ABSTRACT
According to Aristotle, what is common to all emotions is the presence of pleasure or pain. He says, ‘By passions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendly feeling, hatred, longing, emulation, pity, and in general the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure or pain … (EN II 5; 1105 b 21–23, emphasis added). In this definition Aristotle has certainly pointed to one essential feature of those mental phenomena that we call emotions, for it is impossible to think of an emotion that would not be coloured by the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. (We prefer the modest word ‘unpleasure’ to the excessively strong ‘pain’.)
