It is often said that television series are nowadays as good as films, or even better than them, but the philosophical inquiry into the former remains much less developed than the philosophy of film. A handful of recent books (e.g., Nannicelli 2016, Shuster 2017, Andrzejewski and Salwa 2018, Bandirali and Terrone 2021) have tried to fill the gap, but there is much work still to be done. Significant contributions to the aesthetics of television series are coming from television studies (...) and fil... (shrink)

What aesthetic interest do we have in watching films? In a much debated paper, Roger Scruton argued that this interest typically comes down to the interest in the dramatic representations recorded by such films. Berys Gaut and Catharine Abell criticized Scruton’s argument by claiming that films can elicit an aesthetic interest also by virtue of their pictorial representation. In this article, we develop a different criticism of Scruton’s argument. In our view, a film can elicit an aesthetic interest that does (...) not come down to an interest in the dramatic representation or in the pictorial representation. We will argue that this is a distinctively cinematic interest. In section I we outline Scruton’s argument. In section II we point out an interest in how the cinematic medium presents the portrayed subject as detached from the spectator’s environment. In section III, by referring to Wittgenstein’s account of the contemplation from outside, we contend that the interest in films introduced in section II can count as an aesthetic interest. In section IV we argue that both documentaries and fiction films can elicit this kind of interest. In section V we compare the three different kinds of aesthetic interest that, in our view, a film can elicit. In section VI we describe the corresponding kinds of cinematic achievements. (shrink)

The paper offers a twofold intervention in the debates about the paradox of fiction. First, it argues that too much emphasis has been placed on the paradox’ epistemological aspect. This has led to a neglect of its ethical dimension. Specifically, little has been said about the ethical issues of regularly caring for fictional entities while exhibiting comparatively far less concern for real­life fellow men and women. Second, the essay argues that it is often the case that it is real­life structures (...) rather than fictional entities that cause emotions. In the case of horror, for example, we are not afraid of the fictional monster but of an off possibility that something like this might exist in the real world. Importantly, the proposal differs from the counterfactualist approaches because it allows that fictional entities may cause emotions. Specifically, emotions which do not have clearly defined accompanying typical actions, such as sympathy and antipathy. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 129-131, Winter 2020.

This book, first published in 1992, attempts to unify the economic analysis of the production process in order to understand the effects of technical change. It is both an analytical representation of the production process, taking into account the temporal, organizational, and qualitative dimensions of production, and a fact-finding model for studying the economic effects of technical change. The inclusion of temporal and organizational aspects allows the author to examine the analytical implications of research on the nature of firms and (...) the characteristics of technical change, whilst the model is used to analyse technical changes that involve variations of scale or degrees of flexibility. This book deals with themes much discussed in research in industrial economics and management studies and is an important contribution to bringing these two areas of research closer together, providing a general framework for the study of production processes. (shrink)

This book will undoubtedly be useful to scholars and graduate students interested in the relationships between self-consciousness, emotion, the brain, and the...

The aim of the present paper is to list the usual and some possible meanings--or at least those the writer found the most interesting--of the word 'level,' to specify them briefly, to illustrate them, and to propose some problems in which those concepts are involved. Should this semantical clarification prove useful in clearing the ground for ontological speculation, the thesis would be confirmed that there is no conflict between semantics and ontology as long as the former does not deny the (...) legitimacy of inquiries into the denotata of certain universal words, and as long as metaphysics is not reluctant to linguistic hygiene. (shrink)

In recent years, Karl Rahner's theology of concupiscence as a «pre-ethical appetite» has been subjected to some negative criticism as «un-Thomistic» and as presupposing modern philosophy's dualistic understanding of being. The present essay tries to situate Rahner's interpretation within the theological context of the time when it was originally published; the major debate then was on the nature of the supernatural and the desiderium naturale videndi Deum. It then tries to reconstruct the usage Rahner himself made of Aquinas's theology and (...) Heidegger's philosophy, as presented in the latter's Sein und Zeit . In 1941, Rahner's major contribution consisted in reformulating Aquinas's theology on concupiscence in Heideggerian terminology. The Incarnation and the gift of integrity constituted two benchmarks that Rahner used to test his own understanding of concupiscence. Finally, Rahner's contribution is placed within the context of the Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification and the definition of concupiscence as presented in the accompanying Official Common Statement. (shrink)