''Examined Life'' is a 2008 Canadian documentary film directed by Astra Taylor about philosophers. The film has eight influential modern philosophers walking around New York and other metropolises, discussing the practical application of their ideas in modern culture.

Featured philosophers

The philosophers are

Cornel West Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society an ...

Avital Ronell Avital Ronell ( ; born 15 April 1952) is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic l ...

Peter Singer Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a Secularit ...

, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum,

Michael Hardt Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book ''Empire'', which was co-written with Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri suggest that several forces which they see as domin ...

, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler, who is accompanied by Taylor's sister and the disability activist Sunny (Sunaura Taylor).

Production and release

The film appeared in the

2008 Toronto International Film Festival 8 (eight) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9. In mathematics 8 is: * a composite number, its proper divisors being , , and . It is twice 4 or four times 2. * a power of two, being 2 (two cubed), and is the first number of t ...

, the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival and the 2009

Kingston Canadian Film Festival The Kingston Canadian Film Festival is an annual celebration of the best in Canadian cinema held in Kingston, Ontario. It is the largest stand-alone showcase of feature films from across Canada. The 2021 festival took place from February 26 to Ma ...

. It was co-produced by Sphinx Productions and the

National Film Board of Canada The National Film Board of Canada (NFB; french: Office national du film du Canada (ONF)) is Canada's public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary f ...

, in association with the Ontario Media Development Corporation,

TVOntario TVO Media Education Group (often abbreviated as TVO and stylized on-air as tvo) is a publicly funded English-language educational television network and media organization serving the Canadian province of Ontario. It is operated by the Ontario ...

and

Knowledge Network Knowledge Network, also branded as British Columbia's Knowledge Network, is a Canadian publicly funded educational cable television network serving the province of British Columbia. It is owned by the Knowledge Network Corporation, a Crown co ...

Reception

Reception has been generally favorable (

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

gives it 77%), However, Martha Nussbaum subsequently complained in '' The Point'' magazine, that although ''Examined Life'' displays "a keen visual imagination and a vivid sense of atmosphere and place" it nonetheless "presents a portrait of philosophy that is... a betrayal of the tradition of philosophizing that began, in Europe, with the life of

Socrates Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...

References

External links

* *
''Examined Life''
at the National Film Board of Canada * Kam Williams]
Examined Life review
2008 films English-language Canadian films 2008 documentary films Canadian documentary films Documentary films about philosophers Films set in Toronto National Film Board of Canada documentaries Documentary films about Slavoj Žižek Films about philosophy 2000s English-language films 2000s Canadian films {{2000s-Canada-documentary-film-stub

Featured philosophers

Production and release

Reception

See also

References

External links