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The Anguish of Ivan Karamazov| old_uid | 17604 |
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| title | The Anguish of Ivan Karamazov |
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| start_date | 2019/03/26 |
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| schedule | 15h-17h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | In a striking passage of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevski describes Ivan Karamazov’s feelings as he approaches his father’s house. The goal of our paper is to provide a philosophical account of Ivan’s state of mind. On the basis of a brief typology of affective states, we argue that the anguish that Ivan experiences is best characterized as an occurrent affective state. But which kind of occurrent affective state is it, exactly? We consider the two main options. We examine whether Ivan’s anguish should be conceived of as an emotion, either a standard kind of emotion or an objectless emotion, and we offer reasons to think that Ivan’s anguish is neither. We then turn to the suggestion that Ivan’s anguish should instead be conceived of as a mood. We consider the main accounts of moods and argue that the answer is again negative. Finally, we argue that Ivan’s anguish belongs to a sui generis kind of affective state, which we tentatively propose to call ‘Dostoevskian affects’, and which is characterized by the fact that it bears on epistemically undetermined intentional objects. |
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| responsibles | Dokic |
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