Event Detail

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, despite being a work of fiction, remains unsurpassed for its description of dying as the ultimate transformative experience and still holds untapped insights for philosophy. I will use Tolstoy’s story for the following philosophical ends. My first aim is to investigate dying as a transformative experience. This will involve adjudicating between two rival philosophical interpretations of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, one by Frances Kamm who argues that Ivan does undergo a transformative experience, and the other by Gerald Lang who argues that he does not. My second aim is to describe in phenomenological terms what I will call “the ungraspability of death.” This will involve defending Freud’s claim that “one’s own death is beyond imagining” against Shelly Kagan’s criticisms of it. My third aim is to use Tolstoy’s story to show the failures in Heidegger’s account of death. My fourth and final aim is to show how Tolstoy’s story culminates not in a denial of death, as Daniel Rancour-Laferriere has argued, but rather in a kind of mysticism about death, one which also calls into question Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of our finitude.