In The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits argues that the best life is the one whose essence is game-play. In fact, only through the concept of game-play can we understand how anything at all is worth doing. Yet this seems implausible: morality makes things worth doing independently of any game, and games are themselves subject to moral evaluation. So games must be logically posterior to morality. The current paper responds to these objections by developing the theory of Ludic Constructivism. Constructivist theories such (...) as Kant’s explain normativity in a way that is both objective and cognitivist but also mind-dependent. Roughly, constructivists ground normative structures in rational procedures. But rational agency is diverse: it is realized in different ways and to different degrees by different agents. Yet Kantian Constructivism requires a strong identity of rational procedures across rational agents. Ludic Constructivism avoids this challenge by rejecting this strong identity of agency, instead building a normative framework out of the ingredients of Suits’s definition of game-play. We want to play the best games we can. In order to do so we must play games with a certain structure: they must be nested multiplayer games in which everyone who is capable of self-originating activity is engaged as a fellow player rather than a plaything. Nested games – games that are constructed out of other games – go best when each game contributes to the value of each other game in the nest. Such game nests are “reciprocating value-maximization structures”. Our lives go best when we design, play, and revise the game of our Individual Life and we also embed that game within the highest-order nested game of Fate of Humankind. In this way, Ludic Constructivism delivers a normative system that expands Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, and a life that meets Aristotle’s conception of pleasure. (shrink)

Drawing from narratology and design studies, this article makes use of the notions of the ‘implied designer’ and ‘ludic unreliability’ to understand deceptive game design as a specific sub-set of transgressive game design. More specifically, in this text we present deceptive game design as the deliberate attempt to misguide players’ inferences about the designers’ intentions. Furthermore, we argue that deceptive design should not merely be taken as a set of design choices aimed at misleading players in their efforts to understand (...) the game, but also as decisions devised to give rise to experiential and emotional effects that are in the interest of players. Finally, we propose to introduce a distinction between two varieties of deceptive design approaches based on whether they operate in an overt or a covert fashion in relation to player experience. Our analysis casts light on expressive possibilities that are not customarily part of the dominant paradigm of user-centered design, and can inform game designers in their pursuit of wider and more nuanced creative aspirations. (shrink)

In this article I will use Husserlian tools in order to elaborate a phenomenology of ludic experience. Following Fink, my aim here is to present what Husserl could have elaborated in a more systematic manner concerning the specificity of what he calls the ludic praxis (Spielpraxis) and the ludic construct (Spielgebilde). Firstly, I analyze the temporality of ludic experience. Play has a dilative temporal structure: it involves a momentary captivation in the present and a momentary suspension of the architectonic goals (...) of the agent. Secondly, play has its own artifacts. I begin by analyzing what I call the impermanent construct, i.e., the object whose elaboration is motivated by a self-referential interest of the poietic subject. Thirdly, play does not only erect singular entities, but also ludic worlds as a whole. My objective is to scrutinize the mode of being of these normative spaces. I conclude with a description of the ludic object par excellence, namely the toy (Spielzeug). (shrink)

This book represents a new departure in science studies: an analysis of a scientific style of writing, situating it within the context of the contemporary style of literature. Its philosophical significance is that it provides a novel way of making sense of the notion of a scientific style. For the first time, the Hellenistic mathematical corpus - one of the most substantial extant for the period - is placed centre-stage in the discussion of Hellenistic culture as a whole. Professor Netz (...) argues that Hellenistic mathematical writings adopt a narrative strategy based on surprise, a compositional form based on a mosaic of apparently unrelated elements, and a carnivalesque profusion of detail. He further investigates how such stylistic preferences derive from, and throw light on, the style of Hellenistic poetry. This important book will be welcomed by all scholars of Hellenistic civilization as well as historians of ancient science and Western mathematics. (shrink)

