Books

Books : reviews

Antonio Damasio.
Descartes' Error: emotion, reason and the human brain.
Vintage. 1994

Antonio Damasio.
The Feeling of What Happens: body, emotion and the making of consciousness.
Vintage. 2000

Antonio Damasio.
The Strange Order of Things: life, feeling, and the making of cultures.
Pantheon Books. 2018

From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture.

The Strange Order of Thing is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the nourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular existence and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. In The Strange Order of Thing, Damasio gives us a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it.