Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition

The book begins with the view that human consciousness is essentially embodied and that our conscious experience of the world is structured by our lived bodily dynamics. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the animate, bodily-engaged dynamics of emotional experience. Because the essential factor in all emotion is conscious desire, emotions help to disclose a world of meaning and importance. They do so by focusing our attention, helping us to home in on salient facts, and allowing us to affectively frame our surroundings in accordance with what we care about. Cognitive processes of appraisal, sense-making, and interpretation therefore are not detached, intellectual processes, as some theorists suppose, but instead are infused with affect. Because emotions play such a crucial role in self-consciousness, moral evaluation, and social cognition, disruptions in emotive, bodily consciousness can lead to severe psychological impairments. Disorders such as schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism powerfully illustrate this.

ISBN 0230576974   Pages 272 ISBN13 9780230576971 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 470 Publisher Palgrave Macmillan   Published in Basingstoke Imprint Palgrave Macmillan   Series title New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science Format Hardback   Height (mm) 223 Publication date 17 Dec 2010   Width (mm) 143 DEWEY 128   Spine width (mm) 22 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

Series Editors' Preface Acknowledgements Introduction The Essential Embodiment Thesis Essentially Embodied, Desire-Based Emotions Sense of Self, Embodiment, and Desire-Based Emotions The Role of Emotion in Decision and Moral Evaluation Essentially Embodied, Emotive, Enactive Social Cognition Breakdowns in Embodied Emotive Cognition Conclusion Notes References Index

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