Film & Philosophy

“Film has become such an integral ingredient in our motley recipe of mass art and pop culture entertainment that we often overlook its potential for stimulating serious reflection and speculation. The visual immediacy of cinematic art appeals to our receptive curiosity in the same way that paintings and natural landscapes often captivate our perceptual and emotional attention. However, our intellectual engagement with film has been minimized more and more with the proliferation of movies that cater simply to the passive sensory networks of spectacle-obsessed viewers rather than to the active reflection of thoughtful inquirers.”

- Kevin L Stoehr

My name is?

Aristotle, oh and the shadows

When Aristotle isn't being praised as God himself, he gets beaten around a bit.  So does Plato but mainly Aristotle. Here's something interesting that I found when going through my old files:

"If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and—like an axiom—used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements.

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato.

There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism. It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy’s basic questions—and doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man’s long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness."

- Review of J.H. Randall’s Aristotle, The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1963, 18