Passionate Engines shows that our best understanding of emotion has important implications for understanding intentionality, rationality, phenomenal consciousness, artificial intelligence, and other issues. Some theories of mind, of action, and of moral psychology, and some approaches in artificial intelligence, are shown to be inconsistent with our best understanding of emotions. However, our best understanding of emotions also suggests fruitful new approaches to the challenges of these disciplines. There are three additional themes. First, the book introduces a version of a t ... More

Passionate Engines shows that our best understanding of emotion has important implications for understanding intentionality, rationality, phenomenal consciousness, artificial intelligence, and other issues. Some theories of mind, of action, and of moral psychology, and some approaches in artificial intelligence, are shown to be inconsistent with our best understanding of emotions. However, our best understanding of emotions also suggests fruitful new approaches to the challenges of these disciplines. There are three additional themes. First, the book introduces a version of a theory of some emotions called the affect program theory. This theory is defended against social constructionist and cognitivist views of emotion, and shown to be able to account for the rationality of emotions and our ability to emote for fictions. Second, the book defends the hierarchical view of mind. Part of this view is the thesis that the primary topic of the study of mind and artificial intelligence is autonomy, and not the skills typically associated with intelligence. Third, the book challenges the simplistic associations that naturalism has come to have in much contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that science typically complicates and enriches, instead of eliminating and reducing, our view of natural phenomena.