Nathan T. Andersen

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.