PHIL 195 - Seminar in a Philosophical Topic

FDR: HU
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter, Spring

Fall 2014 topic:

PHIL 195-01: Seminar: Philosophy and Film (3). Film is popular and ubiquitous, but is it worthy of serious consideration? Or is it merely the detritus of consumer culture? In this seminar, we take film seriously, and we submit it to the variety of inquiry that we would give any artistic, literary, or philosophical text. To that end, we begin by looking at the ways in which film is philosophical, how film makers have explored traditional questions in philosophy (truth, knowledge, and mindedness) as well as how the film medium can itself be a mode of philosophical inquiry. In the second part of the class, we examine the more literary elements of cinema, including the nature of authorship, adaptation, and genre; we also look, if only briefly, at the role that gender and race can play in film. We close with “metacinema”, or what happens when filmmakers make films about films. (HU) Burstein