ABSTRACT
Antonio Damasio (1994, 2000), one of the world’s leading neurologists, suggested that emotion is part and parcel of cognition. In doing so, he challenged the received wisdom that emotion (as distinct from extreme emotions) interferes with wise decisions. In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Damasio (2000) suggests that we need to overcome the ‘obstacle of self’ (ibid., p. 8) by understanding three closely related phenomena:
• An emotion • The feeling of that emotion • Knowing that we have a feeling of that emotion.
