Jerome Dokic

EHESS-Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Institut Jean-Nicod, Faculty Member

Philosophy +2

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Papers

The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Self

by Margherita Arcangeli, Jerome Dokic, and Marco Sperduti

In Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, ed. F. Cova and S. Réhault, Bloomsbury, 2018

The sublime emerges in the history of philosophy as the object of an aesthetic experience very of... more The sublime emerges in the history of philosophy as the object of an aesthetic experience very often contrasted with the aesthetic experience of the beautiful. While the latter experience is mainly positive and pleasurable, the former experience is characterized by ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, the sublime involves an overwhelming vastness, or power, which disturbs and unsettles. On the other hand, the sublime poses a challenge, which is enlightening and elating. The overall experience of the sublime is also frequently associated with the feeling of the insignificance of human life, of our smallness compared to the grandeur we are confronted with. In the light of recent psychological and neuroscientific studies, we claim that the sublime gives rise to an aesthetic experience that, contrary to the experience of the beautiful, involves a diminished sense of the self. More precisely, sublimity experiences are immersive and tend to blur the distinction between the self and the world. Our claim has implications for a vexed question about the sublime, namely whether it is restricted to natural scenes or extends to artworks. We suggest that in favourable conditions, art can elicit sublimity experiences. We then offer a roadmap to test our claim within an experimental setting, with special focus on music and virtual reality devices to deal with the immersive character of sublimity experiences.

Affective Memory: A Little Help from Our Imagination

by Margherita Arcangeli and Jerome Dokic

In New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory, ed. K. Michaelian, D. Debus and D. Perrin, Routledge, 2018

When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modif... more When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modified form at the phenomenological level of our present memory. When it does, we experience what is sometimes called an “affective memory.” Theorists of memories have disagreed about the status of affective memories. Sceptics claim that the relationship between memory and emotion can only be of two types: either the memory is about a past emotion (the emotion is part of what is remembered), or it causes a present emotion (the emotion is a separable effect of the memory). We argue that there is a third option, which points to an emotional way of representing the past situation. Drawing from Peter Goldie’s account of mental narratives, we show that three levels of mental perspective are involved in memories: the perspective of the represented subject (the character, if there is one), the perspective of the representing subject (the author), and the intermediary perspective of the narrator (who may remain virtual). Affective memories are cases in which the narrator’s emotional perspective has direct implications for the author’s emotional perspective, even if the former typically differs from the latter.

Le corps en mouvement : les relations entre l'action, l'intention et le mouvement corporel

Revue De Theologie Et De Philosophie, 1992

Jerome Dokic

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