My research interests concern the connections between Husserlian phenomenology, psychoanalysis (Freudian and some contemporary), and continental thought on sensibility. The thematization of sensibility and alterity, as found in Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, in the formation of "I" and in some of sociality (notably that of Husserl on intersubjectivity) is the subject of current research.

I am also interested in Nietzsche's philosophy of forces in bodies, and his attempt to rethink European values. Finally, I am also interested in the distinctions between 19^th-century rational psychology in German speaking cultures (Herbart, Brentano) and Revolutionary psychiatry in France (Pinel, Esquirol, and later, Charcot, among others).

My main research interests are in ethics and more specifically in meta-ethics and moral psychology, a field at the confluence of moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and empirical psychology. Research concerning moral realism and moral epistemology lead me to study the nature of emotions and their relation to value judgements. I thus argued that emotions consist in perceptual experiences of evaluative properties (Tappolet 1995, 2000). Emotions are still one of my main research interests. My publications in this domain, some of which have been produced in collaboration with Luc Faucher (UQAM), bear on the relation between emotions and attention, and on the modularity and plasticity of emotions.

In collaboration with Ruwen Ogien (CNRS, Paris) I have also worked in normative ethics, and have examined the relationship between value judgments and ethical judgments (Ogien & Tappolet 2009). I have also been interested in the relationship between evaluative judgments and actions, and more specifically the nature of phenomena such as weakness of will (Stroud & Tappolet 2003). The question of the relationship between autonomy, rationality and emotion is key to my future research.