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.

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.