Craig DeLancey - Passionate Engines. What Emotions Reveal about the Mind and Artificial Intelligence [2001][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: December 6, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0195142713 | ISBN-13: 978-0195142716
In this unique contribution to philosophical debate, Craig DeLancey shows that our best understanding of emotion provides essential insight on key issues in philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. DeLancey offers us a bold new approach to the study of the mind based on the latest scientific research, and provides an accessible overview of the science of emotion and explanation of the technical issues that arise, with minimal jargon.

Reviewed by George Graham, University of Alabama, Birmingham
Human emotional and affective life is so rich, naturally expressive and circumstantially variegated, that any attempt to philosophically theorize about it may appear, at first thought, ridiculous. The phenomena may seem to resist distinctively philosophical analysis. But philosophers on emotion, is this truly ridiculous? For three reasons, I believe, it is not.
In the first place, emotions are difficult to manage and often destructive. Philosophers are in the business of identifying how not to ruin lives. In the second place, emotions, can, in their essential complexity, be fecund bases from which to draw lessons about virtues and vices, means between extremes, the emotional modification of behavior – indignation, shame, gratitude, caring, love. To ruminate about such matters has been part of the philosophical enterprise since Plato and Aristotle.
In the third place, consider the fact that a lot of analytic philosophy of mind in the middle and later part of the last century worried in an a priori way about the concepts of mind, action, belief, desire, and so on. Where did it take us? Arguably, not very far. Accusatory voices from the sciences and from philosophers who admire science prodded philosophers of mind to appreciate that although conceptual inquiry, of some sort, is inescapable and science can profit from it, it is woefully incomplete and parochial unless tethered to scientific models and theories of relevant empirical data.
With the new century, the shift in appreciation is complete. Philosophers of mind now commune with scientists, and both populations are better for it. Real minds, not mere or only concepts, are central to the discipline of philosophy of mind. Emotions are among the data. Emotions are part of real minds.
Craig DeLancey’s book is a contribution to the philosophical analysis of real minds. To notice merely the main title of this book is to suspect, perhaps, that DeLancey writes in the traditions of those worried about destructive emotions or emotional virtues and vices. ‘Passionate engines’ suggests a machine running out of control or too steamy and hot to effectively compute. The subtitle, while less simmering, more accurately reports. DeLancey seeks convergence in our understanding of emotion and real minds between the best that various sciences have to offer and the best that philosophers have said. DeLancey is not trying to tell us how to keep from being emotionally destroyed or how to navigate between emotional extremes. He seeks to address a set of questions about mentality via exploration of emotion.

About the Author
Craig DeLancey is at SUNY Oswego.