ABSTRACT
The philosophy of film is now a well-established sub domain of the philosophy of art. This chapter teases out the different senses in which a film might be said to be "philosophical". This should not surprise people, given that the films in question are artworks rather than works of philosophy, and as such are characterized by the norms of the particular artistic traditions from which they emerge. The chapter draws upon Arthur Danto's arguments concerning the philosophical dimensions of modern art. On one orthodox view within the philosophy of art, artworks embody an array of different kinds of value not only aesthetic value, most often regarded as the mainstay of artistic value, but cognitive, ethical, political and historical value. This orthodoxy now faces a challenge, where practitioners of X-Phi experimental philosophy and others within the lineage of Aristotle, Hume, and W. V. O. Quine press the view that the concerns of philosophy cannot be made wholly independent of the concerns of science.
