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27'The Little People': Power and the WorshipableIn Lester Hunt & Noel Carroll (eds.), The Twilight Zone and Philosophy, Blackwell. 2008.Philosophers and social scientists have explored the ritual practices and the experience of worship, but there has been relatively little discussion of what makes something worthy of worship.However, we find a characteristically sophisticated examination of the issue by Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone episode "The Little People" (3rd Season, March 30, 1962). By considering the example of “The Little People” and a few variations, we can clarify the role power plays in making something worthy of …Read more
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25Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial ExperienceFilm-Philosophy 6 (1). 2002.The Haunting, Directed by Robert Wise MGM/Argyle, 1963.
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22The Desire‐Frustration Theory of SuspenseJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (3): 281-290. 2008.
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20L'HumorIn Julien Deonna Emma Tieffenbach (ed.), Petite Dictionnaire des Valeurs, . forthcoming.Most everything one might think about humor is in dispute. Only a few negative claims are fairly clear. Does humor always involve feelings of superiority? Probably not. But what properties do objects need in order to be amusing? Most plausibly, humorous objects present non-threatening incongruities. However, not all such incongruities are amusing. So there must be something more. What is the connection between feelings of amusement and laughter? Amusement typically leads to laughter, but not alw…Read more
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18Welfare, Meaning, and WorthRoutledge. 2016._Welfare, Meaning, and Worth_ argues that there is more to what makes a life worth living than welfare, and that a good life does not consist of what is merely good for the one who lives it. Smuts defends an objective list theory that states that the notion of worth captures matters of importance for which no plausible theory of welfare can account. He puts forth that lives worth living are net high in various objective goods, including pleasure, meaning, knowledge, and loving relationships. The…Read more
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15Multiple Inheritance and Film Identity: A Reply to DilworthContemporary Aesthetics 1 1-3. 2003.I argue that Dilworth has not shown the type / token theory of film identity to be non-viable, since there is no reason to think that a single object cannot be a token of two types. Even if we assume a single inheritance view of types, Dilworth's argument runs into other problems. Dilworth does not provide any convincing argument as to why intentions are necessary for identifying film and why production history alone will not suffice for identifying hardly conceivable forgeries. Intention is …Read more
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9Hitchcock as Philosopher by yanal, robert jJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (3): 339-341. 2007.
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The ethics of singing along : the case of "Mind of a lunatic"In Jeanette Bicknell & John Andrew Fisher (eds.), Song, songs, and singing, Wiley. 2013.
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It is widely assumed that we can meaningfully talk about emotional reactions as being appropriate or inappropriate. Much of the discussion has focused on one kind of appropriateness, that of fittingness. An emotional response is appropriate only if it fits its object. For instance, fear only fits dangerous things. There is another dimension of appropriateness that has been relatively ignored — proportionality. For an emotional reaction to be appropriate not only must the object fit, the reaction…Read more
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HorrorIn Paisley Livingston & Carl Plantinga (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Routledge. 2008.
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In this paper I critically evaluate the Devil Simulation Argument for cognitive immoralism—the position that moral flaws with a work of art can be cognitively virtuous, and thereby artistically valuable. I focus on Matthew Kieran's version of the argument. Kieran holds that by simulating the attitudes of fictional devils we can come to gain important moral insights. In response, I argue that we have no reason to believe that we can effectively adopt immoral attitudes, that any successf…Read more
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Philosophy of Action |
Aesthetics |
Normative Ethics |
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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |
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Social and Political Philosophy |