Richard Eldridge

© Mind Association 2017Exactly how radical change in commitments on matters of fundamental concern is possible has been a problem since at least Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus and Augustine's rejection of Pelagianism and defence of divine grace. If an act of will is required to accept the offer of grace, then isn’t something important left to us to do? And if so, can or does reason play any role in such radical change? If so, how? Martin Warner takes on these large questions in The Aesthetics of Argument. One modest way in which he gets his account started is to note, following Susan Haack, that ‘the intuition … that there is such a thing as favourable but not conclusive evidence … is stronger than … [the intuition] that there is such a thing as “inductive implication”’. That is, we apparently do make...

Arthur Danto's philosophical writing is replete with literary references. Philosophy is purely a conceptual enterprise, aimed at solving problems about the natures of things precisely where no empirical information is available to settle what they are. Danto chose the philosophy of literature, and in particular the relations between literature and philosophy, as the topic of his 1983 APA Presidential Address. Danto describes “the bottom‐line view of philosophy” that undertakes to develop only via impersonal theses and arguments, and that requires “the suppression of voice” as “abstract, distorted, and surrealistic” in being too severed from our actual experiences as historical and embodied beings. Philosophy, at least as a matter of its defining ambitions and at the highest reach of its achievements, is, in Danto's perception, essentially written for the sake of transfiguration; its very life is lost when its texts are “flattened into papers”.

Hegel’s account of the unconscious and his broader philosophy of mind offer us a well worked out form of non-dualist, non-reductionist, non-eliminativist, non-representationalist naturalism. Hegel describes the development of discursively structured thought (and responsiveness to norms) in ethological terms as emerging from initial somatic-sensory states, from states and processes of bodily activity on the part of a feeling soul, and from structured habituation in relation to other subjects. Importantly, earlier, less organized states of sensory awareness and feeling persist as residues underneath cognitive development in “the pit of imagination.” Imagistic and sensory-somatic materials from this pit can burst out, among other things, in dreams, madness, somnambulism, witty conversation, and puns. In the face of the permanent possibility of regressions from cognitive development, a continual activity of self-formation (Bildung) through art and participation in second nature is essential to maturity.

Stanley Cavell’s writing about movies, from the more theoretical and general The World Viewed (1971) to the later works on specific genres (Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears), has a unifying theme: some movies as (successful) art investigate conditions of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience in medium-specific ways. This claim is explained and defended by explicating the details of the medium-specificity of the moving photographic image (and its history of uses) and by focusing on Michael Verhoeven’s film The Nasty Girl (1990). Though the very ideas of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience naturally prompt some suspicion in a commercialized, pluralistic society, our responses to some movies show that we continue to aspire to a life that embodies them.

This chapter contrasts the broadly empirical, pluralist, and construction device–oriented approaches to film study of analytic philosophy of film with the broadly socially hermeneutic, artistically and politically avant-gardist stances of Continental film theory. Analytic philosophy of film has tended to focus on classic Hollywood films and continuity editing, in order to explore the achievements of these films as art, while Continental film theory frequently finds such films to be regressive and technically uninteresting. I explore in detail the work of such analytically oriented film scholars as Cavell, Danto, Walton, Carroll, Wilson, Bordwell, Plantinga, and Wartenberg, among others, against the background of this broad divergence in styles of work. I conclude by suggesting possibilities of rapprochement between these two styles, possibilities that embrace both the insights of analytic philosophers concerning specific devices and effects of film construction and the insights of Continental theorists concerning human subject formation and human social, political, and artistic interests.