Filmosophy

By Hanno

Last year we started doing a series of lectures using film as the background for questions in Philosophy, which we called 'filmosophy.' It is easy to use film to raise philosophical issues when you choose philosophically oriented films, such as the classic 'The Seventh Seal.' I, however, also wanted to explore philosophy in films that were not so obvious, and I wanted to do that for two reasons: First, I thought the audience for heavy films would be small, so the group that shows up would be small, and we were looking for something with more appeal. And second, it is more of challenge to show that there are Platonic overtones to, say, Starship Troopers, than to show questions about the meaning of life in The Seventh Seal. After all, no one thinks Starship Troopers has any philosophical content, while everyone who has seen the later knows there is philosophical content to the Seventh Seal.

I was going to do 'The Truman Show,' Jim Carey's movie about a guy whose whole life is a reality show, only he does not know it. I may still, at some point. But I thought of three others I would rather do:

The Mind/Body Problem and 'Ghost'
The Metaphysics of Time and 'Back to the Future'
Horror and 'Night of the Living Dead'