Abstract
The contemporary controversy between cognitive and neurobiological theories of emotions is genealogically tracked back to its origins within early modern theories of passions. Descartes and Spinoza are presented as the most important figures in this genealogy, since they tried to explain passions and other affects, on one hand, by their intermediate physiological causes and, on the other, by concatenation of mental processes leading to emotions.
After critical analysis of reductionist tendencies in merely cognitive and biological accounts of emotional experience, the books proposes a phenomenological theory, where emotions are defined as a specific ways of behaving. Such a redefinition of emotions in terms of conducts is able to reunite subjective conscious experience with the 3rd person accounts of experience, instead of reducing them to mental states or results of an objective process happening in our brains.