Whither Humanity? Emotional Mind Begs Rational Assessment

Rami Gabriel and Stephen Asma’s book The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition sketches an ambitious research agenda that centers the explanation and understanding of human experience in our embodied, emotional makeup. It argues for a new evolutionary paradigm that naturalizes the understanding of mind, knowledge, and culture, and emphasizes the affective over the cognitive. I argue that they mischaracterize the role that rationality and philosophical theories of rationality play in understanding and shaping our experience. Furthermore, I argue that the book is insufficiently critical about the emotional origins of the theories it explores, which leads to its uncritical acceptance of androcentric ideas and it all but ignores the great and growing problems of group-based inequality whose roots are in the overriding effect of affect.