Emotion in Agency : The Problem of Cartesian Mind-Body Dualism and a Corrective from Spinoza

A Spinoza-inspired view of the self makes sense of the way emotions are vital to how we move through the world.

Due to the pervasive influence of Cartesian mind-body dualism, emotion is most often considered incidental or even inimical to agency, and therefore are left out of current discussions of the agential self. However, this book explores how recent and ongoing developments in philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology are expanding traditional paradigms of the self, consciousness and mind, demonstrating that these central features of human existence necessarily include emotional, bodily and environmental factors. If the self can no longer reasonably be regarded either as narrowly mental or fundamentally separate from the world, we need a more constructive role for emotion in agency.
Renee England demonstrates, on one hand, that the legacy of Descartes’s mind-body dualism continues to impact both philosophical and scientific research into the self, emotion and agency, even when a more expanded approach to the self and mind is explicitly adopted. On the other hand, England argues that the work of Spinoza can fruitfully correct the ongoing effects of mind-body dualism, particularly when the radical nature of Spinoza’s monism is fully embraced. A Spinozist approach is furthermore strikingly compatible with contemporary perspectives. A model of the self, mind, and emotions developed from Spinoza and cashed out in contemporary terms effectively addresses key problems in both contemporary theory of emotion and prominent theories of selfhood. It reveals a relationship between emotion and agency that is both beneficial and essential.