This chapter contains sections titled: It Ain't Fast Food! We Are What We Eat Notes.

Through a phenomenological study of horse-human relations, this article explores the ways in which, as embodied beings, we live relationally, rather than as separate human identities. Conceptually this challenges oppositional logic and humanist assumptions, but where poststructuralist treatments of these issues tend to remain abstract, this article is concerned with an embodied demonstration of the ways in which we experience a relational or in-between logic in our everyday lives.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an area of great interest, yet little is known about how CSR is perceived and practiced in the professional sport industry. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, including a survey, and a qualitative content analysis of responses to open-ended questions, to explore how professional sport executives define CSR, and what priorities teams have regarding their CSR activities. Findings from this study indicate that sport executives placed different emphases on elements of CSR including a focus on (...) philanthropic activities and ethical behaviors. The data suggest that professional sport executives view CSR as a strategic imperative for their business. Sport executives indicated that a number of factors influenced the practice of their CSR including: philanthropy (altruistic giving), an emphasis on the local community, partnerships, and ethical concerns. We also examine important organizational variables for sport (winning, revenues, and team value) and highlight their relationship with reported CSR involvement. We discuss the implications of the findings and propose recommendations for both theory and practice. (shrink)

Mutualism provides a compelling account of the fairness intuitions on display in economic games. However, it is not yet clear how well the approach holds up as an explanation of all human morality. The theory needs to be tested outside the methodological neighborhood it was born in; such testing has the potential to greatly improve our understanding of morality in general.

Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 provides a point of departure for exploring the dynamic between the old and new, logic and rhetoric, absolute and relative knowledge, and scholasticism and humanism in writings on music from early fifteenth-century Padua. Early fifteenth-century Padua was a city of contrasts in which two intellectual traditions – one condemned by Petrarch and the other his legacy – ran alongside, and often entangled with, each other: scholasticism and early humanism. The writings (...) on music of Paduan citizens Johannes Ciconia and Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi afford insights into the reception of these intellectual traditions. Ciconia’s Nova musica embraces the spirit of early humanism by proposing a revolutionary understanding of music as grammar and rhetoric, largely from the perspective of some of the oldest authors of Latin music theory. Prosdocimo’s scholastic approach to musical knowledge nonetheless demonstrates an interest in the aesthetics of listening that emphasises the role of emotion, especially pleasure, in musical experience. Yet, Ciconia alone provides the most forceful exposition of an emotional theory of musical expression that ultimately manifests itself in the music that he composed during the last decade or so of his life in Padua. (shrink)

In digital game studies, approaches to the aesthetics of games have primarily focused on games’ narrative or sensory qualities, considered the status of games as em...

In philosophical reflections on geoethics, it is primarily the question of what it means to be ‘part’ of the Earth system that is critically reflected upon. As the current geological era of the Anthropocene disrupts the dichotomy between Human agency and the Earth system, philosophers criticise a humanist account of geoethics and call for a post-humanist account. In this chapter, we critically engage with one specific proponent of the post-humanist position, Timothy Morton. We introduce his version of the post-humanist position (...) by focussing on his call for the ‘end-of-the-world’ in the Anthropocene. We subsequently criticise Morton’s rejection of the World for three reasons. We show that the emergence of the Anthropocene is primarily an ontological phenomenon, namely a shift in our ‘being-in-the-world’ and that the concept of World is needed to understand the meaning of our ‘being-in-the-Anthropocene’ in contrast with our ‘being-in-the-Holocene’. We introduce a twofold between our ‘being-in-the-world’ as a symmetric relation and our ‘being-on-Earth’ as an asymmetric relation that constitutes our ‘being-in-the-Anthropocene’. This asymmetry disrupts the post-humanist position and calls for a conceptualisation of the human ethos beyond the post-humanist position. This conceptualisation of the human ethos also has consequences for our understanding of geoethics as geo-ethos. (shrink)

This is a revision of game theory which takes account of agents' own descriptions of their situations, and which allows people to reason as members of groups.

Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of Western humanism. This paradigm has been increasingly thrown into question by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through andbeyond the human and which dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. Antiquities beyond Humanism seeks to explode this presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn": fourteen original essays explore the myriad (...) ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human rather thansimply reflecting the ideals of classical humanism. Greek philosophy is filled with metaphysical explanations of the cosmos grounded in observations of the natural world. Other areas of ancient humanistic inquiry - ethics, poetry, political theory, medicine, rhetoric - extend into the realms ofplant and animal life, even stone life, continually throwing into question the ontological status of living and non-living beings. By casting the non-human or more-than-human in a new light in relation to contemporary questions of gender, the environment, and networks of communication, the volumedemonstrates that encounters with ancient texts, experienced as both familiar and strange, can help forge new understandings of life, whether understood as zoological, physical, psychical, ethical, juridical, political, divine, or cosmic. (shrink)

