Introduction

Perhaps one thought which lay behind the neglect was connected to something else which is no longer true: the emotions were characteristically thought of by philosophers as states which give rise to perturbation in what might roughly be called right thinking. The emotions will then be dealt with on their own terms—neither specifically mental nor specifically material. One could then set out to give an ontology of the emotions directly, rather than hying to assimilate emotions to less complex states. According to this 'commonsense ontology' approach, each emotion is a thing which we can identify and reidentify by its manifest features: thoughts, feelings, bodily changes, actions and expressions. Epistemology and emotions meet at two places. Damasio's experiments are ingeniously crafted to show that affectivity, far from being an occasional unwelcome interruption to decision-making and motivation, is essential for any decision to be efficacious in action.