| Popis: |
At Philebus 48a–50a, Socrates offers an account of “the laughable” and the mixture of pleasure and pain that constitutes our response to comedy. This account may generalize to our other emotional attitudes: they are complex responses to their intentional objects, often in tension and conflicted. This account of emotional attitudes, and of comedy in particular, may help to explain how the comic episodes described in the dialogues are designed to generate a response, not only in the described audience, but also, most importantly, in the reader. Because that response is conflicted, this chapter argues, it generates a felt puzzlement in its audience; and this—the phenomenology of comedy—is a provocation to attention and then reflection. The chapter considers three comic moments—in the Charmides, the Protagoras, and the Euthydemus—to illustrate how the response to comedy is brought to bear on questions of moral epistemology and how the emotional content of that response renders the moral questions pressing on the reader. |
