Following two introductory sections which deal with the search for meaning and the model of film as a form of probing, I argue that Bergman deals with a number of important philosophical issues within his film corpus. A summary account of the vision which emerges from this corpus is sketched, followed by an analysis of the central role of the artist in society as Bergman conceives it.

Publically available since 2018, the Ingmar Bergman Archives gave rise to a wide range of readings and re-evaluations of primarily the written part of his oeuvre. While considering the relation between Bergman’s manuscripts and films, the paper points out the significance of his workbooks and other textual fragments for understanding the Archives as a work of art. The concluding analysis of the film Winter Light illustrates how the intertwined parts of the Archives contribute to understanding its appeal throughout the (...) history of readings. By highlighting the previously neglected affective layers of the film, the paper also builds on hypotheses about the need to expand on existing philosophical and theoretical approaches to Bergman’s work. (shrink)

Following two introductory sections which deal with the search for meaning and the model of film as a form of probing, I argue that Bergman deals with a number of important philosophical issues within his film corpus. A summary account of the vision which emerges from this corpus is sketched, followed by an analysis of the central role of the artist in society as Bergman conceives it.

The development of themes, motifs, and techniques in Bergman's films, from the first intimations in the early work to the consummate resolutions in the final movies.

Although Ingmar Bergman figures on everyone’s list of philosophical filmmakers, attempts to specify the philosophical implications of his films have yielded highly divergent results. One reason why this is the case is that interpreters disagree over how the philosophical content of a cinematic oeuvre is to be identified. Some interpreters clearly believe it best to work with their own philosophical views when interpreting a film’s story and themes, while others contend that the content of a work is at least (...) partly constituted by the filmmaker’s own ideas and background, which the interpreter should try to reconstruct on the basis of the available evidence. This entry focuses on claims made by interpreters who share the latter premise. Such interpreters often disagree about the content of a given film because they do not have the same evidence about its context, or because they reason about the evidence differently. I survey such disagreements among Bergman’s interpreters and then shed new light on his actual philosophical sources and ideas. (shrink)

Discusses the metaphysical themes of Bergman's films, analyzes his major works, and attempts to explain his philosophy.

The launching of this first full-length study of the films of Ingmar Bergman by the Director of the Institute of Astro-theology, should have put everyone into orbit. Instead, the book has left all who have read it on the launching pad, smarting under the pain of wooden and stilted summaries, incorrect grammatical constructions, and for everyone not acquainted with the vocabulary of Astro-theology, interpretative phrases which inhibit the light of reason and understanding. The prose, gutted with non sequiturs and (...) opaque jargon, may be operational in outer space where the air is thin but here, we earth readers, like Mother Nature, abhor a vacuum. This book is a minuscule step forward for Astro-theology and a giant step backwards for the study of Ingmar Bergman--J. B. L. (shrink)

Acclaimed as one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman is for many an arch-modernist, whose work is characterized by a high degree of self-conscious artistry and by dark, even nihilistic themes. Film critics increasingly identify him as a kind of philosopher of the human condition, especially of the dislocations and misery of the modern human condition. However, Bergman’s films are not embodiments of philosophical theories, nor do they include explicit discussions of theory. Instead, he attends (...) to the concrete lived experience of those who, on the one hand, suffer from doubt, dislocation, and self-hatred and, on the other, long for confession and communion. In the middle of his career, especially in his famous faith trilogy of the early 1960s, Bergman investigated the lived experience of the absence of God. It is commonly thought that after this period, the question of God disappeared. However, in his last two films, Faithless and Saraband, Bergman explores the lived experience of the absence of God. Indeed, he moves beyond a simple negation to explore the complex interplay of absence. He even illustrates the possibility of a kind of communion for which so many of his characters—early, middle and late—long. (shrink)

Les films d’Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) ont la réputation d’être noirs et décapants. Le cinéaste nous soumet à une déconstruction des relations humaines fondamentales et de nos aspirations spirituelles. Mais sonder le vide en nous n’est-il qu’accablant? Ou serait-ce le chemin le plus sûr vers un renouveau? Le cinéaste suédois, fils de pasteur, a lutté pour remplacer le discours chrétien de son enfance par un évangile exaltant l’amour et la vie. Son cinéma peut se comprendre comme un combat entre les (...) mauvaises nouvelles et les bonnes. Maris et femmes, mères et filles, pères et fils, prêtres et communiants, psychiatres et patients, tous entrent dans la ronde interminable où un peu de lumière perce les ténèbres. Et là où la stratégie des acteurs bergmaniens s’avère insuffisante, la musique prend le relais afin de communiquer par-delà notre finitude. (shrink)

