Criticism
Damasio uses Phineas Gage and other brain-damage cases to argue that rationality stems from emotion, and that emotion stems from bodily senses. However, the book's presentation of Gage's history and symptoms has been criticized as fictionalized. Others object that in using Descartes' name Damasio was knowingly or unknowingly employing a straw man; and that in fact 'the post-Cartesian medical tradition was well aware of the role of emotions in thinking'.
Read more about this topic: Descartes' Error
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)