Kristin Boyce

In the tenth book of Plato’s _The Republic_, Socrates famously invokes an ancient quarrel between philosophy and tragedy (among other art forms). In the _Symposium,_ he shows philosophy triumphing over tragedy when Socrates bests Agathon, a tragic poet who has just taken first place at the Festival of Dionysus, in a competition for the best speech in praise of love. This chapter argues that _Hedda Gabler_ represents an important further stage in this ongoing quarrel, one that takes the fight to philosophy’s home turf: that of soul-transforming conversation. In plays such as _A Doll’s House,_ Ibsen develops a form of theater that takes on the Socratic aspiration to facilitate serious conversation. _Hedda Gabler_, though, goes even further. In this play Ibsen develops a form of theater that not only takes over the Socratic aspiration, but at the same time _transforms_ it by transforming our understanding of what such conversation might consist in.

The philosophy and theory of film began with the skeptical question of whether film could be an art, given the mechanical way its moving pictures were produced. Theorists such as Noël Carroll and Victor Perkins have persuasively argued that the legacy of its defensive beginnings continues to compromise both philosophy and theory of film. This chapter seeks to contribute to an ongoing collective effort to overcome the effects of this legacy. It focuses on two films that invite comparisons not to painting or theater but to dance—Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann. It argues that the right kind of attention to these films sheds new light on both what film is and how it is related to the other arts.

The literary style of Henry James has attracted the attention of a number of leading analytic philosophers who are drawn to make claims for the philosophical significance of works of literature. Many of these philosophical commentators share a common approach: namely, they locate the philosophical center of gravity of James’s style in a philosophical view that his way of writing is understood to embody or corroborate. The aim of this essay is to argue that such an approach fails to capture what is philosophically most significant about how James writes. By contrast, the essay works out a comparison between James’s literary forms of expression and the logically perspicuous modes of representing thought developed by Gottlob Frege. It highlights one use to which Frege sought to put his Begriffsschrift: namely, as a tool for the task of clarifying forms of philosophical confusion. This comparison helps to illuminate what is philosophically most distinctive and powerful about the modes of perspicuously representing human life that James develops. These literary forms inherit a time-honored aspiration of philosophical writing: seeking to represent a reader’s life to the reader herself in such a way as to allow her to recognize her own confusions in living.