ABSTRACT
Let me restate my general claim. Watching and listening to films has philosophical importance. It is a contemporary re-enactment of Plato’s cave. But the inhabitants of the cinema-cave are not prisoners; they are, to a considerable extent, pleasure-seekers. They use film as part of the process of coming to terms with and understanding the world they inhabit, knowing at some level that the world on film contrasts with the world off film. So film rebuts Plato’s use of the cave to undermine the senses of the ordinary person as guides to knowledge. In fact it shows that ordinary people are very sophisticated in relation to the problem of appearance and reality. Unlike philosophers, they do not fear it and worry how to solve it. They solve it regularly and without fuss: they play with it.