Humanism is appealed to today whenever we want to tackle the conditions of dehumanization in the contemporary world. But for humanism to be viable in the twenty first century, this book argues, it needs to be pluralized. Employing theoretical, historical and sociological arguments, the book moves beyond the discourse of critique. It engages theories of religion and secularism, as well as postmodern, postcolonial, and decolonial critiques of Western humanist projects, to uncover the ideas and practices of religious and secular humanisms (...) when they challenge dehumanization in the pursuit of conditions of flourishing for all. Through studies of the Solidarity movement in Poland and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the book demonstrates the centrality of humanist traditions to the emergence of religious-secular solidarities that transformed the political landscapes of the world. By highlighting the instances in which humanisms functioned as checks on each other's absolutist claims, the book contends that humanisms supply a constructive path for addressing the challenges of our time-a time of radically divided societies and intolerant, even violent, forms of nationalism. A challenge to the critiques of humanism that seek to identify it solely as the legacy of the West, as anti-religious discourse, or relegate it to the domain of power constellations, Pluralizing Humanism highlights the rich plurality of humanist discourses and the need for their mutual engagements. It points to humanist ideals as constitutive of politics that can guide our human power because they are irreducible to it. As such, the book will appeal to social scientists, social theorists, religious studies scholars, and ethicists with interests in religion, secularism, social movements, and humanist thought and practice. (shrink)

The model of feminism as humanist in practice and postmodern in theory is inadequate. Feminist practice and theory directly inform each other to displace both humanist and postmodern conceptions of the subject. An examination of feminism's use of rights discourse suggests that feminist practice questions the humanist conception of the subject as a self-identity. Likewise, feminist theory undermines the postmodern emphasis on the constitutive instability and indeterminacy of the subject.

Game theory is central to modern understandings of how people deal with problems of coordination and cooperation. Yet, ironically, it cannot give a straightforward explanation of some of the simplest forms of human coordination and cooperation--most famously, that people can use the apparently arbitrary features of "focal points" to solve coordination problems, and that people sometimes cooperate in "prisoner's dilemmas." Addressing a wide readership of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, Michael Bacharach here proposes a revision of game theory that resolves (...) these long-standing problems. In the classical tradition of game theory, Bacharach models human beings as rational actors, but he revises the standard definition of rationality to incorporate two major new ideas. He enlarges the model of a game so that it includes the ways agents describe to themselves their decision problems. And he allows the possibility that people reason as members of groups, each taking herself to have reason to perform her component of the combination of actions that best achieves the group's common goal. Bacharach shows that certain tendencies for individuals to engage in team reasoning are consistent with recent findings in social psychology and evolutionary biology. As the culmination of Bacharach's long-standing program of pathbreaking work on the foundations of game theory, this book has been eagerly awaited. Following Bacharach's premature death, Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden edited the unfinished work and added two substantial chapters that allow the book to be read as a coherent whole. (shrink)

There are many theories about organizations that are mutually inconsistent with each other, which explain phenomena to very similar extents. Most of them ignore the ethical dimension completely. In this paper I put forth the basic principles for a theory of decision-making in organizations, which integrates ethics in the core of the theory. It is based on the work of Juan Antonio Pérez López [1991, Teoría de la Acción humana en las organizaciones (Ediciones Rialp, Madrid), 1993, Fundamentos de la Dirección (...) de Empresas (Ediciones Rialp, Madrid)] and is essentially a humanistic view of the interrelationships between people and its implications for organizational decision-making. I will first show that in any relationship between two people, the learning of the two is crucial for such a relationship to last; and then I will expand on the different aspects of that learning. This analysis will then be applied to the organizational context as a basis for organizational decision-making, Second, it applies the previous analysis to the organizational context as a basis for organizational decision making, showing how any decision in an organization needs to be analyzed on the basis of three criteria (short-run effectiveness, development of distinctive competence, and unity and identification with the organization) and how ethics is included in the last two. (shrink)

Prisoners involved in the Attica rebellion and in the recent Georgia prison strike have protested their dehumanizing treatment as animals and as slaves. Their critique is crucial for tracing the connections between slavery, abolition, the racialization of crime, and the reinscription of racialized slavery within the US prison system. I argue that, in addition to the dehumanization of prisoners, inmates are further de-animalized when they are held in conditions of intensive confinement such as prolonged solitude or chronic overcrowding. To be (...) de-animalized is to be treated not as a living being who is sustained by its mutual relations with other living and nonliving beings, but rather as a thing to be warehoused and/or exchanged for a profit. The violence of de-animalization affects both human and nonhuman animals held in control prisons, factory farms, laboratories and other sites of intensive confinement. In order to make the connections between these sites, and to develop forms of solidarity appropriate to our shared animality, we need a post-humanist critique of intensive confinement that breaks with the logic of opposition between human and animal, and articulates our constitutive relationality as (inter)corporeal beings. (shrink)

Individual rationality, or doing what is best for oneself, is a standard model used to explain and predict human behavior, and von Neumann–Morgenstern game theory is the classical mathematical formalization of this theory in multiple-agent settings. Individual rationality, however, is an inadequate model for the synthesis of artificial social systems where cooperation is essential, since it does not permit the accommodation of group interests other than as aggregations of individual interests. Satisficing game theory is based upon a well-defined notion of (...) being good enough, and does accommodate group as well as individual interests through the use of conditional preference relationships, whereby a decision maker is able to adjust its preferences as a function of the preferences, and not just the options, of others. This new theory is offered as an alternative paradigm to construct artificial societies that are capable of complex behavior that goes beyond exclusive self interest. (shrink)

In this essay, David Waddington and Noah Weeth Feinstein explore how Dewey's conception of science can help us rethink the way science is done in schools. The authors begin by contrasting a view of science that is implicitly accepted by many scientists and science educators — science as a search for truth — with Dewey's instrumentalist, technological, and nonrealist conception of science. After demonstrating that the search-for-truth conception is closely linked to some ongoing difficulties with science curricula that students find (...) particularly alienating, they then analyze some of the educational opportunities that Dewey's vision opens up. Ultimately, Waddington and Weeth Feinstein argue that Dewey offers a humble and humanistic vision of science and science education practice that captures the power of science by connecting it clearly to everyday human activities and challenges. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (...) Empire (2000), which characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

