Skepticism Films Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema

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.

List of figures

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Skepticism Films. A Certain Tendency in Contemporary Cinema

Part I: Thinking Through Cinema

2. Films as Configurations of Philosophical Thought

3. Remediating Philosophy, or: The Media of Philosophical Thought

Part II: Skepticism in Film Philosophy

4. Varieties of Philosophical Skepticism: Knowledge, Acknowledgement, and Trust

5. A Moving Image of Skepticism? Philosophy's Acknowledgement of Film

6. A Cinema for Believers. Trust, Belief, and the Expulsion from the Paradise of Childhood

Part III: Skepticism Films

7. Varieties of Skepticism Films

8. Tools for Philosophical Film Analysis

9. (Not) Knowing My World: External World Skepticism Films

10. Not Knowing My Self, or: Being One's Own Evil Deceiver

11. Coda. From Doubt to Acknowledgement, or: The Philosophical Significance of Skepticism Films revisited

Bibliography and Filmography

Index

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