Damasio's insight: the information from affect
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/contrastes.29.3.2024.19604Keywords:
emotions, Damasio, agency, cognitionAbstract
Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error (1994) is a landmark in the discussions regarding human mind and emotions, both for its characterization of emotions and for the role they play in our mental economy. In this paper I intend to extend the spirit of Damasio's approach showing that emotions are not only indispensable for decision making and rational thinking, but that they are also essential for agency. I will begin by offering a brief reconstruction of his proposal, emphasizing his improvements over the original Jamesian intuition (section I). Then, I will address the value of emotions for agency by synthesizing the contribution Damasio provided with his hypothesis of somatic markers and, secondly, by gathering other contributions that strengthen the argument for the influence of emotions on other aspects of our mental life (section II). Finally (section III) I will suggest a way of reinterpreting the phenomena presented, in order to integrate what I consider to be Damasio's insight, namely the revolution introduced at core of the conceptualization of emotions and their importance for agency.
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