For many philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytical tradition, the philosophy of film stands to film just as the philosophy of language stands to language: a given range of familiar phenomena are embedded in our lives in ways that take for granted a certain understanding of their nature, and the philosopher interrogates that understanding with a view to disclosing and testing the legitimacy of its presuppositions, and thereby clarifying the true nature of those phenomena. Katherine Thomson-Jones’s short, accessible book, Aesthetics and Film, belongs to this genre: it introduces readers to the field by focusing on two clusters of issues that currently dominate it. The first is film’s original basis in photography, and whether this might threaten film’s claim to be a field of artistic endeavour at all, or instead determine what an aesthetically significant film must be like; the second is the applicability in cinematic contexts of a range of concepts familiar from other aesthetic concerns—authorship, language, narration, and the role of the audience.

Thomson-Jones’s discussion shares the current assumption that work in cognitive science must be taken as authoritative in any attempts to understand the relation between films and their viewers (thirty years ago, the authority figure was psychoanalysis, but the problems created by unquestioned figures of authority are not solved by changing their identity). It is also representative in downplaying the possibility that the unprecedented nature of film might bring into question our philosophical assumptions about what the realm of the aesthetic, and so the nature of art, might be. For instance, while noting that both Roger Scruton and André Bazin place pressure on the very idea of photographs as representations, Thomson-Jones tends not to pause over that aspect of their work: the discussion of Scruton turns quickly to the aesthetic possibilities of photographic methods, while Bazin’s “confusing” claims are translated into a putatively parallel debate between Kendall Walton and Greg Currie about the transparency of photographs. But since that debate presupposes that photographs are representations of some kind, the only question being which kind, the chance that Bazin’s words create (of allowing the nature of photography to instigate a reconsideration of the very idea of what a representation or likeness of reality might be) is missed.

Robert B. Pippin’s Fatalism in American Film Noir project works within a conception of the relation between film and philosophy that Thomson-Jones explicitly and understandably (given the brevity of her text) excludes from consideration, but one that seems far more productive both for philosophers and for those hoping for a better understanding of film and its possibilities (aesthetic and otherwise). His book is subtitled “Some Cinematic Philosophy,” and so carries the conviction that genuinely thoughtful engagements with issues that are of enduring and characteristic interest to philosophers can be found in films, and even in genres of film generated by Hollywood. In an earlier book, Pippin made this case for (some) Westerns (Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); in this book, the relevant genre is film noir, and the issue central to its most interesting instances is that of human agency.

According to a model popular in philosophy (and elsewhere), people do things in order to achieve purposes, and are motivated to do so by reasons and desires of which they are aware; when we act, we know what we are about and why we are about it. By means of detailed readings of three well-known films noir, Pippin shows that they are populated by characters who flagrantly fail to act as this model requires: they lack any clear idea of why they are doing what they do, or act despite knowing that they have good reason not to, or appear incapable of judging whether they have good reason to take a given course of action. Their frequent references to fate articulate a pervasive fatalism in relation to their own actions and lives; but these mid-twentieth-century Americans thereby make manifest a distinctively modern cultural malaise, in which the social preconditions for the realization of rational models of agency (for actually living the lives of rational agents) have broken down. These films thus show us what it looks like and feels like to be alive when our confident assumptions about self-knowledge, embedded as they are in our practices of holding one another to account for what we do, are losing their grip.

Pippin approaches these films as one of the foremost interpreters of G. W. F. Hegel, and certain Hegelian principles have plainly prepared him to appreciate these particular ranges of significance in film noir. For Hegel, human agency and even the most fundamental terms in which people understand themselves are historically variable rather than structured by a timeless logic; human agency itself is akin to a social status instituted and sustained in (and so subject to alteration in the light of shifts in) shared social attitudes. Hegel also viewed art as a cultural domain within which such shifts in self-understanding would find a distinctively sensible or sense-based expression and evaluation. Pippin’s readings aim to reveal film noir as a place in which the accelerating disintegration of one central mode of self-understanding shows up, and in which both the creators of these films and their viewers engage reflectively with its nature and implications.

Thus, despite initial appearances, these films are not presented as illustrations of independently established philosophical claims. They are rather sites at which Pippin’s Hegelian stance is tested against cultural reality, and through which modern art forms’ appreciation of that reality makes a legitimate contribution to the collective conversation about it, rather than being a mere effect or epiphenomenon of broader social and intellectual forces that theorists alone can identify and evaluate. In this way, films are given a voice in their own reception: they appear as philosophy’s interlocutors, and thereby not only claim a place among the arts, but reconfigure a conception of the powers inherent in works of art and of philosophy alike.