This book focuses on the often-overlooked mid period of Socialism in twentieth century Poland, tracing the transgressive variations of humanist thought that emerged as forms of resistance amid the intellectual crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It analyses how an upsurge in anti-Semitism and discourses of exclusion in the period stimulated environmental explorations beyond the hegemonic notion of the human subject and humanity. Readers will find a synthetic analysis not only of the atmosphere of the mid-socialist period, but (...) also of fragmented, decentered, and marginalised phenomena in film, literature, theory, and theatre, in which transgressive moments in well-known work such as the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor, Stanisław Lem's writing, Maria Janion's cultural studies, or Jerzy Skolimowski's early films feature alongside artistic output that was never broadly known or is mostly forgotten now. By acknowledging the specificities of transgressive humanism in socialist Poland, the book enriches post-anthropocentric theory with a distinct perspective from the so-called semi-periphery. The volume is relevant for scholars of post-humanist studies, the history of knowledge, studies on socialist Europe and Polish studies. (shrink)

Late nineteenth-century German anthropology had to compete for intellectual legitimacy with the established academic humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), above all history. Whereas humanists interpreted literary documents to create narratives about great civilizations, anthropologists represented and viewed objects, such as skulls or artifacts, to create what they regarded as natural scientific knowledge about so-called 'natural peoples'-colonized societies of Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas. Anthropologists thus invoked a venerable tradition that presented looking at objects as a more certain source of knowledge than reading (...) texts. Visual representations, especially of the colonized, not only allowed anthropologists allegedly objective insight into humanity but also put them in direct contact with popular audiences of ethnographic spectacles, exotic photography, and even pornographic images. Anthropologists thus sought to create a peculiar kind of anthropological vision that both differentiated them from humanists as 'objective' natural scientists but also distinguished them from the leering 'Schaulust' that they believed characterized popular consumption of exotic images. To do so they invented technologies of visual representation that eschewed the subject position figured by linear perspective. These novel optics dispensed with the leering subject posited by popular spectacles and the knowing subject posited by humanism and created an anti-humanist form of knowledge. (shrink)

In forms of physical recreation associated with ‘wilderness experiences’, such as backcountry hiking or mountain climbing, technology is omnipresent. As a result, some may wonder whether genuine wilderness experiences are possible. In this essay, I argue that wilderness experiences are possible and that they can be enhanced through games. That is, I contend there are often physically challenging aspects to wilderness experiences that certain games can help to promote. This analysis will stress the fact that Bernard Suits (...) delineated two comparable but distinct ways to engage in games. Following Suits’s logic, I explain how ‘literal skills’ like walking or climbing can function as the ‘constitutive skills’ of games. I then consider how games predicated on ‘literal skills’ can help promote the meanings available in wilderness experiences. (shrink)

The paper applies Christian Humanism to management highlighting the role of relations in business and the entrepreneurial life. The claim is that such a dimension is important for everybody even from a secular point of view regardless of one’s belief. The first part shows how Biblical tradition inspired a rereading of relation in the first Christian thinkers, who had to recognize it in God. But this made possible to perceive that the relationships can be a real source of being, as (...) the example of a family shows. The thesis proposed is that within every Gesellschaft there is a Gemeinschaft, that is constituted by its relational dimensions, connecting the common good and profit also to relational goods. The second part draws consequences for management, recognizing through the example of the Inner Game three relational dimensions relevant for management: the one interior to the person; the relationships between coworkers; the interaction with the culture of the company. All of them should be considered to improve the Gemeinschaft dimension within the Gesellschaft. The last part of the article explains how Christian Humanism helps also to avoid an idealistic reading of the proposal, which always has to take into account the demands of confrontation with the external system intrinsic to the Gesellschaft, as the very etymology of management reveals. (shrink)

The following essay explores critical post-humanism as elaborated by Stephan Herbrechter. Avoiding the simplistic, deterministic accounts of new technological developments—whether they predict impending apocalypse or future communication systems in which all of humanity becomes perfectly and peacefully united—Herbrechter's analysis reminds us that the democratization of subjects requires an ongoing, persistent deconstruction of the anthropocentric values all too often linked to recent trends in social media, artificial intelligence, genetic enhancements, predictive analytics, digital surveillance, and so on.

Methodologically, heterocentrism is the principal starting point of several recent Liebsch?s theoretical contributions, the meaning of which is simply to be taken as the protection of man. In one decisive sense, for him, keeping someone in a position of otherness already con?tains the germ of violence: making an other leads to alienating subordination. In this paper, we examine the sustainability of the author?s universal interpretive thesis that the history of our culture is a history of violence: it turns out to (...) be structurally unprovable and partly arbitrary. The starting point of such a generally negative attitude is what we call Liebsch?s conceptual moralism. Our research also re-examines Liebsch?s interrogation of the tradition of philosophy of culture as morally indifferent, as well as his criterion of acceptability of nor?matively impregnated culture in the form of the Derridean imperative of unconditional openness to the other as a guest. (shrink)

