Emotions, Myths and Theories

The English title promises a book this is not. It sounds like a survey of feeling; it is a dense and patient treatise on the theory of knowledge.

Its subject is the ancient quarrel between the senses and reason - sensationalism against rationalism - and the problem running under that quarrel since Plato: how thought gets out of the animal and into the human head. The chapters take up the history of the dilemma, whether Hume thought animals perceive the world, time and space as objective entities, myth and logic, and the social premisses of reason. Emotions do appear, but as the affective ground of sensory reflection - the positive or negative charge an organism puts on what it perceives - rather than as the topic.

The author's foreword supplies the real title: this is a revised version of his monograph on the sensory, the rational and experience, published by Moscow University Press in 1976.

That also dates it. The Progress edition is genuinely of the mid-1980s, commissioned for translation into English and Swedish, but the thought is a decade older, and it reads like its real date rather than its printing date: developed socialism used without embarrassment, and nothing anywhere that would betray the later 1980s.

For a reader interested in Soviet epistemology as an argument rather than a catechism - and in a serious attempt on the relation between perception, emotion and conceptual thought - it repays the misleading cover.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.