinal Theory developed by Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni to account for the relationship between emotions and values.
Relatedly, Tappolet has examined the common claim that emotion necessarily involve motivation. Focusing on the case of fear, she has argued that even an emotion like fear need not involve motivation. Accordingly, there are "contemplative emotions", such as fear directed at the past or at fictional entities. Incidentally, she also argued that fear need not concern one's own well-being. Pace Martha Nussbaum, we can for instance feel fear for perfect strangers.
Tappolet also researched the nature of negative emotions in general. In particular, she assessed the theoretical implications of the existence of negative emotions, holding that even if the many ways in which emotions can be negative makes for a difference with standard perceptual experiences, the Perceptual Theory is not threatened.
Nonetheless, Tappolet recently has argued that the Perceptual Theory should be replaced by a theory of emotions that better accounts for the differences between emotions and sensory perceptual experiences. This novel theory, called the "Receptive Theory", holds that emotions have to be modelled on analog representations of magnitudes, such as distance and number.