In this paper reflexive games are defined as a way to act beyond equilibria to control our opponents by our hiding motives. The task of a reflexive game is to have the opponent’s actions become transparent for us, while our actions remain obscure for the competitor. In case a reflexive game is carried out between agents belonging to the same organisation, success in a reflexive game can be reached by a purposeful modification of some components of a controlled system. (...) Such a modification for the guaranteed victory in a reflexive game is called reflexive management. This kind of management uses reflexive games to control a knowledge structure of agents in a way their actions unconsciously satisfy the centre’s goals. (shrink)

I am focusing here on the main counterarguments that were raised against a thesis I put forward in my article “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” (2009), namely that significant similarities can be found on a fundamental level between the concept of the posthuman, as put forward by some transhumanists, and Nietzsche’s concept of the overhuman. The articles with the counterarguments were published in the recent “Nietzsche and European Posthumanisms” issue of The Journal of Evolution and Technology (January-July 2010). As several (...) commentators referred to identical issues, I decided that it would be appropriate not to respond to each of the articles individually, but to focus on the central arguments and to deal with the counterarguments mentioned in the various replies. I am concerned with each topic in a separate section. The sections are entitled as follows: 1. Technology and evolution; 2. Overcoming nihilism; 3. Politics and liberalism; 4. Utilitarianism or virtue ethics?; 5. The good Life; 6. Creativity and the will to power; 7. Immortality and longevity; 8. Logocentrism; 9. The Third Reich. When dealing with the various topics, I am not merely responding to counterarguments; I also raise questions concerning transhumanism and put forward my own views concerning some of the questions I am dealing with. (shrink)

Evolutionary game theory and public goods games offer an important framework to understand cooperation during pandemics. From this perspective, the COVID-19 situation can be conceptualized as a dilemma where people who neglect safety precautions act as free riders, because they get to enjoy the benefits of decreased health risk from others’ compliance with policies despite not contributing to or even undermining public safety themselves. At the same time, humans appear to carry a suite of evolved psychological mechanisms aimed at (...) curbing free riding in order to ensure the continued provision of public goods, which can be leveraged to develop more effective measures to promote compliance with regulations. We also highlight factors beyond free riding that reduce compliance rates, such as the emergence of conspiratorial thinking, which seriously undermine the effectiveness of measures to suppress free riding. Together, the current paper outlines the social dynamics that occur in public goods dilemmas involving the spread of infectious disease, highlights the utility and limits of evolutionary game-theoretic approaches for COVID-19 management, and suggests novel directions based on emerging challenges to cooperation. (shrink)

This paper concerns the judgement and critique of athletic movement in moving images. Inspired by the ski crash trial case of Paltrow v. Sanderson, and by comparing different media representations of downhill skiing, the essay outlines a framework that discerns as well as connects elements of movement and images, developing the concept of the ‘diorama’ in relation to Deleuze’s notion of the diagram and Kant’s idea of critique. Thus, moving images featuring elite alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, fictional character James Bond, (...) and an official skiing game for the international ski federation (World Cup Ski Racing, FIS) figure as comparative material to the animation that played a central role in the celebrity trial. Diorama and diagram are posited on a continuum to assess when and how judgement takes place in each of the exhibits. The essay concludes by discussing how the judging of athletic movement in moving images contributed to Paltrow winning the case, and theoretically by connecting this finding to dioramas and diagrams as tools apt for a framework aiming at the critique of athletic movement in moving images. (shrink)

I begin this review with a brief overview of the book itself, followed by a discussion of its pedagogical usefulness as a text in Philosophy of Sport and Philosophy of Religion courses. I then move on to discuss a few points in the book that I take to be especially interesting and/or problematic from a philosophical point of view.

Games are more varied and occupy more of daily life than ever before. At the same time, the tools available to study game play and players are more powerful than ever, especially massive data sets from online platforms and computational engines that can accurately evaluate human decisions. This essay offers six suggestions for future cognitive science research on games: Don't forget about chess, Look beyond action games and chess, Use -optimal play to understand human play and players, (...) Investigate social phenomena, Raise the standards for studies of games as treatments, Talk to real experts. (shrink)

It seems natural to think that one of the businesses of the philosophy of language is to provide an explanation of the understanding of language. It is the aim of the present essay to show that and why this is not so. Instead, I shall hold that both meaning and understanding go beyond the scope of traditional philosophy of language. Philosophers widely agree today that the meaning of linguistic expressions is to be explained by recourse to the use of words (...) and sentences; an explanation of this use does not only take recourse to linguistic but to any kind of human practices, and according to Wittgenstein these in turn can neither be fully described from outside these practices nor can they be theoretically captured once and for all. On the account suggested here a model of understanding in general yields a model of the content of linguistic expressions. Such a model of understanding calls for a renewal of philosophy as well as a recasting of philosophical argument and procedure. To sketch this project I shall review Putnam's struggle for an adequate theory of meaning and reference. In trying to disconnect understanding from meaning as far as psychological aspects are concerned, Putnam catches a "problem of reference." A comparable problem finds reflection in Kripke's influential reading of Wittgenstein on rules and private language. In both cases the problem grows from an inadequate use of two central notions, namely objectivity and subjectivity. An alternative reading of Wittgenstein along the lines of McDowell and later Putnam allows a new, pragmatic view on understanding, its subjects, and its objects. (shrink)

