Ethical Pessimism in Bergson

The Socratic Bergson

Against Pessimism in Tuberculosis

Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurolog...

Optimism and pessimism in trust

Artificial agents do not exist in the world in solitude. They are required to interact with others, and thus must reason in some fashion about those they interact with. This paper presents a view of trust which artificial agents can use to help in such reasoning processes, providing them with a means to judge possible future behaviour on the basis of past experience. The paper discusses the not...

Optimism and Pessimism in Games

This paper considers the impact of ambiguity in strategic situations. It extends the existing literature on games with ambiguity-averse players by allowing for optimistic responses to ambiguity. We use the CEU model of ambiguity with a class of capacities introduced by Jaffray and Philippe (1997), which allows us to distinguish ambiguity from ambiguity-attitude, and propose a new solution conce...