Curtis fears that he may be becoming mentally ill. He can’t sleep, and when he does, he has terrible nightmares of a thunderstorm, dying birds, and of his family turning against him. He starts to experience these dreams while awake as hallucinations; or perhaps he is just falling asleep and dreaming during the day? Or perhaps, as he comes to suspect, his visions are literal premonitions of a terrible apocalyse that only he can prevent?

I used to play this party game of who would play who in “Analytic Philosophy the Hollywood blockbuster”, and one of my most confident castings was 70s Gene Hackman as Ted Sider. I hope Ted doesn’t mind. It had to be Gene Hackman as he was in the 70s when he was cool, youthful, funky - I think the model was as he was in The French Connection.

If only the Matrix hadn’t been released in the same year, eXistenZ would now be famous for having introduced a generation to Descartes’ dream argument. (It’s like the Christ’s clothes controversy all over again!) The plot is like this: in the near future, you can play immersive virtual reality video games, in which…

If you don’t love nerding it up in medieval philosophy, you probably haven’t heard that late medieval philosophers like John Buridan, William of Ockham, and Marsilius of Padua were on the verge of inventing quantification, classical mechanics, and liberal democracy, but it all went pear-shaped because they were on the wrong side of the “Christ’s clothes” controversy.