Nearly 20 years age, Yi-Fu Tuan wrote his influential Dominance and Affection:The Making of Pets , which argued that human affection for domestic animals is inseparable from dominance. Today, cultural critics persist in the view that companion animals are compromised, even degraded, because they are controlled by humans. The essay attempts to rethink the relationship between humans and companion animals beyond the freedom-dominance binary. It argues for a conceptual approach that defers confidant interpretation of animals while dramatically relaxing control of (...) them within human settings. It suggests that this approach be called a "performance ethic" and offered the House Rabbit Society as a model. (shrink)

A Cinematic Humanist approach to film is committed inter alia to the following tenet: Some fiction films illuminate the human condition thereby enriching our understanding of ourselves, each other and our world. As such, Cinematic Humanism might reasonably be regarded as an example of what one might call ‘Cinematic Cognitivism’. This assumption would, however, be mistaken. For Cinematic Humanism is an alternative, indeed a corrective, to Cinematic Cognitivism. Motivating the need for such a corrective is a genuine scepticism about the (...) very notion of the cognitive. Using historical reconstruction, I reveal how ‘cognitive’ has become a multiply ambiguous, theory-laden term in the wake of, indeed as a consequence of, Noam Chomsky’s original stipulative definition. This generates a constitutive problem for cognitivism as both a research programme and a set of claims, and as such poses a trilemma for philosophers of film, art and beyond. I propose a Cinematic Humanist solution to the problematic commitments of cognitive film theorising and, in so doing, gesture towards a methodology I am calling ‘philosophy of film without theory’. (shrink)

Habitus has been an attractive concept for works examining body-centric practices. This article draws on interviews and 18 months of ethnographic research with high-risk climbers primarily throughout North America. An important guide to this research has been the concept of habitus. However, this article demonstrates that there are limits to habitus being used to address the moment of action. The scope of habitus ranges widely, limiting its capacity to effectively address the experience of the individual. Rather than abandoning the concept, (...) habitus can be extended through a reconceptualization drawing on the use of echoes as a metaphor. Using echoes as an allegorical mode of understanding dispositional acquisition and activation, the embodied echo can more radically and precisely explore the habitus in motion during the intensely body-centric practice of alpine climbing. This is particularly critical when exploring the use of speed as a form of safety in the alpine environment. (shrink)

What makes video games unique as an audiovisual medium is not just that they are interactive, but that this interactivity is rule bound and goal oriented. This means that player experience, including experience of the music, is somehow shaped or structured by these characteristics. Because of its emphasis on action in perception, James Gibson’s ecological approach to psychology—particularly his concept of affordances—is well suited to theorise the role of music in player experience. In a game, players perceive the environment (...) and gameplay situations in terms of the goal-oriented actions they afford. Nondiegetic music, not tied to any place in the digital game world, can play a unique role in the structuring of these affordances. Through a series of case studies, I will show that music creates and structures situations both in the game environment (such as the appearance of enemies in Unreal) and beyond the game environment (such as the death of an avatar and the restart of a level in Super Mario Bros.). (shrink)

Jewish by birth, though from a secular family, Alan Morinis took a deep journey into Hinduism and Buddhism as a young man. He received a doctorate for his study of Hindu pilgrimage, learned yoga in India with B. K. S. Iyengar, and attended his first Buddhist meditation course in the Himalayas in 1974. But in 1997, when his film career went off track and he reached for some spiritual oxygen, he felt inspired to explore his Jewish heritage. In his reading (...) he happened upon a Jewish tradition of spiritual practice called Mussar. Gradually he realized he had stumbled on an insightful discipline for self-development, complete with meditative, contemplative, and other well-developed transformative practices designed to penetrate the deepest roots of the inner life. Eventually reaching the limits of what he could learn on his own, he decided to seek out a Mussar teacher. That was not easily achieved, since almost the entire world of the Mussar tradition had been wiped out in the Holocaust. In time, he did find an accomplished master who stood in an unbroken line of transmission of the Mussar tradition, and who lived at the center of a community of Orthodox Jews on Long Island. This book tells the story of Morinis’s journey to meet his teacher and what he learned from him, and reveals the central teachings and practices that are the spiritual treasury and legacy of Mussar. Alan Morinis has written this book because the wisdom and practices that helped him so much have not penetrated the world beyond the confines of Orthodox Judaism, and may not be fully appreciated even there at this time. His hope is that Jews and non-Jews alike will find in Mussar a time-tested path of spiritual practice that will help them discover the hidden radiance within. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

Empathy is often described as a virtue which that could help in making medicine more humanistic. This paper argues that there are two limits to this thesis. First, it is unclear whether a lack of empathy can be attributed to the biomedical education. Second, empathy itself is not without issues, and another concept, compassion, can be put forward instead. Humanism based on compassion is more minimalist, but integrated with an approach focused on health systems, it makes humanism more tangible and (...) radical. -/- . (shrink)

This is the first volume to apply insights from the material turn in philosophy to the study of play and games. At a time of renewed interest in analogue gaming, as scholars are looking beyond the digital and virtual for the first time since the inception of game studies in the 1990s, Material Game Studies not only supports the importance of the turn to the analogue, but proposes a materiality of play more broadly. Recognizing the entanglement of physical materiality (...) with cultural meaning, the authors in this volume apply a range of theoretical approaches, from material eco-criticism to animal studies, to examine games and play as existing within worlds of matter. Different chapters focus on the material properties of board, card and role-playing games, how they are designed and made, how they are touched and played with, and how they connect with other human and nonhuman things. Bringing together international scholars, Material Game Studies defines a new field of material game studies and demonstrates how it is a valuable addition to wider debates about the material turn and the place of embodied humans in a material world. (shrink)

