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Irving Singer. Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 245 pages.
In more than a score of books, Irving Singer, trained as an analytic philosopher, has explored the relationships between philosophic thinking and artistic expression. In the process of these intrepid border crossings he has been drawn to those philosophers whose artistic impulses inflect (some would say invalidate) their professional credentials. Early and late he has been engaged with George Santayana (poet and novelist), but Singer's concerns with issues of affectivity, meaning, love, and representation have drawn him to other great predecessors who resist easy categorization-Plato, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Similarly, on the artistic side of the divide, he has always also shown a lively interest in mixed artistic forms like drama and opera.
It was perhaps inevitable then that Singer should have been drawn to film as a decidedly mixed form, and one that has presented age-old philosophic issues in a new and compelling form. Although he confesses in the present book that he has long used films as a supplement to the teaching of philosophy, it was only with the turn of the millennium that he began publishing books on...