1,721,221 research outputs found
There’s Always More Show. The Impossibility of Remarriage in BoJack Horseman
Full text linkThis paper casts the television series BoJack Horseman as a challenge to the genre that Stanley Cavell calls “the comedy of remarriage.” First, it is argued that the last season of the series explicitly suggests but finally contradicts the narrative pattern of the comedy of remarriage. Then, the impossibility of remarriage in BoJack Horseman is traced back to some structural features of the medium of television and its relationship to time. Finally, the impossibility of remarriage in BoJack Horseman is related to the capacity of the medium of television to enable self-defeating fictions which challenge fiction as a cultural institution
Observers and Narrators in Fiction Film
Full text linkIn the debate on our engagement with and appreciation of fiction films, the thesis that the viewer of a fiction film imagines observing fictional events, and the thesis that these events are imagined to be presented by a narrator, are usually taken as two components of one theoretical package, which philosophers such as George Wilson and Jerrold Levison defend, while philosophers such as Gregory Currie and Berys Gaut reject. This paper argues that the two theses can be disentangled and investigates their logical connection. The investigation shows that the second thesis entails the first but there is no entailment the other way around. Endorsing the first thesis is thus compatible with two options, namely endorsing the second thesis or abandoning it. However, the paper argues that if we endorse the first thesis, endorsing the second provides us with a more compelling explanation of our engagement with and appreciation of fiction films
The artifactual theory of depiction: from paintings and sculptures to virtual reality
No full textThis paper proposes a new account of depiction, namely the ‘artifactual theory’, which aims to supplement the so-called “experiential accounts”. The latter characterize pictures as eliciting a perceptual experience of what is represented. Drawing on philosophical accounts of technical artifacts and on their notions of structure and function, the artifactual theory casts the generation of a peculiar perceptual experience as the function that pictures perform in virtue of their structure. The paper argues that the artifactual theory leads us to a compelling taxonomy of pictorial kinds that accounts for not only paradigmatic two-dimensional pictures such as paintings but also “threedimensional pictures” such as statues, and even “immaterial pictures” such as those of virtual reality. Specifically, the artifactual theory enables us to individuate the three basic pictorial kinds thereby situating virtual reality, statues and paintings in the pictorial realm in an effective and insightful way that captures both what they have in common and what makes each of them special
Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality
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The Cosmic Soundtrack: Does Consciousness Increase or Decrease the Aesthetic Value of the Universe?
No full textOne can either take consciousness as the absolute focus of appreciation or rather focus on the contribution of consciousness to the aesthetic appreciation of another item. This paper focuses on a specific item to which consciousness might give a significant aesthetic contribution, namely, the universe. First, I will explain in which sense the universe can be an object of aesthetic appreciation. Then, I will consider how such appreciation is affected when consciousness enters the picture. Finally, I will wonder whether consciousness enriches the aesthetic value of the universe, weighing reasons for both the positive and the negative answer to this question
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