Ludics [1] is a novel approach to logic—especially proof-theory. The present introduction emphasises foundational issues.For ages, not a single disturbing idea in the area of “foundations”: the discussion is sort of ossified—as if everything had been said, as if all notions had taken their definite place, in a big cemetery of ideas. One can still refresh the flowers or regild the stone, e.g., prove technicalities, sometimes non-trivial; but the real debate is still: this paper begins with an autopsy, the (...) autopsy of the foundational project.Up to say 1900, the realist/dualist approach to science was dominant; during the last century some domains like physics evolved so as to become completely anti-realist; but this evolution hardly concerned logic.By the turn of the XXth century mathematics was jeopardised by paradoxes, the most famous of them being due to Russell. Hilbert's reaction was to focus on consistency. But the reduction of paradoxes—and therefore of foundations—to solely the antinomies is highly questionable: indeed, the typical paradoxical artifacts are secret sharers, objects satisfying the formal definitions but far astray from the intended meaning, typically the Peano “curve” which contradicts our perception of dimension. Fortunately, topology has been able to show that dimension m is not the same as dimension n … but just for a second, forget this and imagine consistent mathematics in which balls in any dimension are homeomorphic: what a disaster! This exclusive focus on consistency—not to speak of the strategic failure of the Programme—should explain why logic, especially foundations lost contact with other sciences during last century. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s language games can be put into a wider service by virtue of elements they share with some contemporary opinions concerning logic and the semantics of computation. I will give two examples: manifestations of language games and their possible variations in logical studies, and their role in some of the recent developments in computer science. It turns out that the current paradigm of computation that Girard termed Ludics bears a striking resemblance to members of language games. Moreover, the kind (...) of interrelations that are emerging could be scrutinised from the viewpoint of logic that virtually necessitates game-theoretic conceptualisations, demonstrating the fact that the meaning of utterances may, in many situations, be understood as Wittgenstein’s language games of ‘showing or telling what one sees’. This provides motivation for the use of games in relation to logic and formal semantics that some commentators have called for. Many of the ideas can be traced to C.S. Peirce, for whom signs were vehicles of strategic communication. The conclusion about Wittgenstein is that the notions of saying and showing converge in his late philosophy. (shrink)

This paper was made as part of a wider research I made about rituals and their meaning and roles they are playing in the religious system of thinking. The way they are thought, displayed, precisely followed as instructed and believed, makes them a powerful social act that has been always provided by any religion, and also a tool for religion to make the human society what it is today. After I speak about what is a ritual and its religious content (...) in general, I am enumerating roles and functions of play and theatre in particular have, both for profane and religious purpose. Do we still use play/games as adults because they are rewarding, they give us pleasure? They are used as means of relaxation, or for continuing the age of childhood; or it is in our nature to play games in everything we do? In this paper I have emphasized play as adaptive potentiation or adaptive variability useful both in therapy, as in religious ceremony. The relation and comparison of rituals with play is due to the fact that playing is the most engaging behavior performed by man and animals, and it can be found as foundation of almost any ritualist activity. (shrink)

This paper focuses on philosophical toy objects and neo-pataphysicist disciplines, everyday resistance by futility and play. Contemporary electromagnetic toys, smart objects and the Internet of Things will be compared to the seventeenth-century Wunderkammer objects. Historic naturalia, objects and actual toy gadgetry will all be unveiled as alternate W.A.S.T.E. (Pynchon 1964) communications devices, among Habsburg peers. A proof of evidence for the functions of futile toys as resistance objects is given through the presentation of electronic circuit board designs as new bachelor (...) machines, chindogus (useless objects), subcutaneous Radio Frequency Bijoux (RFID-implants) and game fashion, as introduced by the author. But what are the consequences of the use of futile toys on the streets of everyday life? Do they entail a sustainable nascent practice in arts? Who is allowed to play with the electromagnetic parallel worlds? Do electronic toys offer a parallel communications system in their futility? What is the actual role of electronic toys in an inverse trajectory backwards to their harbingers, which are philosophical toys, jeux bijoux (blingblings to play with), Wunderkammer-toys (for peers to establish links with Potlatch-like gifts to tighten social relations) and the Ludic Spielzeug (a toy which empowers the player to recognize the futile toy as tool of resistance and backtalk to given economic and discourse order)? (shrink)

