Philosophy, 8/28.

"Is philosophy fun?" asks David Sterritt in PopMatters. Open Court's "thriving" Popular Culture and Philosophy series is "based on the premise that philosophy is the most uproarious pursuit in the world, and it's determined to make you agree.... Hitchcock and Philosophy: Dial M for Metaphysics doesn't mention Hitch's fine 1954 thriller Dial 'M' for Murder, and more to the point, it doesn't privilege metaphysics over such other branches of philosophy as ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology." Nonetheless, "you'll find that the essays assembled by editors David Baggett and William A Drumin are often engaging, entertaining, and enlightening."

Also via Bookforum: John Morreall's review of Vittorio Hösle's Woody Allen: An Essay on the Nature of the Comical, "a refreshing counterbalance to the traditional neglect of humor and comedy by philosophers," for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

And via wood s lot, editors Fiona Jenkins and Robert Sinnerbrink introduce a new issue of Scan, a journal of media arts culture hosted by the Media Department at Macquarie University in Sydney. This one's devoted to "film as philosophy." After sketching a brief history of the relationship between philosophy and film, they note that the essays here "consider how film itself engages in different kinds of thinking using sound, image, time, memory and narrative."

Havi Carel on David Cronenberg's The Fly: "[I]nstead of seeing Seth's illness as a metaphor for monstrosity, I suggest that monstrosity is a metaphor for illness... I argue that the notion of the monstrous that is so central to the film in fact supports the health / illness dichotomy, in which the two states - health and illness, or human and monster - are posited as mutually exclusive. Instead of accepting the dichotomy and focusing on the dialectic between human and monstrous, as many interpretations have, I claim that the film in fact demonstrates the fallacy of this dichotomous view, showing that ultimately we all have 'the disease of being finite.' I propose to understand the film as a tragedy portraying the terminal illness of a decent man. As such, the film dupes the viewer into accepting the human / monster and healthy / diseased dichotomies, only to grasp their illusoriness by the end of the film."

For Jenkins, Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother raises a series of questions: "How do we give an account of ourselves? How does our exposure to loss figure in this telling, even if only through what is partial or absent? And what is it that makes such telling difficult or even inevitably thwarted and displaced?"

Catherine Summerhayes "explores Chris Marker's interpretation of memory as time and space in his experimental essay film Sans Soleil."

In Lars von Trier's Dogville, Robert Sinnerbrink finds "a political, moral, and aesthetic experiment: one that aims to show the violence inhabiting liberal democracy, but which also explores the forms of desire that underlie contemporary morality and politics... Dogville enacts a cinematic questioning of two dogmas of democracy: the role of morality in the constitution of democratic community, and the primacy of exchange relations in liberal democracy. The film critically challenges these dogmas by exposing the underlying libidinal economy of desire that organises and maintains the democratic community."

Drawing on, among others, Umberto Eco and Jacques Lacan, Matthew Sharpe argues that "a promise is held up in reality television which already animated the sadists' always-flagging desire in Sade's boudoirs: that here at last, via the conflicting demands the reality games bombard their 'stars' with, we might confront something irreplaceable in the Other."

"[F]ilm needs to be understood both as an adoption and modification of existing technical forms of the industrial reproduction of experience, and as a form that has itself been adopted and modified by the newer media based on information technology (film itself having been radically modified by digital technologies)," writes Patrick Crogan. The editors point to where he's taking this: "[A]ll thought is cinematic: perception, understanding, and so forth all involve selection from a 'tertiary' form of memory, deposited in the mnemotechnical archive of audiovisual culture."

Daniel Ross considers the "cinematic condition of the politico-philosophical future."

Meanwhile, though I haven't mentioned the journal in a while, Film-Philosophy has a relatively new site - cleaner, clearer and easier to navigate, with articles available as PDFs.

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2007 2:15 AM