Noel Carroll (born December 25, 1947, in Far Rockaway, New York City) is an American philosopher and a leading figure in the contemporary philosophy of art, Aesthetics, Philosophy of film, or Cinema studies. In 2016 in Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, he was ranked sixth in a list of the Best Anglophone Philosophers of Art post-1945. He also works in the philosophies of particular artforms, including literature, painting, theater, dance and, most notably, cinema and television where he is a prominent proponent of cognitive theories of the moving image. In addition, he has contributed to the theory of media, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of the emotions. Carroll has worked as a journalist, and has written five documentaries. Since 2007, he has held the position of distinguished professor in the philosophy program at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Education Carroll graduated from Hofstra University in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in philosophy. He gained three Master of Arts degrees in philosophy, Cinema Studies, and Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, New York University, and the University of Illinois Chicago, respectively. During his tenure at New York University, he completed his PhD with the dissertation "An In-Depth Analysis of Buster Keaton's The General". He completed another PhD from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1983.
Career Carroll holds two PhDs, one in cinema studies and the other in philosophy. From 1972 to 1988, he worked as a journalist covering film, theater, performance, and fine art for publications such as the Chicago Reader, Artforum, In These Times, Dance Magazine, SoHo Weekly News, and The Village Voice. Many of these early articles have been collected in his 2011 book Living in an Artworld. He has also written five documentaries. Carroll has taught philosophy in a range of academic settings in the U.S. and abroad. Since 2007, he has been based at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as distinguished professor. Earlier, he held named professorships at Temple University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has also spent time teaching at institutions such as the University of Auckland, Cornell, Wesleyan, and Columbia.
Philosophical works One of Carroll's most well-known books is The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990). It is an examination of the aesthetics of horror fiction (in novels, stories, radio and film). In A Philosophy of Mass Art (1998), Carroll offered a defense of mass-produced art forms such as cinema, radio, and television. In On Criticism (2009), he presented a theory of art criticism and argued for its objectivity. His 2022 work Classics in the Western Philosophy of Art examines key figures in the Western philosophical tradition, including Plato, Aristotle, Hutcheson, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Clive Bell, offering commentary on their contributions to aesthetics. Carroll has contributed to, while also sometimes initiating, discussions in the contemporary philosophy of art. These include the definition of art, moderate actual intentionalism, moderate moralism, the content-based approach to aesthetic experience, a purpose-driven model of art criticism, the characterization of aesthetic appreciation as a form of evaluative judgment, a definition of mass art, and arguments in support of the cognitive value of art. His work addresses topics such as philosophizing through artworks, anti-autonomism, the nature of the avant-garde, the ethics of racist humor, the relationship between art and emotion and mood, narrative and fiction, medium-specificity in criticism, and the interplay between art and ideology.
Theory of the moving image Carroll's best-known book in this area of inquiry is his criticism of Marxist/psychoanalytic film theory, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (1988). This book helped set the stage for the resurgence of the cognitive study of the moving image. Carroll co-edited a book with David Bordwell called Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996) which challenged grand unified theories of cinema, such as Marxist/psychoanalytic film theory, in favor of middle-level research. In addition to his general contribution to the emergence of cognitivist approaches to the study of the moving image, Carroll has offered theories of suspense, point-of-view editing, the documentary, the image of women in film, the representation of race and ethnicity, film genres, the evaluation of motion pictures, and cinema style.
Books about Carroll Two academic monographs have been published focusing on Carroll's philosophical work. Noel Carroll by Hae-Won Lee (Communication Books, 2017) offers an introduction to his theories of art, narrative, and media, and was published in Korean. Noel Carroll and Film: A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture by Mario Slugan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) examines his influence on the philosophy of film and aesthetics, situating his work within broader debates in analytic philosophy and popular culture.
Awards American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellowship (2025) Guggenheim Fellowship (2002) Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Graduate Center, City University of New York (2007–present) Danforth Fellowship (1969–1975) Filderman Award in Philosophy, Hofstra University (1967–1969)
Selected publications Carroll is the author of more than two hundred articles and other works:
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