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This chapter sets about testing empirically the claim that philosophical practice involves an implicit reliance on intuitions. It does this by examining ten philosophical thought experiments in argumentative context: Perry’s cases in “The Essential Indexical”, Burge’s arthritis cases in “Individualism and the Mental”, Thomson’s violinist, Thomson’s and Foot’s trolley cases, Cohen’s lottery cases, Lehrer’s Truetemp, Goldman’s fake barn cases, Cappelen and Hawthorne’s cases on judgments of taste, Williams’ cases on personal identity, and Chalmers’ zombies. Relying on the diagnostics developed in the previous chapter, it is shown that none of the judgments involved have the special features that methodologists typically take as characteristic of intuitions.

An introduction to what the book defines as exploitation-horror – tracing the term back to Robin Wood and discussing how the style of this demarcation might be seen to hold similar aesthetic and thematic pretensions to that of the post-classical sexploitation movement. Historic appreciation of the key films is introduced alongside how some of the films were received at their time of release.

This chapter probes the depiction of zombies in such contemporary novels as World War Z, Zombie Haiku, and the revisionist classic Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Authors Margo Collins and Elson Bond argue that the zombie is uniquely appealing to today's technologically savvy, fast-paced generation and, as such, can serve as a mirror for some of Generation Y's values and notions of identity. New millennium zombie-ism demonstrates an apparent divergence into what initially appears to be two distinct categories: zombie-as-comedy and zombie-as-threat, but as the chapter argues, time and again those two categories overlap in intriguing and symbolic ways. Ultimately, depictions of both kinds of zombies come to function as monstrous placeholders for potentially dangerous human interactions in an anomic society. Accustomed to instant communication with virtual strangers, insulated from the natural world and dependent on fragile transportation, communication, and power networks, millennial audiences have good reason to fear the chaotic anonymity of zombies.

This chapter illustrates the interconnection between representations of war and Gothic imaginary. It presents a reading of WWI poetry in conjunction with George Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007), Ambrose Bierce's Gothic description of his Civil War experience and the American military involvement in the Caribbean. Romero's distinctively self-referential style is read as a reflection of the monstrosity of the cinematic medium itself, conjoining on the thematic level the return of soldiers as zombies and on the extradiegetic level a visual language returning both as spectral bodies on screen. The war zone is depicted as a realm between life and death, as though the Gothic mode were the only way the truth can be told in a situation of catastrophe. The zombie, poised in this space, functions as a trope used to confront us with the ethical crisis raised by a ubiquity of digital images at the beginning of the 21st century.

In Robert Kirkman’s graphic narrative The Walking Dead, the zombie apocalypse acts an equalizing force, bringing together disparate groups of survivors from all walks of life, who join forces to combat the living dead. Yet Kirkman’s emphasis on each character’s work history sheds light on the divisive class and economic power that continues to haunt protagonist Rick Grimes and a host of minor characters who display a profound sense of disillusionment and worker alienation in attempting to achieve the American Dream. Kirkman’s anti-capitalist slant as demonstrated by many of the characters’ relief in having escaped the endless cycle of commerce, consumerism, and capitalism that consumed their lives before the zombie invasion occurred becomes a useful tool to discuss how labor impacts lived experience.

This chapter discusses Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its prequels. It suggests that critical disdain of mashup fiction to the contrary, the three novels deserve close attention to the things they do, and to foreground their work as parody. In engaging their original text’s complicated relation to race, class, and gender issues, they act directly on Jane Austen’s fiction; but at the same time, they also foreground the limits of the contemporary engagement with Austen. What the novels do is reflect simultaneously on the historical Austen text, the reception of Austen, and the contemporary moment’s systemic exclusions and violences.

This chapter argues that post-WWII zombie narratives offer a terrifying allegory of national selfhood. The traumatic dislocations of post-war geopolitics range from 1950s’ fear of communist infiltration and nuclear annihilation to Vietnam’s neo-colonialist catastrophe, and from 1970s’ consumer fetishism and economic collapse to the contemporary dominance of globalization. In the zombie horde’s total disregard for national borders, reducing survivors to traumatized sub-humans huddled in the wreckage of civil society, we see the gothic interrogation of our current economic problems, specifically the transformative impact of global neoliberalism.

This chapter’s discussion puts to task the views developed in previous chapters in an attempt to solve four famous philosophical puzzles: the Puzzle of Mary, the Explanatory Gap, the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and the Possibility of Zombies. How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what form does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? These are all questions that are addressed in this chapter.