The latest book of Reviel Netz presents a highly erudite analysis of the style of Hellenistic mathematics. Besides the Introduction and Conclusion the book is composed of four chapters. Before turning to more general remarks I would like first to outline the contents of the book.The Introduction starts with the presentation of Archimedes’ Spiral lines. In a condensed form, the author outlines his approach and calls attention to the stylistic peculiarities of that work. Most of the themes discussed in more (...) detail in the following chapters, such as the analysis of the narrative structure of the treatise, its working with surprise, the exposition of the rhetorical devices, the discussion of technical tools, and the breaking of genre-boundaries emerge here side by side in a single treatise.The first chapter, called The carnival of calculation, starts with another work of Archimedes, the Stomachion, for which Netz offers a new interpretation as a treatise in geometrical combinatorics. Then he turns to Archimedes’ On the measurement of the circle, where, in a detailed analysis of the calculations made by Archimedes, Netz presents a pattern that he identifies in several other works of Hellenistic mathematics, a pattern he calls ‘asymptotic calculation’. It consists in a combination of strict geometric arguments with calculations of proportions, some precise, some only approximate, which together with rather arbitrary simplifications lead to a result that is achieved after an abrupt and unexpected halt. Netz shows that, according to the surviving testimonies, a similar pattern can be found in many Hellenistic authors, such as Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Apollonius of Perga. "[I]n many Hellenistic mathematical works we see calculations that give rise to values that are big and unwieldy, or else are only asymptotically found. Such calculations end up not with the satisfaction of having simplified … ". (shrink)

A basic income might be able to correct for the income related losses of unemployment, but what about the meaning/purpose related losses? For better or worse, many people derive meaning and fulfillment from the jobs they do; if their jobs are taken away, they lose this source of meaning. If we are about the enter an era of rampant job loss as a result of advances in technology, is there a danger that it will also be an era of rampant (...) meaninglessness? In this chapter, I offer counsel against any such despair. I argue that we should encourage the withdrawal from the world of work into a more personal world of games.We should do this because (a) work is structurally bad and getting worse as a result of technology; and (b) a more ludic, game-like life would help us to attain a valuable form of human flourishing. I offer three arguments in support of this view, and respond to critics who argue that withdrawing from the demands of work would result in a more selfish and impoverished form of existence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary LiteratureWalter E. BromanPlaytexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature, by Warren Motte; 233 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, $31.50.When readers early encounter such stuff as “Thus in the category of agôn, for example, hide-and-seek would tend toward paidia, whereas chess would tend toward ludus” (p. 7), they suspect that this book will be a rugged and humorless read, in spite of the (...) fun hinted at in the title. Much of the book turns out to fulfill this dread. There is no escaping the sour smell of academic jargon: “to privilege,” “to foreground,” “to marginalize,” “diegetic frame,” etc., or the tangled infelicities of academic prose.Professor Motte sets out to examine a series of texts, “... each text considered a different ludic economy with its own rules and norms, but all texts defined as language games” (p. 15). While struggling through the discussions of Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, André Breton’s Nadja, or Albertine Sarrazin’s Astragal, one catches glimpses of a book that might have assumed sumptuous flesh. This is especially true in the chapter on Nabakov’s Pale Fire, which is quite interesting and well written. Nabakov’s is “an agonistic game that pits Kinbote against Slade, the Sladeans against Kinbote, Kinbote against us the readers, Nabakov against Kinbote, we the readers against Nabakov” (p. 81). This is a game in which Nabakov offers his readers “a full partnership in the creative process” (p. 82). I was forced to recognize that I had enjoyed reading Pale Fire, all the while only being aware of a minim of these ludic convolutions!A major problem with this book and with the books Professor Motte discusses can be shown most vividly in the chapter on Georges Perec’s La Disparition, where the game is to write an entire novel without using the letter “e.” This “literary machine” is supposed to be geared for expressing the iron impositions of life and its ineluctable loss and lack. I suspect that this semantic juice is squeezed out only by critical legerdemain. The discussion merely succeeds in convincing me that this literary tour de force might be suitable for Guinness’s Book of Records, but would likely be a boring read. It reminds me of a Rube Goldberg contraption or of Johnson’s dog walking on its “hinder legs.” Calling this a lipogram linked to Greek antiquity does little to rinse away the sweaty scent of useless exertion.Professor Motte includes a quotation from Eco referring to Swift’s book-making machine in the Grand Academy of Lagado, which provides a sinister and ludicrous image of much of this ludic literature. Eco sees the text as a “combinatory, ludic machine” (p. 191). This literature as machine and game is remarkable for its lack of any concern for the reader: “... the game is finally less vital for us than it seems to have been for Gombrowicz” (p. 68). Compare this with Dryden who took it as axiomatic that the audience’s “concernment” is of vital importance. Now, though, the readerly text is supplanted by the writerly (p. 163). René Bellato builds up “a narrative technique based on the systematic [End Page 243] frustration of the reader’s expectations...” (p. 166). A kind of apex of readerly boredom is devised in Harry Matthew’s literary machine “Matthew’s algorithm”—exemplified by the permutational poetics in Le Savoir des rois, where the same verse is given endless alterations of word order. There lurks a sniffy implication that if you don’t go along with this sort of game you aren’t a good reader. I don’t mind straining to be a good reader if the reward is commensurate with the effort. Professor Motte never explains why we ought to bother.Professor Motte presents various interesting theories of play, as diverse as Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Freud, but his own position is not easy to discern. He seems to be sympathetic with Calvino’s notion that “all literature is play” (p. 142). For this to be true, the definition of ludics or play would have to have a Humpty Dumpty squishiness. It would have to be ample... (shrink)

