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On Emotional Presentation, first published in German in 1917, contains the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong’s clearest and most developed account of the emotions and their relation to values. In this work, written toward the end of his life, Meinong argues that values are given in and through emotions but are also ontologically independent of these emotions or any subjective attitude.

Available again in English, with a new foreword by John J. Drummond that situates Meinong’s account within contemporary discussions of the emotions, this translation will be welcome to those interested in Meinong and his theory of objects as well as those interested in the philosophy of the emotions and values.

Melodrama is not just a film or literary genre but a powerful political discourse that galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence. Finding virtue in national suffering and heroism in sovereign action, melodramatic political discourses cast war and surveillance as moral imperatives for eradicating villainy and upholding freedom. In Orgies of Feeling, Elisabeth R. Anker boldly reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of melodrama and affect in contemporary politics. Arguing that melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power, Anker examines melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory. Building on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of "orgies of feeling," in which overwhelming emotions displace commonplace experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness onto a dramatic story of injured freedom, Anker contends that the recent upsurge in melodrama in the United States is an indication of public discontent. Yet the discontent that melodrama reflects is ultimately an expression of the public's inability to overcome systemic exploitation and inequality rather than an alarmist response to inflated threats to the nation.
 

What new insights become available for historians when emotions are included as an analytical category? This volume of Osiris explores the historical interrelationships between science and its cultures and cultures of emotions. It argues that a dialogue between the history of emotions and the history of science leads to a rethinking of our categories of analysis, our subjects, and our periodizations. The ten case studies in the volume explore these possibilities and interrelationships across North America and Europe, between the twelfth and the twentieth centuries, in a variety of scientific disciplines. They analyze how scientific communities approached and explained the functions of emotions; how the concomitant positioning of emotions in or between body-mind-intersubjectivity took place; how emotions infused practices and how practices generated emotions; and, ultimately, how new and emerging identities of and criteria for emotions created new knowledge, new technologies, and new subjectivities.