Abstract
Woody Allen’s trick philosophy puts the greatest magician to shame. Allen’s factoring philosophy relies on phenomenological false moves to make God, the world, other people, morality, meaning, and even oneself disappear. “You can never resolve the epistemological conundrum,” the skeptical Allen assures us. Our mind’s efforts to know only distort, applying a human stain to an unknowable reality. The mind, says Allen, “puts all this chaos in order”—its order. The trick of factoring philosophy is to split mind, the purely subjective, from world, the purely objective. Factoring out the subjective cancels the world’s meanings. The world itself vanishes behind a curtain of subjective appearances. What remains for Allen’s filmmaking is to flip-flop between the skeptic’s sleight of hand and ordinary topics of artistic concern, such as adultery. But global skepticism voids ordinary concerns. When fidelity and forgiveness stop making sense, the font of art runs dry.