Noel Carroll (born December 25, 1947, in Far Rockaway, New York City)[3] is an American philosopher and a leading figure in the contemporary philosophy of art. In 2016 in Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, he was ranked sixth in a list of the Best Anglophone Philosophers of Art post-1945.
He also works in the philosophies of particular artforms, including literature, painting, theater, dance and, most notably, cinema and television where he is a prominent proponent of cognitive theories of the moving image.[4] In addition, he has contributed to the theory of media, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of the emotions.[5] Carroll has worked as a journalist, and has written five documentaries. Since 2007, he has held the position of distinguished professor in the philosophy program at the CUNY Graduate Center.[6]
One of Carroll's most well-known books is The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990). It is an examination of the aesthetics of horror fiction (in novels, stories, radio and film).[11][12][13]
In A Philosophy of Mass Art (1998), Carroll offered a defense of mass-produced art forms such as cinema, radio, and television.[14] In On Criticism (2009), he presented a theory of art criticism and argued for its objectivity.[15]
His 2022 work Classics in the Western Philosophy of Art examines key figures in the Western philosophical tradition, including Plato, Aristotle, Hutcheson, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Clive Bell, offering commentary on their contributions to aesthetics.[6]
Carroll has contributed to, while also sometimes initiating, discussions in the contemporary philosophy of art.[9][16] These include the definition of art,[7] moderate actual intentionalism, moderate moralism, the content-based approach to aesthetic experience, a purpose-driven model of art criticism, the characterization of aesthetic appreciation as a form of evaluative judgment, a definition of mass art, and arguments in support of the cognitive value of art.[11]
His work addresses topics such as philosophizing through artworks, anti-autonomism, the nature of the avant-garde, the ethics of racist humor, the relationship between art and emotion and mood,[5] narrative and fiction, medium-specificity in criticism, and the interplay between art and ideology.[17]
Theory of the moving image
Carroll's best-known book in this area of inquiry is his criticism of Marxist/psychoanalytic film theory, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (1988).[18] This book helped set the stage for the resurgence of the cognitive study of the moving image.[19] Carroll co-edited a book with David Bordwell called Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996) which challenged grand unified theories of cinema, such as Marxist/psychoanalytic film theory, in favor of middle-level research.[20]
In addition to his general contribution to the emergence of cognitivist approaches to the study of the moving image, Carroll has offered theories of suspense, point-of-view editing, the documentary, the image of women in film, the representation of race and ethnicity, film genres, the evaluation of motion pictures, and cinema style.[6]
Books about Carroll
Two academic monographs have been published focusing on Carroll's philosophical work. Noel Carroll by Hae-Won Lee (Communication Books, 2017) offers an introduction to his theories of art, narrative, and media, and was published in Korean.[5]Noel Carroll and Film: A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture by Mario Slugan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) examines his influence on the philosophy of film and aesthetics, situating his work within broader debates in analytic philosophy and popular culture.[21]
The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
On Criticism, London, Routledge, 2009.
Art in Three Dimensions, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Living in an Artworld: Reviews and Essays on Dance, Performance, Theater, and the Fine Arts in the 1970s and 190s, Louisville, KY: Chicago Spectrum Press, 2012.
Minerva's Night Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures, Malden, Ma.: Blackwell Publishing, 2013.
Humour: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Carroll on Theatre (Beijing, China: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2019).[3]
Carroll, Noël (2003), Lamarque, Peter; Olsen, Stein Haugom (eds.), "The Power of Movies", Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, Wiley-Blackwell, p.21, retrieved 2025-05-01
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
