Abstract

The moral importance of films to viewers is a dimension of the cinematic experience that has long been neglected. By describing the moral education powers of film, this book aims to encourage philosophers to practice the ethical reading of film works. This exercise helps to make intelligible important features of our lives, which academic forms of discourse tend to overlook. Taking our experience of films seriously should even reorient our conception of the tasks of ethics and the ways of doing philosophy. Hugo Clémot thus intends to contribute to a conversation whose interlocutors are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, William Rothman, Victor Perkins, Cora Diamond, Andrew Klevan and Sandra Laugier. Because it allows us to understand films such as "The Awful Truth", "Bringing Up Baby", "The Aviator's Wife", "The Green Ray", "Winter Tale", "Spring Tale", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", "Detachment" or "Happy-Go-Lucky" and directors such as Leo McCarey in a different way, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Éric Rohmer, Terrence Malick or Arnaud Desplechin, this tradition also concerns researchers in film studies, since the value of an aesthetic research is a function of its capacity to enrich the experience of singular works.