FILM 2257 Philosophy and Film

In this course, we go to the movies to think, not to escape from our everyday lives but to understand them more deeply. We will think about films and with films as they engage enduring philosophical questions such as how we know what is real, how we define the good, how we comprehend the fact of death, how we understand our own selves, and how we find meaning in life. Films will be paired with philosophical texts both from the history of philosophy as well as from contemporary philosophers writing specifically about film. We will cover a range of popular film genres: horror films that ignite questions of evil, monstrosity and bodily integrity; science-fiction films that explore the relation of mind and body and envision scenarios of the end of the world; crime films that raise issues of mortality, fate and free will; and comedies that play with ideas of selfhood, love and romance. Alongside the focus on how particular films address key philosophical debates, a running theme will be how the medium of film itself poses philosophical issues involving its relationship with reality, its creation of fictional worlds, its solicitation of intense emotional responses and its powerful mass appeal.