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Films

Philosophical Twist

Thomas Wartenberg tells us his hunch about a cunning plan to market DVDs. Is turning epistemology into showbiz a good thing or a bad thing?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why philosophers have been paying so much attention to film and popular culture recently. It’s not that philosophers were oblivious to film before the last decade. After all, probably the first academic study of film – The Photoplay by Hugo Münsterberg in 1916 – was written by a philosopher, and there have been a number of impressive philosophical works to do with film. It’s just that the philosophy of film remained a minor subfield in aesthetics, subordinate to the more traditional concern with the fine arts such as painting and music. But nowadays, film and its cognate visual artforms – video, television, DVD, etc – have become a much more active field of philosophical discussion.

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