Descartes' Error
.jpg?lang=en) The original paperback edition | |
| Author | António Damásio |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | 1994 |
| Pages | 312 |
| ISBN | 978-0-399-13894-2 |
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a 1994 book by neurologist António Damásio, in part a treatment of the mind/body dualism question. Damásio presents the "somatic marker hypothesis", a proposed mechanism by which emotions guide (or bias) behavior and decision-making, and positing that rationality requires emotional input. He argues that René Descartes' "error" was the dualist separation of mind and body, rationality and emotion.
Wider influence
Damasio's book was described by one reviewer as a 'work with far-reaching implications for understanding mental life'.[1]
Richard Webster wrote that the appearance of Descartes' Error was encouraging for those who see the traditional dichotomy between reason and feeling as artificial and damaging, noting that it contests the division on the basis of both clinical experience and the findings of modern neuroscience. Webster comments that Damasio's argument is relevant to ideas that he develops in his Why Freud Was Wrong (1995).[2]
Criticism
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Damasio uses Phineas Gage and other brain-damage cases to argue that rationality stems from emotion, and that emotion stems from bodily senses. However, the book's presentation of Gage's history and symptoms has been criticized as fictionalized.[3] Others object that in using Descartes' name Damasio was knowingly or unknowingly employing a straw man.[4]
Publication data
- Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Putnam Publishing, 1994, hardcover: ISBN 0-399-13894-3
- Harper Perennial, 1995 paperback: ISBN 0-380-72647-5
- Penguin, 2005 paperback reprint: ISBN 0-14-303622-X
See also
References
- ^ Goleman, p. 27
- ^ Webster, Richard (2005). Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: The Orwell Press. p. 617. ISBN 0-9515922-5-4.
- ^
See:
- Macmillan, M. (2000). An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-13363-6. pp.118-9, 331-2.
- Macmillan, M. (2008). "Phineas Gage – Unravelling the myth The Psychologist" (PDF). British Psychological Society, 21(9): 828–831, 830-1.
- ^ Lagerlund, p. 15
Further reading
J. Birtchnell, The Two of Me: The Rational Outer Me and The Emotional Inner Me (London 2003)
J. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience (OUP 1998)