Instructor: Hunter Vaughan
Course Time: MW 1:00-3:47 PM
General Education: Art & Writing Intensive
Term: Winter 2014

DESCRIPTION:

Film and Philosophy traces the relationship between moving-image culture and the history of Western philosophy. Introducing some of the most crucial philosophical thinkers and debates of our intellectual foundation, this course will begin by exploring how film helps to illustrate philosophical problems—what we could call philosophy-through-film. After laying this foundation, the course will turn to complex theories of film-as-philosophy, using more contemporary texts to explore how the Seventh Art provides new ways of understanding the world, ways of viewing the world and our relationship to it that challenge classical philosophical foundations and embrace the philosophical changes that evolved to accommodate the twentieth-century condition. Philosophers considered include Plato, Descartes, Sartre, Cavell, and Deleuze, with films ranging from the Bunuel/Dali surrealist classic, Un Chien andalou, to the blockbuster Hollywood action trilogy, The Matrix.