In this paper, we study dialogue as a game, but not only in the sense in which there would exist winning strategies and a priori rules. Dialogue is not governed by game rules like for chess or other games, since even if we start from a priori rules, it is always possible to play with them, provided that some invariant properties are preserved. An important discovery of Ludics is that such properties may be expressed in geometrical terms. The main (...) feature of a dialogue is “convergence”. Intuitively, a dialogue “diverges” when it stops prematurely by some disruption, or a violation of the tacit agreed upon conditions of the discourse. It converges when the two speakers go together towards a situation where they agree at least on some points. As we shall see, convergence may be thought of through the geometrical concept of orthogonality . Utterances in a dialogue have as their content, not only the processes (similar to proofs) which lead to them from a monologic view, but also their interactions with other utterances. Finally, any utterance must be seen as co-constructed in an interaction between two processes. That is to say that it not only contains one speaker’s intentions but also his or her expectations from the other interlocutor. From our viewpoint, discursive strategies like narration , elaboration , topicalization may derive from such interactions, as well as speech acts like assertion, question and denegation. (shrink)

This article uses Whitehead's process ontology and epistemology to propose Aesthetic Experience as a theory that can be used in organizational studies. The article starts from the intersections of ludic theory and aesthetics, to formulate a theory of Aesthetic Experience that improves and promotes enjoyment, creativity, satisfaction, and productivity in the workspace. Located in a process ontology and epistemology, we propose a simple approach for theory evaluation, using thought experiments to identify issues in the formulations of extant theories, and formulate (...) the theory of Aesthetic Experience using grounded methods, visual mapping, and process modeling. The broader purpose of the paper is to revive the study of Whiteheadian process philosophy within organizational studies. (shrink)

El artículo hace el análisis del vocabulario lúdico utilizado en los escritos de Tomás de Aquino, que permite descubrir una “hermenéutica del buen humor” que caracteriza su manera de pensar sobre el ser humano. El objetivo del estudio consiste en sondear la base filosófica tomista de lo lúdico, destacando su contexto antropológico , epistemológico y ético. En este marco, aparece en el pensamiento del Aquinate una “racionalidad lúdica”, que percibe lo lúdico como dirigibile, y que, además, a través del placer (...) lúdico abre al otro hombre y a la verdad. El particular interés se pone en exponer como el ocio ayuda en el conocimiento racional. (shrink)

I have proposed elsewhere 1 that questions of justice are distinctive in being allocative questions. Questions of justice are particularly prominent in the law because there is no law without adjud...

