Abstract
The aim of this opening chapter is to provide an introduction to the emerging field of Performance Philosophy, in order to offer some contextualization for the essays that make up this volume, but also, more broadly, to outline the origins of the Performance Philosophy book series, with Palgrave Macmillan, of which this volume is a launch title. Having narrated aspects of the (ongoing) emergence of Performance Philosophy as an international and interdisciplinary field, I would then like to address one prominent debate concerning the field at present, which I will summarize as the ‘Mind the Gap’ vs. ‘Performance as Philosophy’ debate. This debate was first staged at the inaugural Performance Philosophy conference held at the University of Surrey in Guildford (just outside London) in the UK in April 2013; however, one can trace multiple iterations of similar arguments not only in previous literature within Theatre and Performance Studies, but throughout the history of philosophy and in related disciplines such as Film Philosophy. As we shall see, this debate concerns divergent opinions as to the nature of the relationship between performance and philosophy (as institutions, traditions, enterprises, concepts, practices and so forth). Are performance and philosophy fundamentally different (and hence we should ‘mind the gap’ between them as Martin Puchner suggests) or can we think in terms of performance as being its own kind of philosophy and indeed of philosophy as a form of performance?
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© 2014 Laura Cull
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Cull, L. (2014). Performance Philosophy — Staging a New Field. In: Cull, L., Lagaay, A. (eds) Encounters in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137462725_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137462725_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49911-3
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