Cinema has always displayed an affinity to characters with distorted or even hallucinatory relations to reality. With films such as The Truman Show, the Matrix films or Inception, contemporary filmmakers add another layer to this canon of film characters: unwitting ordinary victims of deception for whom the skepticist fear that the world is not real but a simulation, fake environment or a dream has become true. These are 'skepticism films': dramatized, fictional configurations of the thought experiments which are part and parcel of philosophical reflection on knowledge and doubt.
Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema introduces skepticism films as updated configurations of skepticist thought experiments which exemplify the pervasiveness of philosophical ideas in popular culture. Philipp Schmerheim defends a pluralistic film-philosophical position according to which films can be, but need not be, expressions of philosophical thought in their own right. It critically investigates the influence of ideas of skepticism on film-philosophical theories and develops a typology of skepticism films by analyzing
The Truman Show, Inception, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, The Thirteenth Floor, Moon and other contemporary skepticism films. With its focus on skepticism as one of the most significant philosophical problems,
Skepticism Films provides a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between film, theories of film and philosophy.
Herzogenrath, Bernd: - Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (1999) and An American BodyPolitic: A Deleuzian Approach (2010) and editor of The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (2012) and DeleuzeGuattari & Ecology (2009). His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive (2017), Film as Philosophy (2017), and Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Herzogenrath, Bernd: -
Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American Studies at the University of Frankfurt, Germany.
Pisters, Patricia: - Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, program director of the research group Neuroaesthetics and Neurocultures, and co-director of the research group Film and Philosophy. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture (2003); Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (with Rosi Braidotti; 2012) and The Neuro-Image (2012). See for articles, her blog, and other information at www.patriciapisters.com.
Schmerheim, Philipp: - Philipp Schmerheim is a university lecturer in children's media research at the University of Bremen, Germany, and an adjunct lecturer for film-philosophy at the Philosophy Department of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His research focuses on film-philosophy, philosophical film analysis, the history and analysis of children's film, and theories of intermediality.
