Hitchcock as Philosopher

The films of Alfred Hitchcock deal heavily with psychological and philosophical themes, and one needn’t look very far into the canon to find them. In
Psycho , for example, the personality metamorphosis in Marion Crane that leads her into grand larceny is a pale double of the murderous Oedipal divide in Norman Bates. In
The Birds , overbearing natural mutations turn what might have been a
creature feature
into a film about fear of the unknowable. This book looks at 12 Hitchcock films and the positions they put forth on three problem areas of epistemology: deception, knowledge of mind, and problematic knowledge of the external world. These philosophical concepts are explained and woven into the author’s thorough and thought-provoking discussion of each film. Descartes and Wittgenstein star; Plato, Locke, Hume, Kant and Kierkegaard also make appearances in this new
philosopher’s cut
of the master’s works.