Introduction

Over a century ago, early and classical phenomenologists such as Scheler, Stein, Husserl, Heidegger, Kolnai, and Sartre were already engaged in intensive discussions about the nature and function of emotions. Moreover, they offered detailed, sometimes book-length, analyses of specific emotions such as anxiety, fear or boredom, shame, disgust, hatred, or Ressentiment. Affects and emotions have played a central role in Western philosophy ever since they were introduced by Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek and Roman (Neo-)Stoics. They were extensively discussed as key factors in rhetoric, political life, moral psychology, and social interaction. Around the shift away from the cognitivist paradigm, R. Wollheim published On the Emotions, drawing heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis. Wollheim suggests that emotions originate in desires and are, roughly, sedimented mental dispositions. Phenomenological theories of emotions were simultaneously developed with the establishment of phenomenology as a distinct philosophical tradition.