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I must begin by thanking Jaak Panksepp and Douglas Watt (P & W) for the attention they have given my recent book and the effort they have made to deal with its substance. In their text they indicate that they share many of my views and that they have opted to focus their appraisal on areas of disagreement. That is where I will focus my reply as well.
The issues raised by P & W can be divided into two groups: one group concerns several misunderstandings of my positions; another concerns genuine differences of point of view. I will address the misunderstandings first.
P & W profess admiration for my last book, The Feeling of What Happens, especially in regard to a number of issues over which, after reading of Looking for Spinoza, they now disagree with me. Considering that I have not changed my views on any of those issues, it is reasonable to wonder what could possibly have caused this misunderstanding. Out of courtesy and modesty, perhaps I should simply take the blame and say that it is all my fault, that I simply should have made my writing more clear so that P & W would not be so confused. Unfortunately, it is not so easy. I have no doubt I could have made myself more clear, but perhaps some of the misunderstandings come from reading the material with an attitude that I can only describe as militant. That attitude, which I have previously encountered in the presentations of one of the reviewers, Jaak Panksepp, tends to interfere with a fair appraisal of ideas. It pertains to three tenets:
That what counts in the neuroscience of emotions and feelings are processes that occur subcortically, especially in the brainstem, and even more especially in the periaqueductal gray.
That animals in general and mammals for certain have feelings and consciousness as much as humans do.
That feelings are inseparable from emotions and share their motor-action nature.
Panksepp's views of research on emotion are filtered through these three tenets, and only work that passes the litmus tes