Journal of Philosophy of Emotion Podcast · Journal of Philosophy of Emotion

JPE Book Symposium: The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition, Part 2

·1 hr 12 min·4 clips

Care becomes an action that results in healing, empowerment, and bonding.

1. Journal of Philosophy of Emotion Podcast Part 2 reviews Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel’s The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. 2. The speaker reads the symposium as a response to Asma and Gabriel, Owen Flanagan, Bangri Suk, and E-Cud, whose names anchor the exchange. 3. The episode asks what emotion, culture, and moral life amount to if mind and body are not separate. 4. Asma and Gabriel’s phrase “emotional mind/embodied mind” is set against dualistic hierarchies that treat emotion as suspicious or unreliable. 5. The speaker compares that framework with the Chinese heart-mind, xīn, and notes its link to qing and zhōng. 6. The episode says qing-zhong is more than an inner feeling and can be shared, embodied, and extended into a moral mind. 7. Asma and Gabriel’s seven affective systems are named as fear, lust, care, play, rage, seeking, and panic-grief. 8. Those systems are compared with the seven emotions in The Book of Rites: joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate, and desire. 9. The speaker stresses that grief, play, and care are treated as social emotions, not only human traits. 10. Chapter 4’s question, “Do non-human primates have culture?”, becomes a broader claim about learned forces in animal communities. 11. The episode lists cats, whales, birds, ants, fish, bees, and humans as examples of cultural transmission and learned coordination. 12. The speaker says culture can be transmitted through emotional contagion, conditioning, imitation, or simulation before language develops. 13. The care discussion moves from mammals to ethics, with care described as healing, empowerment, and bonding rather than a neural switch. 14. Carol Gilligan’s “the different voice of women” and Nell Noddings’s care ethics are used to argue that responsibility grows from connectedness. 15. The speaker questions whether injecting oxytocin into a selfish person could create care without an eco-ethics of interdependence. 16. The episode also cites Homo erectus child-rearing by grandmothers, aunts, uncles, siblings, and fathers as an expanded circle of care. 17. Tone stays critical and analytic, with long comparative passages and repeated qualification of Asma and Gabriel’s arguments. 18. The format is a symposium response, so the voice shifts between summary, critique, and direct quotation from the book and interlocutors. 19. Listeners interested in comparative philosophy, affective science, and Confucian ethics would get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a short, non-technical conversation would probably skip it.

As heard by us

A careful podcast discussion on why emotion belongs inside cognition, not beside it.

The discussion treats emotion as part of the architecture of thought, not as a decorative layer on top of it. It moves from the book's emotional mind thesis to embodied mind, then into comparative references, evolutionary function, and the problem of emotional correctness.

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You want a rigorous case for emotion as part of cognition, with no tidy dualism.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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