ABSTRACT
The aim of this introduction is to offer a survey of the philosophical issues raised by the study of negative emotions. It starts by emphasizing the complexity of our attitudes towards negative emotions and their central roles in our attachments to values. Next, it presents the issues discussed in the fourteen chapters of the volume. It describes the theoretical challenges related to the contrast between positive and negative emotions, the incapacity to imagine what goes against our normative views, the apparent rationality of ambivalent emotions and the possibility of mixed affective states. Beyond these broad theoretical issues, the study of any negative emotion raises more specific but no less important issues. The remainder of the introduction presents those of these issues that structure the volume: the complexity of the emotion of being moved; the nature of feelings of unfamiliarity; the possibility of being disgusted by beauty; the role of disgust in the understanding of stench; the place of anxiety in virtuous agency; the positive and negative aspects of grief; whether shame and contempt deserve a place in morality; the relation between negative emotions and racism; and the desirability of getting rid of jealousy.
