 “Emotion” is a term that came into use in the English language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a translation of the French term “émotion” but did not designate “a category of mental states that might be systematically studied” until the mid-nineteenth century (Dixon 2012: 338; see also Dixon 2003; Solomon 2008). At the same time, many of the things we call emotions today have been the object of theoretical analysis since Ancient Greece, under a variety of language-specific labels such as passion, sentiment, affection, affect, disturbance, movement, perturbation, upheaval, or appetite. This makes for a long and complicated history, which has progressively led to the development of a variety of shared insights about the nature and function of emotions, but no consensual definition of what emotions are, either in philosophy or in affective science. 