Laura T. Di Summa (formerly Di Summa-Knoop)

In the 1990s, Laurie Shrage critiqued dominant semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches to film, advocating instead for a contextual analysis attentive to audience reception. Drawing on Christopher Strong (Arzner, 1933), Shrage highlighted its capacity to “disturb patriarchal sensibilities,” particularly in its portrayal of women and marriage. This paper revisits Shrage’s thesis to explore how the film addresses issues that remain relevant today, including female agency within and beyond the institution of marriage. I argue that while the film has been recognized for its narrative and dialogue, its engagement with themes such as women’s employment, motherhood, and caregiving remains critically underexplored. Through a close reading that incorporates cinematic elements, such as costume design, I examine how these themes shape the protagonist’s sense of autonomy and complicate traditional narratives of romantic drama. By situating the film within both its historical and contemporary contexts, I aim to demonstrate its enduring relevance and the significance of returning to questions of spectatorship—what we are meant to see and what we might learn to see anew through a critical, feminist lens.

There is space for children in philosophy. They are mentioned in debates over the rationality of love and in ethical and pedagogical debates on the nature of parenthood. There is also a field devoted to teaching philosophy to children. But there isn’t much discussion on children and aesthetics, on their aesthetic judgments and preferences, and on what it is like to build an aesthetic for children. There is virtually nothing on how children’s aesthetic preferences affect not only the adults they will eventually become but also the adults with whom they live—their parents. In this paper, I approach the topic by looking at young children’s literature, specifically literature for children whose reading depends on the presence of an adult or, at the very least, of someone who is able to read to them. I will begin by looking at the practice of reading with children: what is read, when, and how. Responding to these questions can pave the way to answering another question: namely, why do we read to them? While the answer to the latter question may seem obvious given the extensive studies on the benefits of reading to young children, I believe an appeal to children’s aesthetics can complicate the answer and further contribute to the discussion on loving them, on growing as a parent, and on loving what they love.

Fashion is immediately associated with looks. Its popularity and its most consumerist sides thrive in our current culture of image, further highlighting the connection between fashion and an aesthetic that is quintessentially visual. While it is impossible to deny such a connection, this paper explores the relationship between fashion and touch and fashion and “feel”, two terms that, albeit related, deserve independent consideration. I will begin by emphasizing the importance of seeing fashion in relation to a performative understanding of identity, which is experiential, embodied, situated, and, quite simply, “in movement”. Such an understanding, crucial for a better grasp of sartorial design, is inevitably linked to a tactile understanding of fashion: from the selection of fabrics to the silhouettes and cuts that allow a sketch to move to a garment in three dimensions. But, crucially, a performative understanding of identity is also the starting point for a reflection on touch and fashion in our everyday tasks and judgments, judgments that often move from the aesthetic sphere to other value areas and the broader socio-political context. To further cement my arguments, I will conclude the paper with two case studies: sportswear and maternity wear.

The attention that prominent fashion houses have been paying to climate change and environmental concerns has never been so prominent. Fashion week of 2019 and 2020 made such a concern a staple of the fashion discourse. Designers and fashion houses are exploring fabric alternatives such as Piñatex (derived from discarded pineapple skins), they are advertising their runways as “carbon neutral,” and fashion colossuses such as Burberry, Gap, Levi’s, and H&M are vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emission by 30% by 2030. However, the genuine nature of such intentions is not impermeable to criticism. While “sustainable fashion” – arguably the “it” vocabulary choice of the past couple of years – certainly has its praiseworthy sides, it is also, at times, another strategy to spike consumerism. In this chapter, I aim to investigate the viability of fashion’s current interest in environmental concerns in light of an analysis of fashion’s most indisputably prominent side: its relation to the aesthetic realm. Playing along the lines of the analytic debate gauging the relative impact of ethical values over aesthetic values and vice versa, I will consider how aesthetic demands can be steered by the necessity of ethical reflection without for this reason erasing, or at least hiding, the appreciation of style, glamour, and couture. I will conclude with a reassessment and potential solution, based on the inherently performative side of fashion, to the question of whether sustainable fashion can be seen as a current, viable, and potentially effective way of responding to contemporary environmental concerns.

