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Emotion
Book

Emotion

The Science of Sentiment

Oxford UP, 2001 Mehr

automatisch generiertes Audio
automatisch generiertes Audio

Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Engaging

Recommendation

This layman’s guide to the emotions is a delightful walking tour through the gardens of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, not to mention popular culture. Author Dylan Evans proposes the thesis that emotions are an evolutionary necessity that plays an important role in ensuring human survival. He demonstrates his thesis with anecdotes and illustrations. Though it delivers some intellectually rigorous material, this is not an intellectually rigorous book. It is more of a long, agreeable, rambling monologue. getAbstract.com highly recommends it to those who would read it primarily for pleasure, and secondarily suggests it as a useful overview of the evolutionary role of emotions. Its ample bibliography can guide those who are interested in exploring the subject in greater depth.

Take-Aways

  • Enlightenment philosophers recognized that emotions are necessary to human life and to the cohesion of society.
  • Romantics opened a breach between reason and emotion by extolling emotion.
  • Some basic emotions seem to be hard wired into the human species, innate and invariable, notwithstanding cultural differences.

About the Author

Dylan Evans is a philosophy research fellow at King’s College, London. He is also the author of Introducing Evolutionary Psychology and Rethinking Emotion.


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