"Impressively comprehensive, unfailingly sensible, and made all the more appealing by its hip-pocket readability, Hot Thought will be a godsend to instructors in philosophy and cognitive science."
-- Patricia S. Churchland, UC President's Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego

Contrary to standard assumptions, reasoning is often an emotional process. Emotions can have good effects, as when a scientist gets excited about a line of research and pursues it successfully despite criticism. But emotions can also distort reasoning, as when a juror ignores evidence of guilt just because the accused seems like a nice guy. In Hot Thought, Paul Thagard describes the mental mechanisms-cognitive, neural, molecular, and social-that interact to produce different kinds of human thinking, from everyday decision making to legal reasoning, scientific discovery, and religious belief, and he discusses when and how thinking and reasoning should be emotional.