The question of whether movies can deliver philosophical content is a leading topic in the cognitive and analytic debate on film. But instead of turning to the well-trodden terrain of narrative and emotional engagement, this is the first time fashion and costume choices are analyzed to demonstrate how movies can be said to be doing philosophy. Considering how fashion and costumes can deliver the epistemic content of a film and act as a guidance to the interpretation of the philosophical content of a film, Laura T. Di Summa examines fashion and costume choices in classical and contemporary films. She discusses a number of cinematic examples, and the costumes and fashion elements within them, illustrating the importance of issues such as the performative side of fashion, the alteration between novelty and repetition, the pivotal role of the body, and the relation between fashion, style, and individual as well as collective identity. Featuring close examinations of 1950s melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters and documentaries such as All That Heaven Allows, Mad Max Fury Road, and McQueen, Di Summa uses an innovative new lens to provide fresh philosophical analysis of films. The result is not only an advancement of our understanding of the aesthetic means through which film can do philosophy, but the first insights into a philosophy of fashion.

In this chapter, I critically assess the ability of autobiographical documentary to convey an authentic portrayal of the self and analyze the cinematic means through which autobiographical documentaries may be able to do so. I compare and outline the chief differences between autobiographical documentaries and literary memoirs and assess the ways in which cognitive analysis of film and post-structuralist accounts within film theory and documentary studies have dealt with the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I lastly consider new avenues of autobiographical expression such as the ones potentially offered by social media, blogs, video diaries, personal websites, and so on.

This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary social issues, film’s kinship to other art forms, and the influence of historically seminal schools of thought in the philosophy of film. Of emphasis in many of the essays is the relationship and overlap of analytic and continental perspectives in this subject.

The demise of grand narratives of art, and the emergence of “post-historical art,” have produced a chasm between the tradition of philosophical aesthetics and the production and reception of contemporary art, a divide that has deprived philosophy of the fundamental role it had played, arguably, until the end of the Modern period. The goal of this paper, which focuses primarily on art after 2000, is to investigate possible venues and directions in the current production and reception of art that might lead to a reconciliation of these two poles and to the advancement of new philosophical strategies for the analysis of art. Specifically, I will concentrate on three aspects of the experience of art today: first, the emphasis, in the production and reception of artworks, on enactive accounts of artistic experience; secondly, the importance given to the ethical content of artworks and to their ability to trigger ethical, social, and political reflection; and, lastly, the growing role of the art market and its structures in the overall appreciation of the arts.

The relationship between architecture and urban centers and concepts such as community and identity is undeniably complex and has been described, by both philosophers and architectural theorists, in radically different ways. In this essay, I will focus on the contrast between the role of architecture and cities as providers of a sense of identity while also emphasizing the risks associated with this conception. I will begin with an overview of a few theories arguing—on aesthetic, moral, and functional grounds—for the necessity of a connection among architecture, identity, and community. I will then move, in the second part, to what can be seen as the critical and theoretical dismantling of such a notion: a dismantling that, however, does not end the discussion of identity as much as it problematizes it. Architecture and urbanism, I aim to show, are still discussing the means and terms of the debate on identity, but the interpretation of such a concept has changed in significant ways. Specifically, in the second and last section of the essay, I will argue for what I will refer to as a terminological and conceptual change: for if identity is lost, or too ambitious a goal, identification, and the practices leading to it are still “in the making.” Learning to identify might be even harder than finding identity, but it has become an essential skill in our present, multicultural, and dangerously fluctuating society.

Can a Naturalist Definition of art replace the historical and institutional positions argued for by philosophical aesthetics? This article considers Denis Dutton’s work in evolutionary psychology and his cluster Naturalist Definition of art. I begin with an analysis of the validity of what Dutton takes to be the most important criterion: Imaginative Experience. I propose a criticism of Dutton’s set of criteria coupled with a re-evaluation of what may be implied when referring to a naturalist basis for the arts. Specifically, I argue that philosophical aesthetics, which has been criticized by Dutton as a form of cultural relativism, is instead able to address features of our interaction with the arts that have adaptive and evolutionary value.