The author offers a defense for elective death on utilitarian grounds, but one that is presented specifically from the perspective of someone who: 1) faces a potentially terminal illness and diminishing quality of life; 2) views death as nothing more than a return to prenatal nonbeing; and 3) maintains common humanist ethical commitments. The argument, then, is uniquely situated and limited in scope, rooted both in the particulars of his recent experience with a rheumatic autoimmune illness and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as (...) well as in a worldview shaped largely by emerging narratives in the sciences. Drawing upon the work of J.S. Mill and P. Singer, the author begins by assuming that one is generally free to act on a preference for nonbeing so long as others are not unduly harmed or thwarted in pursuing their own aims as a result. But a humanist, he suggests, ideally ought to press beyond this minimum criterion and do one’s best to maximize eudaimonia by carefully weighing how elective death would likely affect others to whom one is currently obligated in significant ways. The focus of one’s ethical reasoning, then, should remain on maximizing well-being and minimizing harm, not on creating a logical flawless and internally coherent defense that may satisfy a set of abstract or universally applicable criteria drawn up by others in an effort to define precisely what might render a given suicide “rational” or “morally permissible.”. (shrink)

This book is a profound and eagerly anticipated investigation into what is left of a monotheistic religious spirit—notably, a minimalist faith that is neither confessional nor credulous. Articulating this faith as works and as an objectless hope, Nancy deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy. Working through Blanchot and Nietzsche, re-reading Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy turns to the Epistle of Saint James rather than those of Saint Paul, discerning in it the primitive (...) essence of Christianity as hope. -/- The “religion that provided the exit from religion,” as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent. -/- In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world—in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline—parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world? -/- The deconstruction of Christianity that Nancy proposes is neither a game nor a strategy. It is an invitation to imagine a strange faith that enacts the inadequation of life to itself. Our lives overflow the self-contained boundaries of their biological and sociological interpretations. Out of this excess, wells up a fragile, overlooked meaning that is beyond both confessionalism and humanism. (shrink)

The return of a classic book about games and play that illuminates the relationship between the well-played game and the well-lived life. In The Well-Played Game, games guru Bernard De Koven explores the interaction of play and games, offering players—as well as game designers, educators, and scholars—a guide to how games work. De Koven's classic treatise on how human beings play together, first published in 1978, investigates many issues newly resonant in the era of video and (...) computer games, including social gameplay and player modification. The digital game industry, now moving beyond its emphasis on graphic techniques to focus on player interaction, has much to learn from The Well-Played Game. De Koven explains that when players congratulate each other on a “well-played” game, they are expressing a unique and profound synthesis that combines the concepts of play (with its associations of playfulness and fun) and game (with its associations of rule-following). This, he tells us, yields a larger concept: the experience and expression of excellence. De Koven—affectionately and appreciatively hailed by Eric Zimmerman as “our shaman of play”—explores the experience of a well-played game, how we share it, and how we can experience it again; issues of cheating, fairness, keeping score, changing old games (why not change the rules in pursuit of new ways to play?), and making up new games; playing for keeps; and winning. His book belongs on the bookshelves of players who want to find a game in which they can play well, who are looking for others with whom they can play well, and who have discovered the relationship between the well-played game and the well-lived life. (shrink)

