Philosophy with All the Feels
Keywords:
Feelings, attention, audience, Stand-up Comedy, Will, experimentationAbstract
This piece is written to be performed in front of an audience. It can also be read as a paper, in the way that a play is written to be performed but can also be read as a script. Like a play, it includes stage directions. These are designed to draw attention to the actions of the speaker and the responses of the audience. The piece plays with form in order to explore the role of performance and communication style in our philosophical work. Both content and performance (including staging, sound and imagery) affect how the audience receives and responds to the work. In the course of the piece, I try to show how audience feelings matter in philosophy, and why they are worthy of further examination. Alongside the usual philosophical objectives, I hope to make the audience feel entertained, attentive, and open to new experiences. I aim for us to experience and accomplish something together.
References
Alston, Adam. 2012. “Damocles and the Plucked: Audience Participation and Risk in Half Cut.” Contemporary Theatre Review 22 (3): 344–354. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2012.690742. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2012.690742
Alston, Adam. 2013. “Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, Agency and Responsibility in Immersive Theatre.” Performance Research 18 (2): 128–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.807177. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.807177
Bennett, Emma. 2017. “You, The Public: Grammars of Address in Stewart Lee’s Stand-Up.” Performance Research 22 (3): 98–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1346984. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1346984
Carroll, Noël. 2014. “The Creative Audience: Some Ways in which Readers, Viewers, and/or Listeners Use Their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks.” In The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, edited by Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199836963.003.0004. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199836963.003.0004
Cohen, G. A.. 2001. If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674029668. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674029668
De Cruz, Helen. 2021. Philosophy Illustrated. Oxford University Press.
Dotson, Kristie. 2023. “XIII—Dear Octavia Butler.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 123 (3): 327–346. https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoad011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoad011
Dutilh Novaes, Catarina. 2023. “VII—Can Arguments Change Minds?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 123 (3): 173–198. https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoad006. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoad006
Edmonds, David. 2023. Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.111375. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/book.111375
Fine, Sarah. 2022. “Political Philosophy and Autobiography.” In Political Philosophy, Here and Now: Essays in Honour of David Miller, edited by Daniel Butt, Sarah Fine, and Zofia Stemplowska. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807834.003.0013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807834.003.0013
Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical And Civill . DOI: https://doi.org/10.5479/sil.59773.39088001833995
Jannarone, Kimberly, Elise Morrison, and Tavia Nyong’o. 2022. “Presence, 2019–2022: Introduction.” TDR/The Drama Review 66 (4) 22–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204322000533. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204322000533
Lee, Stewart. 2011. How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian. Faber & Faber.
McCoy, Marina. 2008. Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511497827. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511497827
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press.
Potkay, Adam. 2017. “Rhetoric and Philosophy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, edited by Michael J. MacDonald. Oxford University Press.
Rainer, Lucia. 2017. On the Threshold of Knowing: Lectures and Performances in Art and Academia. Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839438046. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839438046
Richards, Jess. 2018. “Performance as Text. Text as Performance: Love Like Salt, a Collaboration between a Writer and an Artist.” Performance Research 23 (2): 13–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464721. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464721
Schmidt, Theron, Diana Damian Martin, Mick Douglas, Reza Mirabi, Ellen O’brien, Rajni Shah, Val Smith, Lizzie Thomson, and Julie Vulcan. 2023. “The First Thing We Make Is the Conditions of Our Meeting: A Gathering on Gathering.” Performance Research 28 (2): 14–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2260691. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2260691
Schulz, Kathryn. 2010. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Granta.
Seeley, John Robert. (1883) 2010. The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511783159. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511783159
Setiya, Kieran. 2021.”Can Comedy Change the World?” New Statesman, 22 July. https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/agora/2021/07/can-comedy-change-world.
Sharpe, Scott, J-D Dewsbury, and Maria Hynes. “The Minute Interventions of Stewart Lee.” Performance Research 19 (2): 116–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2014.928527. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2014.928527
Unger, Clio. 2021. “Share Your Work: Lola Arias’s Lecture Performance Series and the Artistic Cognitariat of the Global Pandemic.” Contemporary Theatre Review 31 (4): 471–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1976166. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1976166
Published
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Sarah Fine

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).