Film Theory in the Mirror [Book Symposium]
Issue: Issue 22 • Author/s: Adriano D’Aloia
Topics: Aesthetics, Cognitive science, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ontology
This essay is the English translation of the foreword to the Italian edition of Film, Art, and the Third Culture, published in 2022 as Cinema, evoluzione, neuroscienze: un’estetica naturalizzata del film (Rome: Dino Audino). It approaches Murray Smith’s study as a key entry point into the ongoing dialogue between film theory and the cognitive sciences, and as a catalyst for rethinking the epistemological foundations of film studies in light of neuroscience. The analysis situates Smith’s notion of “cooperative naturalism” within a broader critical framework that questions how the humanities can…