The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico included innovative practices and technological knowledge of human biology. The first time that cytogenetic techniques had been applied to athletes was in the 1966 European Athletics Championship in Budapest and used on Olympic athletes for the first time in Mexico in 1968. The Genetics and Human Biology Program was created for this purpose in 1966 in close collaboration with the Local Organizing Committee, by Mexican geneticists Alfonso León de Garay and Rodolfo Félix Estrada (...) who led the project. The main objective was to study the genetic and anthropological components which determine an Olympic athlete’s abilities. This investigation studied 1,265 game participants and included family studies, cytological analyses, research on single genes, and the study of sex determination. In terms of influence beyond Mexico, this Program was significant as a site of transnational collaboration. It mobilized cognitive and financial resources, scientific practices, and material culture to set up a clinical laboratory in the Olympic Village. The Program also hosted three international seminars in Mexico City, two before the games, to calibrate clinical trials and anthropological tests. One in 1969 to analyze the results and proceed to their publication in 1974. This manuscript will focus on the PGBH to show how its work fits in the larger tapestry of post-1945 human biological studies. Also, to explore how the Olympic athlete populations studied can be considered laboratories of knowledge production or sites of cognition conceived as specific entities for scientific inquiry, standardization of medical practices, and the production or application of medicines. Finally, through the narrative of the different trajectories and collaborations of the leaders of the PGBH, this manuscript will show how contact between their scientific practices brought cytogenetics and sports together. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the applicability of Wittgenstein’s following the rule in the context of his philosophy of mathematics to real mathematical practice. It is noted that in «Philosophical Investigations» and «Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics» Wittgenstein resorted to the analysis of rather elementary mathematical concepts, accompanied also by the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of his presentation. In particular, against this background, his radical conventionalism, the substitution of logical necessity with the «form of life» of the community, as (...) well as the inadequacy of the representation of arithmetic rules by a language game are criticized. It is shown that the reconstruction of the Wittgenstein concept of understanding based on the Fregian division of meaning and referent goes beyond the conceptual framework of Wittgenstein language games. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Humanism and Truth: Valla Writes against the Donation of ConstantineRiccardo FubiniTranslated by Anastasia Ananson and William ConnellThere has existed for a long time now in studies of Renaissance humanism (and not only as these have developed in a single country or disciplinary area) a tendency to consider from a prevalently formalist point of view what was instead an innovative and complex cultural experience. A particularly privileged position has been (...) reserved for the ars rhetorica, which, considered in its “purely formal instrumentality,” has been treated as though immune from ideological contamination. 1 The fear of becoming entangled in matters of ideological interpretation may, in turn, give rise to new and more seriously flawed readings. Although this is a matter which I shall not now emphasize, it should be clear that when the interpretation of a text is limited to its “purely formal instrumentality,” the vacuum that results can be filled more easily with matter that is new and different. Ideology chased from the doorstep may yet sneak in through the window, sometimes completely stripped of its real historical context. However, what is more important to note here as a premise to my discussion is that, along with the formalism already referred to, one finds in recent studies a tendency to diminish or minimize the significance of writings that were celebrated by the historical traditions of the last century and felt to belong to a shared cultural, religious, or political legacy.Among such writings the De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione of Lorenzo Valla has certainly played an important part, beginning at least with the clamor that was raised on its behalf by Ulrich von Hutten and Martin Luther. Yet it is quite typical that the work’s most recent [End Page 79] editor, who has dedicated much careful research to Valla’s treatise and its reception, should have attempted to disconnect the meaning of Valla’s treatise in its own time from the influence it would later have, concluding that “the influence [of Valla’s work] manifested itself in accents quite different from those that have resulted from [current] interpretation.” 2 In the view of this scholar, at the time of the composition of Valla’s work, Constantine’s alleged “donation” was no longer a matter of contemporary relevance; rather, it furnished the theme for a brilliant exercise in legal rhetoric. He writes: “By then the Donation of Constantine was no longer an urgent theme for political theory. (Die Konstantinische Schenkung war damals kein beherrschendes Thema der politischen Theorie mehr.)” 3My discussion takes its cue from this point. Without dwelling at length on the various contributions of other scholars, I shall begin first by trying, on the basis of documentary evidence, to restore Valla’s treatise to life, to the climate of its day, in order then to gather and present its meaning along interpretative lines I have already laid out elsewhere. 4According to that usually trustworthy Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan, at the end of 1443 made a diplomatic avance toward Florence. Principal among the issues dividing the two powers had been the protection afforded by the regime of Cosimo de’ Medici to Francesco Sforza, then holed up in his fiefdoms in the March of Ancona. The Duke now proposed that they should unite in common defense against the Pope, insofar as the latter was sovereign lord of the March. Beyond these particular circumstances, the accord was supposed to find its warrant in the partners’ shared interest in affirming the superiority of civil over ecclesiastical jurisdiction. So the Duke, according to Cavalcanti, advanced his proposal with words that allow us to suspect an early but not surprising echo of Valla’s treatise (first circulated in that very year): “It so happens that even if Constantine consigned to Sylvester so many and such rich gifts—which is doubtful, because such a privilege can nowhere be found—he could only have granted them for his [Sylvester’s] lifetime, [because] the Empire takes precedence over any lordship.” No differently from Valla, Duke Filippo Maria thought the sovereign impersonality of the [End Page 80] law was the prerogative only of the Empire (and... (shrink)

Personalized and continuing relationships play a central role in any society. Economists have built upon the theories of repeated games and reputations to make important advances in understanding such relationships. Repeated Games and Reputations begins with a careful development of the fundamental concepts in these theories, including the notions of a repeated game, strategy, and equilibrium. Mailath and Samuelson then present the classic folk theorem and reputation results for games of perfect and imperfect public monitoring, with the (...) benefit of the modern analytical tools of decomposability and self-generation. They also present more recent developments, including results beyond folk theorems and recent work in games of private monitoring and alternative approaches to reputations. Repeated Games and Reputations synthesizes and unifies the vast body of work in this area, bringing the reader to the research frontier. Detailed arguments and proofs are given throughout, interwoven with examples, discussions of how the theory is to be used in the study of relationships, and economic applications. The book will be useful to those doing basic research in the theory of repeated games and reputations as well as those using these tools in more applied research. (shrink)

