Analytic Philosophy And The World Of The Play

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Theatre and the mirror of nature -- Part I Exposing the problem and proposing a solution -- 1 Theatrical names and reference: Dialectical-synecdochic objects and "re-creation"--2 The world of the play: Theatre as "re-creation"--Part II Applying the (proposed) solution to the problems -- 3 "Liveness"? The presumption of dramatic and theatrical "liveness" -- 4 Boundedness of (fictional) theatre to our (real) world: Actor and audience -- 5 Identity across "possible worlds": "The world beyond" the play -- Conclusions -- #1 The purpose of playing: Why go to the theatre? -- #2 Where the world of theatre ends: Performance art -- #3 Make-believe -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index

The Problems of Viewing Performance challenges long-held assumptions by considering the ways in which knowledge is received by more than a single audience member, and breaks new ground by, counterintuitively, claiming that viewing performance is not a shared experience. Given that viewers come to each performance with differing amounts and types of knowledge, they each make different assumptions as to how the performance will unfold. Often modified by other viewers and often after the performance event, knowledge of performance is made more accurate by superimposing the experiences and justified beliefs of multiple viewers. These differences in the viewing experience make knowledge surrounding a performance intersubjective. Ultimately, this book explains the how and the why audience members have different viewing experiences. The Problems of Viewing Performance is important reading for theatre and performance students, scholars and practitioners, as it unpacks the dynamics of spectatorship and explores how audiences work.

"Analytic philosophy is now widely regarded as the dominant tradition in philosophy today. But what exactly is it? How did it arise, and what are its characteristic methods and concerns? What are its main strengths and weaknesses? In this [book], Michael Beaney discusses the nature and development of analytic philosophy by exploring key questions that reveal some of its central concerns, and illustrate some of the core ideas of its main founders"--Front cover flap.

The fifteen original essays in Staging Philosophy make useful connections between the discipline of philosophy and the fields of theater and performance and use these insights to develop new theories about theater. Each of the contributors—leading scholars in the fields of performance and philosophy—breaks new ground, presents new arguments, and offers new theories that will pave the way for future scholarship. Staging Philosophy raises issues of critical importance by providing case studies of various philosophical movements and schools of thought, including aesthetics, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, deconstruction, critical realism, and cognitive science. The essays, which are organized into three sections—history and method, presence, and reception—take up fundamental issues such as spectatorship, empathy, ethics, theater as literature, and the essence of live performance. While some essays challenge assertions made by critics and historians of theater and performance, others analyze the assumptions of manifestos that prescribe how practitioners should go about creating texts and performances. The first book to bridge the disciplines of theater and philosophy, Staging Philosophy will provoke, stimulate, engage, and ultimately bring theater to the foreground of intellectual inquiry while it inspires further philosophical investigation into theater and performance. David Krasner is Associate Professor of Theater Studies, African American Studies, and English at Yale University. His books include A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1920 and Renaissance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910. He is co-editor of the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. David Z. Saltz is Professor of Theatre Studies and Head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. He is coeditor of Theater Journal and is the principal investigator of the innovative Virtual Vaudeville project at the University of Georgia.

In thinking about the conceptual empty spaces of theatre, Between the Lines: A Philosophy of Theatre investigates theatre as an art form, the properties of theatrical characters and theatrical worlds, and the difference between truth and truthfulness in the theatre. Ultimately, this book aims to offer a systematic account of theatre--thinking about theatre metaphysically, epistemologically, and ethically.

Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, the necessary and the contingent, the a posteriori and the a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world.

Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History explores the ways interpretation (of key figures, factions, texts, etc.) shaped the analytic tradition, from Frege to Dummet. It offers readers 17 chapters, written especially for this volume by an international cast of leading scholars. Some chapters are devoted to large, thematic issues like the relationship between analytic philosophy and other philosophical traditions such as British Idealism and phenomenology, while other chapters are tied to more fine-grained topics or to individual philosophers, like Moore and Russell on philosophical method or the history of interpretations of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Throughout, the focus is on interpretations that are crucial to the origin, development, and persistence of the analytic tradition. The result is a more fully formed and philosophically satisfying portrait of analytic philosophy.

In this unique study, Michael Y. Bennett re-reads four influential modern plays alongside their contemporary debates between rationalism and empiricism to show how these monumental achievements were thoroughly a product of their time, but also universal in their epistemological quest to understand the world through a rational and/or empirical model. Bennett contends that these plays directly engage in their contemporary epistemological debates rather than through the lens of a specific philosophy. Besides producing new, insightful readings of heavily-studied plays, the interdisciplinary (historical, philosophical, dramatic, theatrical, and literary) frame Bennett constructs allows him to investigate one of the most fundamental questions of the theatre - how does meaning get made? Bennett suggests that the key to unlocking theatrical meaning is exploring the tension between empirical and rational modes of understanding. The book concludes with an interview with performance artist Coco Fusco.