Our first screening for Access Film Studies is Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). We’ll be using this to focus our discussions of style and narrative in the next couple of weeks. There are lots of great articles available on Citizen Kane; please feel free to share these below.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), René Descartes (1596-1650) set out to establish a firm foundation for the sciences. In attempting to do so he succeeded, via two of the most famous sceptical arguments in philosophy, only in confirming how little we actually know for certain.
In the Medieval world [and indeed still to this day in some dark corners] the best way of acquiring knowledge was via Revelation or Authority. However, Descartes was writing at a time of scientific revolution when many doctrines which had hitherto been accepted as certain were being overturned and, as such, he was struck by the instability and unreliability of scientific ‘knowledge’. Continue reading