The increasingly popular idea that cinematic fictions can "do" philosophy raises some difficult questions. Who is actually doing the philosophizing? Is it the philosophical commentator who reads general arguments or theories into the stories conveyed by a film? Could it be the film-maker, or a group of collaborating film-makers, who raise and try to answer philosophical questions with a film? Is there something about the experience of films that is especially suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflections? In the (...) first part of this book, Paisley Livingston surveys positions and arguments surrounding the cinema's philosophical value. He raises criticisms of bold theses in this area and defends a moderate view of film's possible contributions to philosophy. In the second part of the book he defends an intentionalist approach that focuses on the film-makers' philosophical background assumptions, sources, and aims. Livingston outlines intentionalist interpretative principles as well as an account of authorship in cinema. The third part of the book exemplifies this intentionalist approach with reference to the work of Ingmar Bergman. Livingston explores the connection between Bergman's work and the Swedish director's primary philosophical source-a treatise in philosophical psychology authored by the Finnish philosopher, Eino Kaila. Bergman proclaimed that reading this book was a tremendous philosophical experience for him and that he "built on this ground." With reference to materials in the newly created Ingmar Bergman archive, Livingston shows how Bergman took up Kaila's topics in his cinematic explorations of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and the problem of self-knowledge. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper the author offers a frank reassessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He dismisses the Tractatus as philosophically irrelevant but points to the unshaken validity of the main tenents of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially the idea of speech acts being inevitably interwoven with extralinguistic, bodily practices. In the second part the author identifies radical limitations of Wittgenstein’s thought, which he tries to eliminate by combining it with Foucault’s understanding of power and Derrida’s understanding of iterability. (...) The latter link opens the path to viewing language-games as theatrical spectacles. In the third part of the paper the author illustrates the revised model of language-games/spectacles by relating it to two films, Scenes from a Marriage and Faithless. This connection enables the author to enrich the model with an affective dimension which comes to the fore in Bergman’s analysis of the breakup of a marriage. (shrink)

The following essay brings together philosophy and film. On the one hand, it is a short study of Hegel’s chapter on morality in the Phenomenology of Spirit. On the other hand, it deals with some of the moral conflicts presented in Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film, Through a Glass Darkly. Central to my discussion is the concept of God. I aim to show how God, manifest in absolute Spirit, should not be understood as a transcendental figure located in a beyond, (...) but as a concrete entity found within the acts of forgiveness and reconciliation. (shrink)

The Retreat of Reason brings back to philosophy the ambition of offering a broad vision of the human condition. One of the main original aims of philosophy was to give people guidance about how to live their lives. Ingmar Persson resumes this practical project, which has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy, but his conclusions are very different from those of the ancient Greeks. They typically argued that a life led in accordance with reason, a rational life, would also (...) be the happiest or most fulfilling. By exploring the irrationality of our attitudes to time, identity, and responsibility, Persson shows that the aim of living rationally conflicts not only with the aim of leading the most fulfilling life, but also with the moral aim of promoting the maximization and just distribution of fulfilment for all. The Retreat of Reason challenges some of our most fundamental ideas about ourselves. (shrink)

Psychedelic Harm Reduction and Integration is a transtheoretical and transdiagnostic clinical approach to working with patients who are using or considering using psychedelics in any context. The ongoing discussion of psychedelics in academic research and mainstream media, coupled with recent law enforcement deprioritization of psychedelics and compassionate use approvals for psychedelic-assisted therapy, make this model exceedingly timely. Given the prevalence of psychedelic use, the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, and the unique cultural and historical context in which psychedelics are placed, it (...) is important that mental health providers have an understanding of the unique motivations, experiences, and needs of people who use them. PHRI incorporates elements of harm reduction psychotherapy and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and can be applied in both brief and ongoing psychotherapy interactions. PHRI represents a shift away from assessment limited to untoward outcomes of psychedelic use and abstinence-based addiction treatment paradigms and toward a stance of compassionate, destigmatizing acceptance of patients' choices. Considerations for assessment, preparation, and working with difficult experiences are presented. (shrink)

Eines der weitgehend unbestellten Felder der Geschichtswissenschaften stellt die reiche Furstenspiegelliteratur des Alten Reiches dar.

Corporate carbon footprint data has become ubiquitous. This data is also highly promissory. But as this paper argues, such data fails both consumers and citizens. The governance of climate change seemingly requires a strong foundation of data on emission sources. Economists approach climate change as a market failure, where the optimisation of the atmosphere is to be evidence based and data driven. Citizens or consumers, state or private agents of control, all require deep access to information to judge emission realities. (...) Whether we are interested in state-led or in neoliberal ‘solutions’ for either democratic participatory decision-making or for preventing market failure, companies’ emissions need to be known. This paper draws on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Fortune 50 company’s environmental accounting unit to show how carbon reporting interferes with information symmetry requirements, which further troubles possibilities for contesting data. A material-semiotic analysis of the data practices and infrastructures employed in the context of corporate emissions disclosure details the situated political economies of data labour along the data processing chain. The explicit consideration of how information asymmetries are socially and computationally shaped, how contexts are shifted and how data is systematically straightened out informs a reflexive engagement with Big Data. The paper argues that attempts to automatise environmental accounting’s veracity management by means of computing metadata or to ensure that data quality meets requirements through third-party control are not satisfactory. The crossover of Big Data with corporate environmental governance does not promise to trouble the political economy that hitherto sustained unsustainability. (shrink)

