Descartes' Error - Wider Influence

Wider Influence

Damasio's book is widely acknowledged to be a 'work with far-reaching implications for understanding mental life'. Partly in consequence, there is 'at present introduced by literature such as Damasio's Descartes' Error...a trend to include (or rather rehabilitate) the body and its movement into the research of the social and behavioral sciences'.

In literature too 'it is Damasio who seems to be the key inspiration behind the dismantling of the emotion/reason dichotomy'.

Richard Webster writes that the appearance of Descartes' Error is encouraging for those who see the traditional dichotomy between reason and feeling as artificial and damaging, noting that it contests the division on the basis of both clinical experience and the findings of modern neuroscience. Webster comments that Damasio's argument is relevant to ideas that he develops in his 1995 book Why Freud Was Wrong.

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