Stephen Asma and Rami Gabriel on "The Emotional Mind"

In “The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition,” co-authors Stephen Asma and Rami Gabriel argue that emotions play a leading role in the evolution of the human mind.

Philosophy Professor Stephen Asma and Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Associate Professor Rami Gabriel authored The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition, a book that “reveals how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel.” The Emotional Mind will be published by Harvard University Press on April 15.

Both are Senior Fellows at the Research Group in Mind, Science, and Culture at Columbia College Chicago, as well as working artists.

Asma and Gabriel book cover

Asma and Gabriel “explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety.” The book “bring[s] together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, [and] offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique.” More information on The Emotional Mind can be found here.

To celebrate the release of The Emotional Mind, Asma and Gabriel will give a lecture on Thursday, April 18 at Seminary Co-op bookstore in Hyde Park, in partnership with Research Group in Mind, Science, and Culture at Columbia. Both authors will be joined in conversation with Dr. Dario Maestripieri. A Q&A and signing will follow the event. Optional event registration and additional event details can be found here.