philosophy and theatre an introduction

Imagination and make-believe So far, we have discussed imagination, play-acting, make-believe and pretence, without really disti ...

Preface Philosophy and theatre emerged from the same place at the same time: Ancient Greece in the 6th centuryBC. They are both ...

well guess accurately when and where it’s going to emerge from the cloud. This makes it different from thefirst, artistic kind o ...

the form of a dialogue, using the character of Socrates as his mouthpiece. Many scholars think that Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, wr ...

I imagine seeing horses in front of me. (Sensory) I imagine that there are horses in front of me. (Propositional) I act as if t ...

allowed to get away with it?’At a highly abstract, symbolist production: ‘How“realistic”was the performance and how much does th ...

they act as if it’s a bear. This is not the same as visualising the bear; nor is it the same as simply supposing (entertaining t ...

among the best. As for the academic approaches, readers will understand that this is not a work of theatre history; nor do I off ...

make-believe. Although they are clearly distinct, we can see that these two broad kinds ofmimesisare related to one another in a ...

the same for performance studies. Barish (1981) remains an important and accessible study of theatre-bashers, beginning with Pla ...

of theatrical performance. To do so, I shall consider a case-study: Gloucester on the cliffs of Dover. In Act IV Scene VI ofKing ...

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1 What is Theatre? Throughout this book, we consider philosophical problems that arise in relation to theatre. The broad aim of ...

Watching this scene (if suitably immersed), we do not congratulate ourselves for the complex interplay of imitation and imaginat ...

stage; lighting and sound; an audience; actors; finally, the building itself–the theatre. Yet theatrical performances are possib ...

(1986), Heath (1996) and the collection of essays in Rorty (1992). See Halliwell (2002) and Huhn (2004) for more detailed and hi ...

obviously have a‘place for viewing’, or even a dedicated or significant ‘place for listening’ (i.e. auditorium). Of course, some ...

19 Barish (1981: 11). 20 See e.g. Nehamas (1982); Belfiore (1984). 21 This is one of many conventional interpretations of Plato, ...

read, not to be performed; often they are excluded, as theatre, for precisely this reason. Brecht wrote Lehrstücke –‘teaching pl ...

48 By calling this kind of imagination‘sensory’, I do not wish to obscure significant differences between actually seeing the ho ...