This is Going to the movies is usually both more fun and less taxing on the brain than

doing philosophy. Oxford University Stephen Mulhall however sits in the dark auditorium with his philosophical antennae are tuned

and quivering.

His book about philosophy and film argues that some films can themselves be genuinely philosophical, not just in the sense that they may have

interesting things to say about the nature of film itself, but much more broadly, they can contribute

to the whole range of traditional problems, be it free will, personal identity,

or, as in the futuristic blockbuster, Blade Runner, our approach to mortality.

Yes, Blade Runner.

Stephen Morehool, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

It's nice to be here.

Now the topic we're focusing on today is philosophy and film.

When philosophy deals with film, it usually comes up as the philosophy of film but you do something

quite different I wonder if you could outline roughly what your position is

here sure well I guess it might help to explain a little more about what philosophy of film normally looks like.

And here it's really philosophy doing its normal thing of coming along to some other distinct

independent part of human life and starting to raise difficult questions about the assumptions

and the conceptual resources that are being taken for granted.

So in that sense, philosophy of film is constructed in exactly the same way as philosophy of history or philosophy of

language. One looks at one's experience of films, one looks at the ways in which films are

made, the kind of objects they are, and one asks how is it so much

as possible for there to be representations on a screen of real objects that nevertheless

aren't present to us.

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