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Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Philosophy of Mind)

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This is an interesting and challenging book.

Challenging, not in the sense of being difficult, but in terms of its presentation of an array of ideas that are not as well known as they should be.

A central concept is that emotions are not simply generated in the brain, but are instead our perceptions of changes in the body. This idea has long history stretching back to the Ancient Greeks, the Ancient Taoist writers and some Hindu philosophers. In more recent times the fundamental thesis can be traced back the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James, who is often - and with good reason - called the father of modern psychology. In recent years Antonio Damasio from the University of Iowa has not just resurrected the idea, but expanded and developed it.

Yet there is obviously more to an emotion of fear than an increase in heart rate. Therefore some researchers have proposed that emotions are a form of environmental perception, while other have suggested that though an emotion might start with a physical perception, that perception is leavened by constant judgments concerning our relationship with our environment.

Jesse Prinz from the University of North Carolina takes the theory an important step further. He argues that emotion is a form of perception that tells us something about our well being. When we feel an emotion, it is first of all derived from the body. Yet we all have the experience of emotions being meaningful. In the Prinz scheme of "embodied appraisals," emotions are body derived, meaningful, but they do not require either judgment nor cognition. They just are. He also goes to some lengths to distinguish between emotions and other affective states, like moods and motivations.

This is an attractive model, that takes account of our personal experiences, as well as clinical observations, and the ways in which some people respond better to body therapies than to talk therapies.

The theory will doubtless need to be revised as more information is gathered about the mind/brain/body connection. But this is a book which will be of great interest to anyone interested in these connections, or for anyone who works with or experiences emotional issues.

It requires some background in basic neuroscience and psychology, but it is a book that will repay a little effort many times over.

Prinz's book is another, though particularly sophisticated, attempt to rehabilitate William James' theory of emotion in philosophy. It draws upon Prinz's wide-ranging and thorough knowledge of recent work done in cognitive neuroscience and marries this with his avowed commitment to empiricist principles.
Basically, the trick Prinz plays is as follows:
James claimed emotions were the perception of certain feelings or sensations (not perceptions or judgments of states of affairs in the world that bring about the feelings, as the cognitivists claim). For James, we have these sensations in response to states of affairs in the world, and then we perceive those sensations (we perceive our cold sweat and raised heartbeat as fear). It is our perception of this sensation that IS the emotion.
Now, the upshot of James's theory is that our emotions are arational or irrational irruptions in an otherwise rational life.
Cognitivists have contested this. Authors such as Solomon in The Passions, Kenny in his now classic Action, Emotion and Will, Goldie in The Emotions, the cognitivist psychologist Richard Lazarus in his Emotion and Adaptation, Nussbaum in her (much maligned) Upheavals of Thought, Gabriele Taylor in her Pride, Shame, and Guilt and so on have all argued, contra James, that emotions are constituted by judgements or evaluative beliefs (or intentional feeling in Goldie's version).
Prinz seeks to rehabilitate James but in a manner that doesn't imply that emotions are arational or irrational. He wants to revive James's theory though made more robust through the adoption of some of the insights of cognitivism--chiefly Lazarus's version. Prinz does this by imbuing those gut reactions with psychosemantic content by rendering Lazarus's notion of core relational themes sub-personal. You might find this move of Prinz's to be either an ingenious piece of philosophical theory or a peice of hopelessly flawed metaphysics. Phil Hutchinson has argued forcefully in his Shame and Philosophythat the latter depiction is most accurate (and he then offers an alternative framework for understanding emotion: "world-taking cognitivism"). Wherever one stands, Prinz's book should not be ignored. Just, don't believe the hype!