Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision

Philosophy and the Moving Image is the latest collection of essays by Noel Carroll, who has been a leading figure in the philosophy of film and art for many years. In addition to three previously unpublished papers, the volume puts together nineteen essays that Carroll wrote and published between 1995 and 2020, covering a wide range of topics within this field. Carroll begins the introduction of the volume by noting that the philosophy of film has undergone such a boom in the last thirty years that it now touches on almost every traditional area in philosophy, such as ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. To underline this claim, Carroll does not group his essays according to the narrow themes and debates they cover within the philosophy of film but according to how they also fit within these more extensive research areas of philosophy. Part 1, "Metaphysics," starts with Carroll's well-known attempt to answer the classical question of what cinema is and how it can be differentiated from other art forms. Although he does not believe they are jointly sufficient, Carroll identifies four conditions that define our ordinary concept of film. (1) To count as a film, a moving image artwork has to have a "disembodied viewpoint" (7). Unlike when we look at an object through binoculars, for example, we cannot orient our bodies toward the objects we see in a film, since we do not share the same space. (2) To count as a film, rather than a slide or a painting, an artwork has to have the potential for movement. (3) While the stage performance of a play and the performance of a film can be said to be tokens of a type, the stage performance is generated by an interpretation. In contrast, film performances derive from what Carroll calls a template (e.g., a film strip or a DVD). (4) As a consequence of this difference, the performance of a play can be regarded and evaluated as an artwork by itself. In comparison, the performance of a film or video