  One of the major problems concerning cooling flows is the nature of the
mechanism powering the emission lines of the optical filaments seen in the
inner regions of cooling flows. In this work we investigate the plausibility of
Alfv\'en heating (AH) as a heating/excitation mechanism of optical filaments in
cooling flows. We use a time-dependent hydrodynamical code to follow the
evolution of cooling condensations arising from the $10^7$ K cooling flow. The
filaments contain magnetic fields and AH is at work at several degrees of
efficiency (including no AH at all). We consider two damping mechanisms of
Alfv\'en waves: nonlinear and turbulent. We calculate the optical line emission
associated with the filaments and compare our results to the observations. We
find that AH can be an important ionizing and heating source for class I
filaments in the line-ratio scheme of Heckman et al. In addition, AH can be an
important contributor to [OI]$\lambda 6300$ emission even for the more luminous
class II systems.
