Craig DeLancey - Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about the Mind and Artificial Intelligence

What Emotions Reveal About Mind and Artificial Intelligence

2002

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Copyright 2001 by Craig DeLancey
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeLancey, Craig, 1965
Passionate engines: what emotions reveal about mind and artificial intelligence / Craig
DeLancey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-19-514271-3
1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Emotions (Philosophy) 3. Artificial intelligence. I. Title.
BD418.3.D45 2001
128'.37dc21 00-066903

Goals of the Book

This book is a survey of what basic emotions reveal about some central problems of the philosophy of mind. Given their relative importance to our mental lives, emotions remain the mental phenomena most neglected by contemporary philosophy of mind and the sciences of mind. This is not to deny that important work has been done in our time in the philosophy and science of emotions; rather, it is to note that for the traditional interests of philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, and many others, emotions remain peripheral, sometimes even a seemingly irrelevant issue. This is a glaring exception not only because emotions play such important roles, but also because the last several decades have seen a tremendous growth in our scientific understanding of emotions. In this book, I will show that a proper accounting of some of the emotions is essential to many of those aspects of the philosophy and sciences of mind heretofore considered distinct from them. Given our increased knowledge about emotions, the time is now ripe for an overview of how they reflect on some of the theoretical issues of these disciplines. This book provides such a survey for five central issues: