Customer Reviews

Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions

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This superlative work belongs on the shelf of any serious student of art, literature, philosophy and psychology - not to mention those readers who seek self-knowledge. Author Jon Elster explores the complex cognitive antecedents and consequences of emotional experience. Noting that much of what society needs to know about emotions is inaccessible in the psychology laboratory, he makes original, insightful use of literary and philosophical sources. He uses the work of such authors as Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Michel de Montaigne, Jean de La Bruyère and Alexis de Tocqueville to examine how emotional mechanisms function. This approach sheds light on the emotions and on the way you might read literature or listen to music. We highly recommend this book and find it valuable not only for what it says, but for what it inspires. It is capable of changing how you think and feel in ways that are (just as emotions themselves) far from predictable.

I cannot praise this book enough. The writing is clear, the thinking is meticulous and infinitely clever, and the usefullness of understanding the different theories of the emotive being in the social scinces cannot be over-emphasized.

This book is Elster's best since "Political Psychology".

If you are not an Elster partisan, what is wrong with you?