Gurevich P.S. The Range of Human Emotions

Abstract: The article is devoted to the problem related to classifications of emotions. Many famous philosophers including Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and others paid attention to that issue. However, for many centuries emotional experience was viewed as part of cognitive activity but not autonomous expressions of human spirit. Philosophers cared more about the process of thinking rather than the process of feeling. That created obvious differences in interpretations of human and human mind. It can be believed that art covered that gap in philosophical and anthropological research. However, it is only the last decades that have shown the turn towards studying emotional but not cognitive activity of people. In his research Gurevich has used the methodology of philosophical anthropology. According to the author, the approach to the problem from the point of view of human nature may provide a better understanding of the problem. Psychologists divide feelings into basic and non-basic feelings. However, the range of emotions and feelings is quite different in different studies. Some researchers say there are 6 basic emotions, others speak aobut 7 basic emotions while it is almost impossible to actually count emotions. The author of the present article also discuss new classifications and gives a critical analysis of the above mentioned quantitative approach to studying the emotional world of human. For the first time in the academic literature the author emphasizes the conditional nature of the division of emotions into positive and negative ones. The author also focuses on such feature of emotions as their depth (intensity).   

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