Damasio is the first to admit that he cannot prove all he says. In the meantime, one can read with pleasure and share the...
Few neuroscientists today would defend Cartesian dualism—the idea that mind and body are separate—but Damasio takes one more leap: Not only are philosophers wrong to separate brain and body, but psychology's separation of reason from emotion is also wrong.
Most neuroscientists agree that what we call the mind reflects the functions of the nervous system—in short, crudely speaking, the body. Modern science, however, has transferred the old mind- body split into a brain-body dichotomy in which the brain occupies a hierarchically privileged place. But Damasio (Neurology/Univ. of Iowa College of Medicine) democratizes the relationship between brain and body; he posits a powerful interdependence in which our physical experience of the world around us is central to the creation of our sense of self, and colors our behavior. His persuasive argument begins with Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railway worker who suffered brain damage when an iron rod shot through his head like a missile, destroying his left eye and parts of his frontal lobes. The result was not a loss of speech or memory but profound personality and emotional changes and an inability to make rational judgments about the present and future. Damasio and his wife, Hanna, have studied patients with similar frontal-lobe damage and similar effects: IQ, memory, and language are intact, but there is a lack of feeling and an inability to put current events in context and make future judgments. These points are eloquently expressed, along with the anatomical/physiological evidence linking the frontal cortices with sensory-motor areas and emotional networks that feed forward and backward from the body surface and internal organs.
Damasio is the first to admit that he cannot prove all he says. In the meantime, one can read with pleasure and share the excitement of a neuroscientist who sees that in the union of the many parts of the human brain lies its strength.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13894-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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