Cicero’s treatise On Divination is among the most intense ancient discussions of divinatory practices, arguing as much against the background of a long and rich tradition in Greek philosophy as contemporary and recent Roman practices. Focusing on book 2, my contribution will reconstruct Cicero’s “ludic view” of divinatory ritual and extispicy in particular (2.26–41). I will argue that the reference to playing is an important part of Cicero’s argument. I will then use this ancient observation as a hermeneutic lens onto (...) divinatory practices and the materiality involved here. I will conclude on an enquiry into the question of how central this very materiality is for the construction of the divine and the establishment of a bidirectional relationship with it. (shrink)

This article traces the valuation of the ludic themes of laughter and play in the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, as debated by two of his interpreters. The question at stake is whether “religious” or “secular” thinking is more playful and open to humor. Sam Gill argues that a special form of play animates both certain forms of religion as well as an ideal form of secular theory. Tyler Roberts counters that Gill “domesticates” the ludic, and in doing so misconstrues (...) the playfulness of religion. However, lurking behind the religious/secular dichotomy is a more fundamental question about the nature of the ludic, and what sort of power it possesses to transform human life. I show that the claim that theory is “secular” stabilizes certain ontological parameters about what human life could be. I turn finally to Nietzsche to interrogate an expression of ludic thought that pushes decisively beyond the human. (shrink)

Is it possible to characterize the notion of proof in terms of acts, without focusing on a specific domain of application and a specific linguistic formalization of it? This is the question that this paper addresses through a comparative analysis between two logicians who reflected on this issue: Kurt Gödel and Jean-Yves Girard. A comparative analysis of their respective theoretical frames, their respective results, the similarities and the differences between their methodological assumptions is proposed. More specifically, the aim of the (...) paper is to compare Gödel’s notion of absolute proof and Girard’s notion of Ludic from their common core: a conception of proof in terms of acts. (shrink)

"One might say that 'chance' is anything but blind in forking-path narratives."Fictional worlds attract the attention of debaters in particular when they are supposed to activate the viewers' reflections in a special way. Thus, movies that are most likely to irritate the audience and seem to animate people to reflect on their own personality and life are of major interest. In the following, I want to discuss a certain type of movie that meets these criteria: forking-path or multiple-draft narratives. On (...) the one hand they rely on well-known narrative schemata, and on the other hand they comprise something that is actually impossible: alternative futures. One central thesis raised by spokespersons of the .. (shrink)

Este texto reflete sobre possibilidades de educação estética na universidade como necessidade premente à formação inicial de docentes, mais especificamente de pedagogos, no sentido da ampliação e do aperfeiçoamento de sua percepção estética, aliadas ao desenvolvimento de uma postura atenta aos contextos sócio-históricos vivenciados. Nessa direção, problematiza sobre quais dispositivos pedagógicos podem ser acionadores de impulsos lúdicos na formação de docentes, sob a luz das concepções de Schiller. Dentre outras contribuições teóricas, o texto cita ainda Freire, que tece importantes considerações (...) sobre as relações entre estética e ética na formação de professores, e que, a nosso ver, o aproxima das ideias de Schiller; Snyders, que trata do espaço universitário como locus privilegiado para se gerar a alegria cultural, energia necessária à aprendizagem diversificada e enriquecedora do repertório científico-cultural dos estudantes; Moraes e Therrien que refletem sobre a necessidade de ampliação do repertório cultural dos docentes; e Moura que aponta à maleabilidade pedagógica do professor como exigência de um perfil flexível e complexo. O trabalho constitui um estudo bibliográfico imerso no campo da filosofia da educação, guiado, entretanto, por reflexões amparadas em experimentações estético-pedagógicas vivenciadas, em processos de formação inicial docente, no âmbito de uma universidade pública estadual brasileira. Com o estudo, infere-se que à universidade cabe o papel decisivo de garantir e estimular o acesso a experiências estéticas que tanto ampliem o repertório artístico-cultural de estudantes como também neles favoreça a criação de impulsos lúdicos, tornando-os mais perceptivos e criativos, sendo que isso se materializará por meio de proposições curriculares de cada curso, aliadas às condições estruturais concretas dessa universidade. Palavras-chave: Educação estética. Impulsos lúdicos. Universidade. Formação de docentes. Pedagogia. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 179-200.

