Aurel Kolnai's pioneering work carefully dissects the experience of disgust. Although the main part of the book first appeared in 1929, it has only recently become known to English-speaking philosophers, because of the new philosophical concerns with emotions, the growing respect of phenomenology, and the associated interest in Kolnai as one of the great phenomenologists. Kolnai made a breakthrough in the phenomenology of aversion when he showed the "double intentionality" of emotions like fear, focusing on both the object of fear and the subject's concern for his own well-being, this being one of the ways in which fear differs from disgust. In a surprising yet persuasive move, Kolnai argues that disgust is never related to inorganic or non-biological matter, and that its arousal by moral objects has an underlying similarity with its arousal by organic material: a particular combination of life and death. Kolnai gives an analytic list of various kinds of disgusting objects (which should not be read just before lunch), and shows how disgust relates to the five senses.
On Disgust