ABSTRACT
Philosophers have always wreaked a bit of havoc on the common language. But in the case of the vast population of the emotions (we tentatively employ this term as a class name, synonymous with “phenomenon of the affective or emotional sphere”), this violent simplification is endemic and surprising. In the age of Descartes and for centuries after, the term passions played the major role. All sorts of things, along with others that we today have come to designate in the same way, were grouped under this single term: feelings, moral dispositions, moods, states of mind, and emotions. “Emotions, ” in the lingua franca of contemporary philosophy, is a word which has come to be employed with the same all-inclusive generality. Even the recent, beauti ful book by Martha Nussbaum, Upheaveals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emo tions (2001), is no exception to this general trend. Despite the wealth of empirical and literary examples provided, Nussbaum does not seem to feel the need for a terminological and conceptual distinction between, say, a fit of anger and a long-term affection, such as love for one’s parent-qualified, however, as a “background” emotion. (Compare the following, for instance:
Calabi, 1996; Damasio, 1994; De Sousa, 1987, 1995; Goldie, 2000; Magri, 1999; Oksenberg Rorty, 1980; Tappolet, 2000. )
On the other hand, the choice of the term matters little. Something de cidedly worse than the conventional adoption of a general term could oc cur: the adoption of an erroneous theory which reduces all the diverse affective phenomena to one, and furthermore provides it with a general characterization which is mistaken.
