Alice Crary

This book presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostami’s films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.

Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Noël Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostami’s most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy, and Like Someone in Love.

Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy shows that the philosophical significance of film consists less in its ability to make a positive contribution to theorising than in how it beguiles, goads, and rebukes it.

ABSTRACT
The question of whether Wittgenstein was a liberal philosopher has received less attention than the question of whether he was a conservative philosopher but, as Robert Greenleaf Brice has recently argued, there are hints of liberalism in some of his remarks, and some philosophers, like Richard Eldridge have argued that a kind of liberalism follows from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Richard Rorty has also drawn liberal conclusions from a philosophical viewpoint which draws on Wittgenstein’s work and Alice Crary has suggested that the lessons learned from her own interpretation of Wittgenstein are “reflected in forms of social life that embody the ideals of liberal democracy”. Here I will argue both that Wittgenstein was not a liberal and that his philosophy does not imply a liberal viewpoint. The authors discussed here do not demonstrate that any broad ideological conclusions follow from Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks.
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KEYWORDS: Wittgenstein, Liberalism, Liberal Democracy, Brice, Eldridge, Rorty, Crary.

La pregunta si Wittgenstein fue un filósofo liberal ha recibido menos atención que la de si fue un filósofo conservador, pero, como Robert Greenleaf Brice ha defendido recientemente, hay muchos indicios de liberalismo en algumas de sus observaciones, y algunos filósofos, como Richard Eldridge, han sostenido que hay un cierto tipo de liberalismo que se sigue de la filosofía de su última etapa. Richard Rorty ha sacado también conclusiones liberales a partir de la perspectiva filosófica que se basa en la obra de Wittgenstein y Alice Crary ha sugerido que las lecciones aprendidas de su propria interpretación de Wittgenstein "reflejan en formas de vida social que incorporan los ideales de la democracia liberal".
https://revistas.usantotomas.edu.co/index.php/analisis/article/view/4755

Ethics is often dominated by an understanding of objecitivity according to which any subjective influences are to be eliminated as far as possible. This suggests that emotions are an obstacle to ethical cognition because they tend to dull the look upon (ethically relevant) facts. The author here makes an attempt to criticize this kind of understanding of objectivity, reality and rationality, which is (often implicitly) inherent in ethical discourses, as well as the ideal of a moral philosopher as a scientific expert. His aim is to make room for another view of what ethics is actually about. The reality of ethics is that of the significance of situations, and this kind of reality is only accessible to an involved perception and not to a "look from nowhere". Thus, emotions are not in any case to be seen as an obstacle to valid ethical cognition; on the contrary, it is them which facilitate to perceive a situation in its moral relevance. As to the reflections of the moral philosopher about ethical problems this kind of view has the consequence that what has to be asked is not generally keeping distance from his subjective reactions but a somewhat deeper understanding of them.

The concept of moral individualism is part of the foundational structure of most prominent modern moral philosophies. It rests on the assumption that moral obligations towards a respective individual are constituted solely by her or his capacities. Hence, these obligations are independent of any ἔθος (ethos), of any shared ethical sense and social significations. The moral agent and the individual with moral status (who is the target of a respective action) are construed as subjects outside of any social relation or lifeworld significations. This assumption has been contested in the last decades by diverse authors with very different approaches to moral philosophy. In the last years, an increasing number of philosophers like Cora Diamond and Alice Crary (with a Wittgensteinian background), but also phenomenologists like Paul Ricœur, Klaus Held, and Bernhard Waldenfels question the presupposition that individual capacities are the agent-neutral and context-neutral ground of moral con...

In Beyond Moral Judgment, Alice Crary defends a version of moral objectivism which turns on the idea that participation in moral life involves acquired affective proclivities: subjective capacities which nevertheless allow us to be receptive to objective features of the world. In this article, I draw out key aspects and implications of her account with reference to Joshua Oppenheimer's 2014 film The Look of Silence, a companion piece to 2012's The Act of Killing. The film depicts a series of confrontations between optometrist Adi Rukun and warlords and gangsters involved in massacres perpetrated during Indonesia's anti-communist purges. Many of the interviews were carried out under the pretext of conducting eye tests, and the optometric equipment Rukun affixes to the faces of the perpetrators – who often appear quite cavalier about or even proud of their deeds – functions as a stark metaphor for their failures to see the meaning and consequences of their actions. As I work to show, there is something disquieting for philosophy about these men, and the urge to call them monsters. In particular, they cause disquiet by tempting us to say that there are agents who lack the means to see all moral features of the world, or who simply do not feel anything in response to them. As I argue, these explanations are not open to Crary, but that may be a sign not of the weakness of her account but of the glibness of accounts to which they are.