Feeling faint: Review essay of A.H. Modell - Imagination and the Meaningful Brain.

H. Looren De Jong

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The two books reviewed here address cognitive science’s (in)adequacy in accounting for meaning and feeling, rationality and empathy. Modell offers a broadly psychoanalytic perspective on the creation and transformation of feeling, loosely mixed with some semi-popular philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience. From a Wittgensteinian-hermeneutic perspective, Heal sketches a new idea of empathy (mind reading) intended to mark the divide between hard science and the normative, subjective and rational aspects of mind, and thus to keep eliminativism at bay. Whereas Modell’s book is somewhat casual and ecumenical and draws on empirical science, Heal’s work consists of dense conceptual analysis in the style of analytic philosophy. Unsurprisingly, neither has the final word on explaining human feeling and reasoning. © 2005, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)265-276
JournalTheory and Psychology
Volume15
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2005

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