First drafted in 2006 and currently in version 2.1, the London Charter calls for the adoption of international standards for intellectual integrity, transparency, sustainability, and access in 3D modeling for cultural heritage. While the London Charter has been in the process of revision and distribution to the heritage community, game engines have become less expensive and more approachable. Several engines offer the ability to publish easily across operating systems, mobile devices, and the web, causing a rapid expansion in their use (...) for archeological visualization. However, the very power of game engines to create and publish immersive content poses fundamental challenges to the emphasis on data-driven visualization and transparency expressed in the London Charter. These challenges should not be suppressed, since they can prove heuristically fruitful if they are explicitly recognized and explored. This potential is illustrated by a descriptive analysis of the recreation of the House of the Prince of Naples in Pompeii by an undergraduate humanities class, which concludes that the immersive effects of engine-based visualizations are as much to be found in their creation as in their “playing.” This suggests the value of democratizing the creation of game engine content for heritage visualization beyond research visualization laboratories, as a part of undergraduate curricula in the humanities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-GlassLeila S. MayAccording to one tradition in the theory of fiction, there is a kind of fantasy whose function is to invite the reader to "acknowledge the possibility of a different reality."1 In this essay I want to ask whether Lewis Carroll's Alice books fit into this category; that is, I want to explore the possibility that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the (...) Looking-Glass are not the pure nonsense that many readers take them to be. In considering the Alice books as fantasy offering a view of a "different reality" I do not deny that there are in these stories some mimetic elements alongside the fantastic—representations of things going on somewhere, somehow, in Victorian society—in which case the "different reality" presented will not be so terribly different as to be unrecognizable. For example, the Mad Tea Party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is not only an act of fantasy but also an act of mimesis. It certainly imitates the real tea parties often held throughout Victorian England—if caricature is a form of imitation—but it may also mime those mock tea parties held in English asylums whose goal was to model sane-like behavior to the inmates.2 An analogous question can be asked about Carroll's books in general: In addition to the component of fantasy, are they mimetic of Victorian culture itself, or merely of the Victorian conception of madness? Michel Foucault has argued that, while the very idea of la folie is an historical construct, the dialectical relationship between reason and unreason, with each pole parasitic on the other, is a structural constant. Carroll's Alice books produce images that are discharged in the confused nineteenth-century landscape where these two opposites meet. In that respect, his books are not so different from many of the more standard novels written in mid-century England. In this essay I [End Page 79] will explore features of this landscape, using a theoretical framework that has been synthesized from a number of related claims in the work of the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In addition to my long-range aim of urging further study of Wittgenstein's work by literary critics, one of my specific goals is to show that the application of Wittgensteinian methods to the works of Lewis Carroll reveals something about the hidden logic of Carroll's stories, and conversely that this procedure tests some of Wittgenstein's intuitions concerning language. Yet another goal is to suggest that the structure of the discourse of domesticity as reflected in many mid-nineteenth-century novels is curiously similar to the structure of discourse in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land—that the language-games played at these sites are at the same time functional and dysfunctional in much the same way. That may seem like a lot to attempt in a few pages,... but to paraphrase Humpty-Dumpty, when I ask words to do that much extra work, I pay them overtime.In 1965 the philosopher George Pitcher published an essay, "Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll," in which he sought to demonstrate "the remarkable extent and depth of affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense." In addition, he showed that "the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charged philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect," and that many of the examples that Wittgenstein used to illustrate his points "resemble, in varying degrees, examples that are found in the works of Carroll."3 While I agree with Pitcher's observation that the examples of nonsense that Wittgenstein offers are very similar to a primary strain of nonsense that runs through the Alice books, in the first section I intend to go beyond that observation and to apply some of Wittgenstein's tools to Carroll's work and show that Wittgenstein's work can be used to reveal features of literary narrative that might otherwise be obscured, and in the second section, to apply these tools to the works of fiction this side of the Looking-Glass.IWittgenstein says that a language is a "language-game." He... (shrink)

The philosophical literature on sport and games has had little to say about boredom beyond presuming that sports and games can be important ways of overcoming or preventing it. But boredom is an interesting and often misunderstood phenomenon with overlooked implications in this context. Boredom has significant human value and motivates play in ways that contribute to well-being and culture, often through encouraging engaged agency and exploration of novelty. Understanding boredom can also help to clarify problems and tendencies (...) in sports and games that qualify them as havens from boredom. (shrink)

Despite the emergence of computer games as a dominant cultural industry, we know little or nothing about the ethics of computer games. Considerations of the morality of computer games seldom go beyond intermittent portrayals of them in the mass media as training devices for teenage serial killers. In this first scholarly exploration of the subject, Miguel Sicart addresses broader issues about the ethics of games, the ethics of playing the games, and the ethical responsibilities of (...) game designers. He argues that computer games are ethical objects, that computer game players are ethical agents, and that the ethics of computer games should be seen as a complex network of responsibilities and moral duties. Players should not be considered passive amoral creatures; they reflect, relate, and create with ethical minds. The games they play are ethical systems, with rules that create gameworlds with values at play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy and game studies, Sicart proposes a framework for analyzing the ethics of computer games as both designed objects and player experiences. After presenting his core theoretical arguments and offering a general theory for understanding computer game ethics, Sicart offers case studies examining single-player games, multiplayer games, and online gameworlds from an ethical perspective. He explores issues raised by unethical content in computer games and its possible effect on players and offers a synthesis of design theory and ethics that could be used as both analytical tool and inspiration in the creation of ethical gameplay. (shrink)

At the end of the sixteenth century, Friar Juan de Torquemada watched the game of volador on the central plaza in Mexico. At the top of a pole some twenty meters high there was a small pivoting platform. Four ropes were wound around the top of the pole and held in place by a wooden frame. Five men dressed in feathery costumes making them look like birds climbed up the shaft. One of them reached the narrow platform and began to (...) dance. Then the other four bird-men tied themselves to the ends of the ropes and plunged into space, head down, held by the ropes around their waists. This initiated a spectacular circular flight in ever widening rings as the cords unwound. They straightened up only at the last moment, just in time to put their feet on the ground, dizzy and staggering. But on that particular day, one of the dancers was not to straighten himself up. The rope had been badly attached and broke, dropping the man like a heavy mass to the ground, lifeless. The Franciscan at once used this as an argument to demand that the Viceroy prohibit this game. But the civil authorities refused to do so, to the monk's great consternation. (shrink)