This chapter contains sections titled: “Is this man cheating on his wife?” “Just a game” Play and Dating A Ludic Understanding of Dating The Wizards of Dating and Their Hangers‐on The Moral Significance of a Ludic Conception of Dating.

In this essay, we address the influence of psychoanalysis on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the esthesiological body. Our analyses are about the relation of senses and meanings established among the notions of game, sport and ludic, dialoguing with esthesiology and with the pulsional body, based on Freud's psychoanalytic referential, also approached by Merleau-Ponty. Our interlocutor considers that the expression of play in language seeks to situate the body, perception, and desire as primordial sources in the process of signification, presenting a different (...) way of conceiving the problem of ambiguity of the word game, based on a lacunar, indirect, and nascent conception of language. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy beckons to an alternative and possible path in the movement of re-reading the game and the ludic, including the dialogue with Psychoanalysis concerning the relations of the pulsional body with the game and the play in shaping the feeling of existence, and broadening the horizons of the philosophy of sport. (shrink)

Recent work in cerebral neurology should be used to fashion a new synthesis with anthropological studies. Beginning with Paul D. Madean's model of the triune brain, we explore Ralph Wendell Burhoe's question whether creative processes result from a coadaptation, perhaps in ritual itself, of genetic and cultural information. Then we examine the division of labor between right and left cerebral hemispheres and its implications for the notions of play and “ludic recombination.” Intimately related to ritual, play may function in the (...) social construction of reality analogous to mutation and variation in organic evolution. Finally, we consider how our picture of brain functioning accords with some distinctive features of the religious systems dominant in human cultures. (shrink)

This is an investigation into the fundamental connections between the referential use of language and our rich human experience. All types of experience — perceptual, practical, scientific, literary, esthetic, ludic,... — are tightly unified into one total experience by the structure of reference to real or possible items. Singular reference is essential for locating ourselves in our own corner of the world. General reference, by means of quantifiers, is our main tool in ascertaining the accessible patterns of the world. Both (...) are primitive and mutually irreducible. (Often this has been denied.) The unity of total experience is constructed through the biographical unity of a person, and the sociological unity of the communications across a community. This unity of experience is wrought out by an underlying unitary system of reference. We need, therefore, a comprehensive theory of individuation, existence, predication, and truth. One such a theory is Guise Theory. (shrink)

While some argue that the only way to make a place for Philosophy for Children in today's strict, standardised classroom is to measure its efficacy in promoting reasoning, we believe that this must be avoided in order to safeguard what is truly unique in P4C dialogue. When P4C acquiesces to the very same quantitative measures that define the rest of learning, then the philosophical dimension drops out and P4C becomes yet another progressive curriculum and pedagogy for enhancing argumentation skills that (...) can easily be appropriated by any content area. What we want to offer in this article is a reevaluation of P4C that remains faithful to a radical kernel that we find when we do philosophy with children and young adults. To theorise the potential for P4C, we draw heavily on Agamben's work, and in particular his reflections on speech and infancy. We propose that the redemption of P4C necessitates a shift from a community of inquiry to a community of infancy. Such a community is not a community that operates according to predefined rules or standardised assessment protocols but rather is an inoperative community that is defined by letting ends idle. On our account, a community of infancy is an example of dialogic studious play that is neither ritual nor just play, thus avoiding the extreme polarities of the ritualised classrooms of high-stakes testing and the ‘ludic’ postmodern classroom of free play. What is at stake here is to preserve the last vestige of freedom within the school. (shrink)

