The following excerpts come from the site listed below

The following brief excerpts come from the site listed below. They are copyrighted by Professor Brendan Long and should not be reproduced in any manner, except for the immediate purposes of this class. Please go to the original site to see the entire sequence of essays and lectures.

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~brendan_long/index.html

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AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY THROUGH CINEMA

The following are notes developed from my Introduction to Philosophy Through Cinema course taught at the Institute of Continuing & TESOL Education at the University of Queensland, Australia.

. . . As a counterexample to Scruton’s [a film theorist] claim that ‘there could not be a photograph of a martyrdom that was other than horrifying’, I used the Crucifixion sequence from The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). . . [How] does the realism of what I experience in the viewing of this film translate into talk of the reality of the subject of that experience? What have I experienced? What foothold—if any—does it have in the world outside of the movie theatre? Is its reality confined to the geography of the movie theatre, or to what is experienced in the viewing of a film? What can I know of this subject so revealed in my experience of the film?

To one end, the question could be put as one with respect to what extent the realism of this crucifixion sequence constitutes an awareness of the reality of a crucifixion. Am I dislodged from the grip of earlier cinematic depictions on the basis of this constituting a more realistic depiction of crucifixion? Do I know what it was like for Jesus to be crucified? Do I just know what crucifixion was like for anyone? Perhaps there are some things that I can (or do) know about crucifixion on the basis of this sequence, things of an empirical, scientific or archaeological nature. The question, I suppose, I am posing here is: what is the reality of what I am experiencing? Does that reality cross over from the movie screen to the world outside of the movie theatre? Does what transpires on the screen correspond with things in the actual world? Cinematic realism here accounts for how something looks and sounds. The question is: what is the status of the ‘something’—the subject of my experience—in question? . . .

. . . Perhaps we can assume that we are not tempted to equate the appearances or images on the movie screen with reality, in the sense of the actual world. (For instance, I do not actually believe that Willem Dafoe [the actor playing Jesus] is Jesus; he is ‘Jesus’. Furthermore, I do not believe that I am witnessing the Crucifixion at Golgotha; I am viewing ‘the Crucifixion’ at ‘Golgotha’.) As such, we also believe that the experience of a movie is not an experience of the actual world. The world and space of the cinema screen is something that is physically inaccessible to me. There exists an irreconcilable physical gap between what is there on the screen (where I am not) and what is here with me. The recognition of such distance largely manifests itself, presumably, in the state of disengagement or detachment that the audience assumes with respect to what is projected onto the screen. They look upon a world whose physical details are similar to those of the world we are ordinarily familiar with, but also enjoy a kind of unreality that leaves them safe in the thought that the inhabitants of the world and space they peer in on cannot reciprocate that gaze. And it is an expectation that they will always bring to such viewing. One could almost characterise this as the viewing and experience of films as, and under the attitude of, a ‘view from nowhere’, a viewing of the world ‘not from any place within it’; an attitude specifically referring to what is countenanced on the cinema screen, and also applicable to one's own purported disengagement from the world outside of the screen in the viewing of films. . . .

. . . According to [the traditional philosophical] distinction, consciousness, thought and feeling are the distinctive properties of one kind of substance—mind as something immaterial—which are separate from the properties of another distinctive kind of substance—body, or things material. As such, one is always aware that they exist as a thinking thing (one can be identified with their mind and mental activity). Furthermore, one cannot doubt that they exist as a thinking thing, in that even entertaining the thought that one does not exist is a self-affirming exercise. . . . According to [the philosopher] Descartes, I can be certain as to my having, or being identified with, a mind, because of the immediate access I have to, and acquaintance I have with, my own thoughts and inner life. One's having a mind, thus, is essentially private. However, how can I be certain of the existence of other minds, if I cannot directly access their immediate thoughts or mental life? At best, according to Descartes, I can only indirectly access other minds on the basis of behavioural criteria. (The implication here is that another's having a mind is modeled on my own mind and mental activity.)

There are also implications for the idea of cinema itself. If, for instance, literature--through the use of language--is able to access to, or provide us with insight into, the inner thoughts and lives of its characters, does this confine cinema to endlessly raising or being involved in the problem of other Cartesian minds? That is to say, if the photographic medium of cinema is said to capture the physical details of physical bodies in a material world, does this, in turning to human beings as cinematic objects, emphasise the inaccessibility of the private inner life of others? It would follow from this supposition that cinema only provides us with access to the behavioural manifestations of what is private and hidden. Perhaps more: that it commits us to a physicalist or materialist view of minds and the world.

One response to [thus philosophical dualism] and the 'problem of other minds' has been to claim that there is no distinction between immaterial and material; that there are only physical things in the world. To refer to the mental, on this account, is to refer to, or to be talking about, something physical; namely, the brain or some physico-chemical processes of the brain that correspond with mental activity. Furthermore, according to materialist or physicalist accounts of mind, mental states lose their 'essential' privateness, in becoming publicly observable phenomena.

For example, behaviourism was once the dominant attempt to explain the mind, claiming that all talk of mental events and activity could be translated into talk of publicly observable physical behaviour. In philosophical circles, this viewpoint found expression in the form of logical behaviourism. For the logical behaviourist, all meaningful claims about mental events had to trace back to some overt and verifiable behaviour. In this, it was claimed, all mental language refers to behaviour or dispositions to behave. That is, ascriptions of mental terms are, according to the logical behaviourist, really ascriptions of dispositions to behave in appropriate ways. In addition, the ascription of a mental event (e.g. hunger, being in pain) enables us to make predictions about a person's behaviour, given certain dispositions to behave in certain ways when appropriate conditions are in place (a kind of input-output or stimulus-response mechanism). In the latter part of the twentieth century, such behaviourist sensibilities have also surfaced in the guise of functionalism, a theory dominant in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. According to functionalism, mental states are identical with internal states that perform the same function. Where a mental ability is the ability to generate a given output from a certain input, then having that mental ability is identical with having a structure capable of producing that output from that input. (To that end, anything could be seen as having a mind, so long as it is behaved in the same way as a human mind does; i.e. is functionally equivalent with the mental states of a human mind.)