Thinking Reality and Time through Film

Over the last few decades, film has increasingly become an issue of philosophical reflection from an ontological and epistemological perspective, and the claim “doing philosophy through film” has raised extensive discussion about its meaning. The mechanical reproduction of reality is one of the most prominent philosophical questions raised by the emergence of film at the end of the nineteenth century, inquiring into the ontological nature of both reality and film. Yet the nature of this audio-photographic and moving reproduction of reality constitutes an ontological puzzle, which has widely been disregarded as a main line of enquiry with direct consequences for philosophy.

Regarding this background, this volume brings together the best papers from the Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film: Thinking Reality and Time through Film, held in 2014. What they all have in common is the discussion of new aspects and approaches of how philosophy relates to film. Whether by philosophizing through concrete examples of films or whether looking at film’s ontological reliance on time and image, or its intra-active entanglement with reality or truth, this book explores grasp film’s nature philosophically, and provides new insights for the film philosopher and the filmmaker, as well as for the freshman fascinated by film for philosophical reasons.