abstract As history shows, some human beings are capable of acting very immorally. 1 Technological advance and consequent exponential growth in cognitive power means that even rare evil individuals can act with catastrophic effect. The advance of science makes biological, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction easier and easier to fabricate and, thus, increases the probability that they will come into the hands of small terrorist groups and deranged individuals. Cognitive enhancement by means of drugs, implants and biological (including (...) genetic) interventions could thus accelerate the advance of science, or its application, and so increase the risk of the development or misuse of weapons of mass destruction. We argue that this is a reason which speaks against the desirability of cognitive enhancement, and the consequent speedier growth of knowledge, if it is not accompanied by an extensive moral enhancement of humankind. We review the possibilities for moral enhancement by biomedical and genetic means and conclude that, though it should be possible in principle, it is in practice probably distant. There is thus a reason not to support cognitive enhancement in the foreseeable future. However, we grant that there are also reasons in its favour, but we do not attempt to settle the balance between these reasons for and against. Rather, we conclude that if research into cognitive enhancement continues, as it is likely to, it must be accompanied by research into moral enhancement. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to give an explication of the concept of health which does not rely on the concept of disease. The explication is informed by a view of the human individual as an acting subject and it therefore places the abilities of agents in the centre. Abilities may be qualified in different ways. The qualification essential for understanding the dimension of health and illness relates abilities to environmental circumstances and high-ranking projects in the life plan. For (...) this purpose generalized adaptedness is introduced as the overarching construction. The dimension of health and illness is characterized in terms of the adequacy of the repertoire for generalized adaptedness. Some immediate consequences concerning the notion of care are noted. (shrink)

This is a reply to Jesse Prinz and Paul Bloom’s skepticism about the moral importance of empathy. It concedes that empathy is spontaneously biased to individuals who are spatio-temporally close, as well as discriminatory in other ways, and incapable of accommodating large numbers of individuals. But it is argued that we could partly correct these shortcomings of empathy by a guidance of reason because empathy for others consists in imagining what they feel, and, importantly, such acts of imagination can be (...) voluntary – and, thus, under the influence of reflection – as well as automatic. Since empathizing with others motivates concern for their welfare, a reflectively justified empathy will lead to a likewise justified altruistic concern. In addition, we argue that such concern supports another central moral attitude, namely a sense of justice or fairness. (shrink)

We respond to a number of objections raised by John Harris in this journal to our argument that we should pursue genetic and other biological means of morally enhancing human beings (moral bioenhancement). We claim that human beings now have at their disposal means of wiping out life on Earth and that traditional methods of moral education are probably insufficient to achieve the moral enhancement required to ensure that this will not happen. Hence, we argue, moral bioenhancement should be sought (...) and applied. We argue that cognitive enhancement and technological progress raise acute problems because it is easier to harm than to benefit. We address objections to this argument. We also respond to objections that moral bioenhancement: (1) interferes with freedom; (2) cannot be made to target immoral dispositions precisely; (3) is redundant, since cognitive enhancement by itself suffices. (shrink)

Page's manifesto makes a case for localist representations in neural networks, one of the advantages being ease of interpretation. However, even localist networks can be hard to interpret, especially when at some hidden layer of the network distributed representations are employed, as is often the case. Hidden Markov models can be used to provide useful interpretable representations.

This research project assesses the extent to which religion influences standards and behaviour in business, by comparing Islamic banking to co-operative banking as carried out by both Christians and Muslims. The study argues that Islamic banks are particu.

Unfit for the Future argues that the future of our species depends on radical enhancement of the moral aspects of our nature. Population growth and technological advances are threatening to undermine the conditions of worthwhile life on earth forever. We need to modify the biological bases of human motivation to deal with this challenge.

Elizabeth Fenton has criticised an earlier article by the authors in which the claim was made that, by providing humankind with means of causing its destruction, the advance of science and technology has put it in a perilous condition that might take the development of genetic or biomedical techniques of moral enhancement to get out of. The development of these techniques would, however, require further scientific advances, thus forcing humanity deeper into the danger zone created by modern science. Fenton argues (...) that the benefits of scientific advances are undervalued. The authors believe that the argument rather relies upon attaching a special weight to even very slight risks of major catastrophes, and attempt to vindicate this weighting. (shrink)