Science, Ethics and Possible Futures in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema Peter Krämer Monday, 7 April 2025, 13.15-16.45, VP Thursday, 10 April 2025, 13.15-18.15, DS Monday, 14 April 2025, 13.15-16.45, VP Thursday, 17 April 2025, 13.15-18.15, DS (AFO week) Monday, 28 April 2025, 13.15-16.45, VP Wednesday, 30 April 2025, 16.45-20.45, VP Please note that much of the time in these sessions will be taken up with film screenings. Description: This course examines films (as well as one television series) which deal in diverse ways with science and technology, and in doing so map out possible, usually rather negative, futures for humanity. The focus is on works by three prominent writerdirectors: the Canadian James Cameron (this course will deal with Terminator 2: Judgment Day [1991] and Avatar [2009]), the BritishAmerican Christopher Nolan (Interstellar [2014] and Oppenheimer [2023]) and the Brit Alex Garland (Ex Machina [2014], Devs [2020] and Civil War [2024]). Looking closely at the behaviour of the protagonists and antagonists in these productions, how can one make sense of it and how might one judge it in moral terms? How important is the notion of free will for this discussion? How do the films and the TV series deal with clashes between different moral obligations (to one's family, to strangers, to future generations, to humanity as a whole)? How do these fictional visions relate to scholarly prognoses about humanity's actual future (to do with artificial intelligence, nuclear war, the collapse of terrestrial ecosystems, space exploration, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the breakdown of democracy)? What, in particular, is the role of scientific progress and technological innovations in both fictional visions and scholarly prognoses? What is the connection between the ethics of fictional protagonists/antagonists and the shape of the fictional futures they inhabit? And what does all of this have to do with how we live our lives right now? The course involves advance reading for each session, screenings in class (as well as some home viewing), seminar discussions and homework carried out individually or in small groups (and to be submitted in advance of each session). There may be short presentations by the tutor, but no full-length lectures; instead students will read several of the tutor's publications. The reading will provide some film historical context for the work of the above filmmakers, and also introduce students to ethics/moral philosophy (including sufferingfocused ethics) and to research into realworld (existential and suffering) risks for humanity. Students wishing to take this course may want to start reading the following short book: Tobias Baumann, Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe, 2022; freely accessible at https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Avoiding_The_Worst_final.pdf. Shortly before the start of the course, further preparatory reading will be made available, notably the following book chapter: Peter Krämer, "The End of the World (As It Is Collectively Known At the Time): Hit Patterns in US and Global Box Office Charts", The Oxford Handbook of American Film History, ed. Jon Lewis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. About the tutor: Peter Krämer is a Senior Research Fellow in Cinema & TV in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK), and a regular guest lecturer at several other universities in the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic. He is the author or editor of twelve academic books on Hollywood cinema and of a children's book entitled American Film: An A-Z Guide. For the last eight years he has been doing some guest teaching at Palacky University on topics ranging from Stanley Kubrick and Hollywood blockbusters to climate change & the movies as well as, most recently, 'Film, Philosophy and Philanthropy: Academic Work and Personal Ethics'.
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