Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies our visual engagement with films: the fact that they…

Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies our visual engagement with films: the fact that they…

I respond to the commentaries of each of my critics, while seeking to offer a through line of argument distilling some central themes addressed in the symposium. In response to Terrone, I focus on the place of normativity in the model of triangulation, noting that “proto-normativity” is already present in the biological world. Sticking with normativity but shifting the focus specifically onto moral questions, I respond to Vidmar Jovanović’s comments on the ways in which character, and emotion, are related to morality, while also acknowledging the specifically political dimension of…