Research Interests
Are feeling and acting part of thinking?
What is it like to exist in the world? And what does this mean for understanding the relationship between selves, world, and other people?
Thesis
Moral Agency: An Embodied Narrative Approach,
2013 – 2017, University of Edinburgh.
Publications
Hardt, R. (2018.) Storytelling agents: why narrative rather than mental time travel is fundamental. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences. 17(3): 535-554
Vierkant, T., & Hardt, R.(2015.) Explicit reasons, implicit stereotypes and the effortful control of the mind. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. 18(2): 251-26
How do we decide what is right?
My PhD asked, “What is the role of emotion in working out and acting on our values?”. Following J.D. Velleman, I argue that the emotional cadence we experience when we understand stories is a felt and action-orientated sense of what events mean to us. Stories are also a rational type of understanding: we can reflect on stories and, in doing so, change them. Because of their dual rational-emotional nature, storytelling capacities emerge with a felt sense of what is of higher worth - a sense that can be acted on.
Selected Talks
Narrative Understanding: Parts, Wholes, and Recombinable Systems
Presented at a Narrative Science conference, LSE, May 2019.
Storytelling Agents
Presented at European Society for Philosophy & Pscyhology, University of St Andrews, August 2016.
Emotion in Mental Time Travel and Narrative Understanding
Presented at European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions, University of Edinburgh, August 2015.
The Interdependence of Emotion and Sensory Experience
Presented at British Society for the Philosophy of Science, University of Manchester, July 2015.