Philosophical approach to affective states

Discussions related to emotions flooded philosophical speculations of the
ancient, medieval and renaissance time and, to them, in the 17th and 18th century,
the modern mind added new concepts. To the psychologists’ “ordinary”
emotions, theologians, of the Judeo-Christian tradition, likewise, supplied their
“religious emotion-types”, i.e. gratitude, contrition, love of God, piety,
compassion, etc. The terminology expressing emotions changed with the change
of the approach and that of time. Thus, Aristotle’s pathos (i. e. pathos),
important in moral life, changed for the Roman Stoics into “emotion”, as they
adopted Cicero’s translation of the Greek pathos into the Latin perturbatio (i.e.
disturbance) and afterwards it turned out to be affectus (i.e. affect) for Seneca.
Stoics connected emotions to cognition and, throughout several centuries,
debated with the Epicureans on the place of emotions for a good life. Others
preferred passio (i.e. passion), connecting emotions with “suffering” and
“endurance”. Galen, the Greek physician and philosopher, pursued Plato’s
tripartite model of the human mind, i.e. the reasoning, the desiring, and the
emotive parts, and offered a biological and physiological basis of each one. His
theory of the body’s humors intended to explain a person’s dispositions and
temperament, i.e. sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. Descartes
described emotion as “passion” and meant by that “the perceptions, feelings or
emotions of the soul which we relate specifically to it, and which are caused,
maintained and fortified by some movement of the [animal] spirits”1. There are,
in his opinion, six primitive “passions”, i.e. wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and
sadness, and these could be the ingredients used for a good life. Spinoza’s
emotions, the affections of the soul, are yielded by one reality, encompassing
mind and body, and are responsible for making the difference on the quality of
life by motivating one to act or restrain. Hume challenged the inferior place of
passion in philosophy and disputed the role of reason. For him, emotions were
the very essence of human social and moral life. Hobbes called them also
“passions” and assimilated them to appetites and aversions whereas Kant
considered them as conative phenomena. Twentieth century Anglo-American
philosophy and psychology included emotions in cognitive processes as well and
for that behaviorism was one strong reason.

Dana SUGU & Amita CHATTERJEE (2010). Flashback: Reshuffling Emotions International Journal on Humanistic Ideology, 3 (1), 109-133