Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.

Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., (2003). First Edition, stated. Octavo, black & orange textured boards (hardcover), gilt letters, x, 355 pp. Fine in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: 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. H ere, in a humane work of science, Damasio draws on his innovative research and on his experience with (truncated) 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. Damasio’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 an 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. (Inventory #: vita5987)