Is the Theatre a Zombie?

Rebellato, Dan. 'Is the Theatre a Zombie? On the Successful Failures of Émile Zola.' Anglia 136, no. 1 (2018): 100-120.

I've just published a new article. It's in part on the idea of the theatre as a model of the mind and in part about Naturalism. Here's the abstract:

Naturalist theatre, in its late-nineteenth-century incarnation, and particularly in the work of Émile Zola, is often seen as advancing a physicalist view of the mind, where all mind states can be reduced to brain states. The novels and the plays do not uniformly or unambiguously support this analysis, so is the theory or the practice wrong? Physicalism is an idea that has had a recent renaissance, helped by the discoveries of neuroscience. Nevertheless I express some caution about the claims made for the eradication of free will. A range of thought experiments in the philosophy of mind have cast doubt on physicalism, culminating in David Chalmers’s much-debated zombie argument. I argue that zombies and their analogues represented deep social anxieties in the late nine- teenth century, and make repeated appearances in Naturalism. The essay goes on to suggest that Naturalism should be considered to have conducted thought experiments, rather than just to have attempted to embody the theory on stage. Turning to John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, I suggest that theatre-making itself may be a kind of thought experiment model of the mind.

Basically, it's arguing from a philosophical perspective that the physicalist reduction of the mind to the brain is incoherent; you always lose something essential and irreducible when you try to claim that all we are is our physical matter. I go through a lot of the standard thought experiments in the philosophy of mind (Leibniz's Mill, Nagel's Bat, the China brain, Mary and the Black and White Room, Chalmer's Zombie Problem) and then see where this gets us with Naturalism which, famously, claimed that we are just our physical matter (in Zola's version of it anyway). The punchline to the philosophy bit is to suggest that the theatre, in its most conventional form, is a philosophically interesting test of some currently popular views about the brain. The punchline to the Naturalism bit is to suggest that maybe we should see Naturalism in the theatre and the novel as a test of the physicalist hypothesis, rather than a triumphant proof of it.

It's part of an excellent-looking special issue of Anglia on 'Drama, Theatre and Philosophy', edited by David Kornhaber and Martin Middeke and other contributors include Laura Cull O' Maollearca, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tom Stern, Mark Robson and the wonderful Anna Street - among others, so... heady company to be in. If you have access to a University library, you can probably get access to it HERE