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Joy, sorrow, jealousy, and awe -- these
and other feelings are the stuff of our daily lives. Thought
to be too private for science to explain and not essential
for understanding cognition, they have largely been ignored.
But not by Spinoza, and not by Antonio Damasio. Here, in
a humane work of science, Damasio draws on his innovative
research and on his experience with neurological patients
to examine how feelings and the emotions that underlie them
support the human spirit's greatest creations.
Antonio Damasio, widely recognized as one
of the world's leading neuroscientists, has long been investigating
the neurobiological foundations of human life. In Descartes'
Error he explored the importance of emotion in rational
behavior, and in The Feeling of What Happens he used
feelings to explain the basis of the self. Damsio's new
book focuses on what feelings are and reveals the biology
of our survival mechanisms. It rediscovers a thinker whose
work prefigures modern neuroscience, not only in his emphasis
on emotions and feelings, but also in his refusal to separate
mind and body. Together, the scientist and the philosopher
help us understand what we are made of and what we are here
for. Based on laboratory investigations but mindful of society
and culture, Looking for Spinoza offers unexpected
grounds for optimism about the human condition and is a
masterwork of science and writing.
Antonio Damasio is the Van Allen Distinguished
Professor and head of the department of neurology at the
University of Iowa Medical Center and is an adjunct professor
at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. The recipient
of numerous awards, Damasio is a member of the Institute
of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After reading
Damasio's first book, Descartes' Error, Jonas Salk
wrote, "You will never again look at yourself or at
another without considering what goes on behind the eyes
that so meet." Damasio's second book, The Feeling
of What Happens, was selected as one of the year's ten
best by the New York Times Book Review editors. Both
books are translated in more than twenty languages and are
taught in universities worldwide.
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