Nathan T. Andersen

An exploration of the question whether films can be said to do philosophy, that relates this to the question posed by the Turing test as to whether computers can think. Following up on the work of Stephen Mulhall, which attempts to demonstrate the capacity of films to "do philosophy" by examining the Alien and the Mission: Impossible Film Series, this essay re-examines these films to see what they have to say about Artificial Intelligence.

In his monograph On Film, first published in 2002, Stephen Mulhall posed the provocative thesis that films can do philosophy. Although not unprecedented, its bold expression within that text prompted lively debate, stimulating the rise of film-philosophy as a sub-discipline within the fields of both philosophy and film studies. Just twenty years later, in 2022, the arrival of ChatGPT provoked a still-ongoing reappraisal of the question posed by Alan Turing in 1950, regarding whether and under what conditions it would make sense to say that computers can think.  The two questions can be linked. The philosophy within film can and ought to be understood in much the same way as the thinking in AI: both embody an artificial form of intelligence capable of provoking questions and stimulating thought; and both carry the danger of stifling genuine thinking by appealing to ready-made values and meanings. The real question in both cases is not whether films or computers have an intrinsic capacity to think, but whether the thinking they provoke in us, their interlocutors or audiences, is both responsive to reasons, and responsible to the reality of the situation that we find ourselves in. To demonstrate and elaborate I will consider the philosophical assessment of artificial intelligence developed by way of contrast with human intelligence in both the Alien and the Mission: Impossible series, which served as the primary exemplars of philosophy within film in both Mulhall’s original text and its subsequent editions.

All films offer something to think about, but not all thinking about films is philosophical. What would strengthen this volume for teaching purposes is greater emphasis on the question implied by its subtitle: just what counts as “philosophy at the movies”? That films have something distinctive to offer to philosophy is argued here in several of the essays. What is less clear from the volume as a whole are the criteria for differentiation between thoughtful film criticism and analysis and distinctively philosophical writing about film. Even setting aside the much-debated and controversial question whether films can themselves be philosophical or can be said to “do philosophy,” it is still worth asking what it might mean to claim of any given instance of film analysis and criticism that it is “doing philosophy.”

John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and R.G. Collingwood’s Principles of Art (1938) both claim that the distinctive work of works of art is to express emotion. That doesn’t just mean that art makes us feel something, but that it generates for both artist and attentive spectator a compelling experience of self-understanding, through which elements of a lived situation are clarified and transformed. My aim here is to examine the potential of an expressive account of art for a film-philosophical approach to drawing out the relevance of films to issues of importance for philosophy, which I will illustrate with a sketch of an expressive “reading” of Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us.

This was an invited talk for a special Film and Philosophy focused meeting of the Society for the Philosophical Study of Contemporary Visual Arts. The talk focused on some of the challenges of teaching film and philosophy in a period when students "consume" media and watch films primarily online, such that the traditional experience of being together with an audience in a darkened theater when the projector starts is no longer typical. Students who come into such courses often have little experience with philosophy and little experience with film studies or formal film analysis, so the question of how far one can go with the content of the course was also discussed.