Oscar Davis

The hermeneutical experience of illness involves a kind of displacement that alienates us from our own bodies and, at the same time, demands our constant attention to our condition. Gadamer explores this rupture of our being-in-the-world in his work The Enigma of Health, where he exposes the implications of this experience for the evolutionary understanding of health, care and mortality. In this article, I argue that a phenomenology of illness and the hermeneutic encounter with illness is staged in the film Memoria (2021), by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In this article, I explore how Memoria questions the very concept of health, offering cinematic meditations on Gadamer's lectures that explore the culture of care and the relationship between understanding and healing. I begin by exploring the potential of a Gadamerian cinematic philosophy. Then, applying these conditions to the case of Memoria, I argue that, through the affective atmosphere, the temporal structure and the sound ruptures of the film, Weerasethakul stages a form of aesthetic displacement for the viewer that mirrors the inhospitable experience of illness described by Gadamer and later developed by Svenaeus. The film does not portray illness in a conventional narrative sense, but instead creates a sensory and ontological disturbance that invites the viewer into a shared attunement with the protagonist's condition. Memoria is a dialogical encounter in which illness is not merely represented, but revealed as an interpretive event—an event that leads us to consider healing not only as a return to a sense of inner harmony, but as a process of confronting our vulnerable, embodied being-in-the-world.

Existentialist philosophy, in particular the work of Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, was crucial to early postcolonial theorising and, as demonstrated in the work of Brendan Hokowhitu, continues to be an important perspective for understanding Indigenous postcolonial experience. Existentialism is a valuable tool in the on-going attempt to gain clarity about the nature of racist oppression and ways of overcoming it. We focus on two films by Warwick Thornton: Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017) that together form a study of an Indigenous existentialism, and in contrasting ways illustrate both the difficulty of, and possibility of, emergent transcendent agency in postcolonial environments.

In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they must assume or pre‐establish the very conclusion they seek in advancing the argument. This means that such debunking arguments either beg the question against the moral realist or are undermined as standalone metaethical arguments.