Projections Volume 3, Issue 1, Summer 2009: 117–125 © Berghahn Journals doi: 10.3167/proj.2009.030108 ISSN 1934-9688 (Print), ISSN 1934-9696 (Online) Response to My “Critics” Thomas Wartenberg I would like to begin my “response” to my “critics” by acknowledging my sense that they are less critics than fellow travelers in a joint project of understand- ing the philosophical significance of film. Each of them has provided me with help and support over the years. My own attempt to think philosophically about film was aided substantially by my discovery that Cynthia Freeland was also engaged in the same line of inquiry, and this, in turn, resulted in our col- laborating on the first anthology about film written exclusively by philoso- phers, Philosophy and Film, published in 1995. Richard Eldridge and I have also maintained an ongoing if somewhat episodic discussion over the years about my understanding of film and the significance of Stanley Cavell’s account of the cinema, a conversation that has helped me refine my own thinking even as the conversation challenged it. So I would like to begin, then, by thanking rather than responding to these two friends and colleagues In fact, I do not want to “respond” to them at all, but join with them in the project of thinking some more, hopefully even more deeply, about the philo- sophical significance of film. One of the central concerns that they have ex- pressed is that my own account of film’s philosophical significance is too academic, too narrowly cognitive, too philosophically conservative for their sense of the difference that film can make for philosophy. This is, in fact, a worry that I shared when, while discussing Martha Nussbaum and Cora Dia- mond in Thinking on Screen, I referred to my method of procedure as perhaps appearing “flatfooted and even misguided” compared with these two philos- ophers’ accounts of the philosophical import of literature (Wartenberg 2007: 136). So I begin by explaining why I chose to proceed as I did in the book. My goal in writing Thinking on Screen was to present an argument for the possibility of cinematic philosophy. This is the claim that some films ought to be recognized as doing philosophy in their own right. Although many philoso- phers share the conviction that films have this capacity, it is by no means an uncontested thesis. One confusion that seems rife when it comes to thinking about the possi- bility of cinematic philosophy has to do with my articulating the claim in terms of the ability of films to actually do philosophy. Some philosophers object to this claim on the grounds that films cannot do philosophy, for only people can do philosophy. But this objection, despite mimicking a catchy ad- vertising phrase, misses the point. When I support the possibility of cinematic philosophy by claiming that some films actually do philosophy, that is a short- hand way of saying that some filmmaker has philosophized by means of a s8_PROJ_030108 3/12/09 12:01 PM Page 117