This article examines the first-century c.e.Laus Pisonis, an anonymous panegyric for a certain Piso that lays particular emphasis on his skill at lyre-playing, ball games and the board game, the ludus latrunculorum. Whereas this focus has often been a cause of consternation among critics, this article argues that play is a crucial element of the poem's poetic and political operations. The first section shows that the poem employs images of poetic maturity and of temporality in order to justify a light (...) or ludic topic for an allegedly young poet. The second section identifies a hitherto unobserved telestich in the passage describing the ludus latrunculorum and argues that this letter game defines a positive period of play within the poem. The third section further demonstrates that this letter game is aimed specifically at the patron Piso as he is represented within the poem. That is, the poet parallels Piso's potential to uncover the telestich in the text and his ability to uncover the poet's hidden talent. The concluding fourth section explores the wider impact of this reinterpretation of the Laus Pisonis for the literary history of the Early Principate. It proposes that the poem's playfulness should not be seen as reflecting the progressive disempowerment of the political elite. Rather, the poem is an early case of Roman political discourse encroaching on the value of the trivial and the boundaries of otium. The Laus Pisonis makes play political. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article draws attention to the presence of a previously unnoticed transliterated telestich in the transformation of stones into bodies in the episode of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Detection of the Greek intext, which befits the episode's amplified bilingual atmosphere, is encouraged by a number of textual cues. The article also suggests a ludic connection to Aratus’ Phaenomena.

This is an investigation into the fundamental connections between the referential use of language and our rich human experience. All types of experience — perceptual, practical, scientific, literary, esthetic, ludic,... — are tightly unified into one total experience by the structure of reference to real or possible items. Singular reference is essential for locating ourselves in our own corner of the world. General reference, by means of quantifiers, is our main tool in ascertaining the accessible patterns of the world. Both (...) are primitive and mutually irreducible. (Often this has been denied.) The unity of total experience is constructed through the biographical unity of a person, and the sociological unity of the communications across a community. This unity of experience is wrought out by an underlying unitary system of reference. We need, therefore, a comprehensive theory of individuation, existence, predication, and truth. One such a theory is Guise Theory. (shrink)

The Grasshopper’s game-playing Utopia collapses because, ideal though it might seem to some, ultimately most of us want more out of life than game-play. Building on both The Grasshopper and the published sequels in which Bernard Suits attempts to vindicate his Utopia, the current paper reconstructs Suits’s Utopia in a new way. I start from deeper reflection on Suits’s example of John Striver, a Utopian citizen who wants to work but whose profound boredom occasions Utopia’s collapse. Although the Grasshopper returns (...) to Striver repeatedly and urges his interlocutors to bear him in mind, the case is underdeveloped and its implications undertheorized, both by Suits and his numerous commentators and critics. The Striver example reveals a picture of Utopian games as complex, dynamic, mutually responsive, and cooperative; such games are not only better for game-loving ‘Grasshoppers’ but make room in Utopia for work-loving ‘Ants’. This mutuality is the key to Utopia’s sustainability. The paper thus offers a new critique and reinterpretation of the central text in contemporary philosophy of sport and explicates the goods inherent in the ludic ideal. (shrink)

The concept of metagames can be of use to philosophers of sport and games. However, the term “metagame” is used throughout the literature in several different, distinct senses, few of which are clearly defined, and as a result there remains ambiguity about what, precisely, this term means. In this paper, I attempt to disambiguate the term metagame. I have come across at least four different senses of “metagame” in academic literature about games. Of these four senses, most relevant to philosophers (...) of sport and games is what I have termed “ludic” metagames. Ludic metagames involve playing a game “on top of” another game. I attempt to spell out this concept in particular detail, distinguishing it from related – but distinct – ways in which the formal features of a game can be modified without giving rise to metagames. (shrink)

‘Fictional games’ are playful activities and ludic artefacts that were conceptualised to be part of fictional worlds. These games cannot – or at least were not originally meant to – be actually played. This interdisciplinary article discusses fictional games, focusing on those appearing in works of sf. Its objective is that of exploring how fictional games can function as utopian devices. Drawing on game studies, utopian studies, and sf studies, the first half of the article introduces the notion of fictional (...) games and provides an initial articulation of their utopian potential. The second half focuses, instead, on the analysis of one (science-)fictional game in particular: the game of Azad, described in Iain M. Banks’s 1988 sf novel The Player of Games. This analysis is instrumental in clarifying the utopian qualities that are inherent in the activity of play such as its being uncertain and contingent. By presenting relationships of power through a game (and, finally, as a game), utopian fictional games such as Azad serve as a reminder that every socio-political situation – even the most dystopian ones – is ultimately indeterminate, and retains the possibility of change. (shrink)

This article presents the results of the research “Philosophical Attitude and Childhood: Teachers’ Formation and Transformation”, developed at the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia UPTC Kindergarten, by using the Community of Inquiry as a strategy to foster a philosophical attitude. It is divided in three descriptive moments, the first one, previous considerations, contains: philosophy as a tool to think, philosophical attitude as a life style, philosophy for kids as a theoretical and methodological perspective; the second one includes methodological perspectives; (...) and the third one, the experience as a transformation, covers: the Community of Inquiry and ludic, the Community of Inquiry with kids, teacher’s formation and transformation, childhood’s discovery, critical, creative and ethic thinking in childhood, and from the Community of Inquiry to a life style. (shrink)

An eye-opener and a head-scratcher, this set of fifty exercices de style offers an oblique and learned introduction to a great classic of ludic literature dating from the twelfth century, the Maqamat of al-Hariri. Each of the fifty tales of the trickster Abu Zayid, some or perhaps all of which contain or are constituted by one or more formal restrictions, is here presented in the form of a pastiche of some familiar or exotic register of writing in English. We can (...) only admire Cooperson for having taught himself to channel Chaucer, Woolf, and Twain, to parrot Singaporean, Nigerian, and Indian English, to compose in dramatic form and in verse, and to riff off Austen as well as a dictionary of law.... What is frustrating to readers is that our translator-imposter does not let us play the game. He explains each exercise and justifies his approach to it in a prefatory note, then adds footnotes, a bibliography, and a glossary of the “dialect” chosen. We are not even allowed to play guess-the-author! The aim of the elaborate and scholarly apparatus attached to these imitative imitations is to give a hint—a necessarily and unapologetically misleading one—of the pleasure and value of the medieval Arabic for its first and later readers.The problem is that pastiche is not only an entertaining exercise. It typically serves a purpose located somewhere between mockery and homage, and sometimes plays both ends against the middle. Cooperson, however, is not mocking Dickens or Gibbon, even less the al-Hariri he clearly admires beyond all others. Consequently, the nonparticipant reader becomes ever more baffled as to what the game is really for. Surely it cannot be intended only to show us how clever and knowledgeable Mr. Cooperson is? Which he certainly is, but not beyond tripping over his own skipping rope. For example, the prisoner's constraint used in the middle of a pastiche of Dickens, when implemented in the way it was defined by its inventor Paul Fournel, excludes the letter z and also cannot accommodate the tilde of señor—and Dickens would have written bade for the past tense of bid. The more you read, the less you smile, the more you quibble as you are drawn into a surely unintended game of spot-the-blooper.It takes genius to write like someone else, which is why the people who get away with it for real use a battery of extratextual devices to deceive (think of Guilleragues, Ossian, Chatterton, Kuzma Proutkov, Romain Gary... ). Cooperson is not seeking to deceive (yet how can a pastiche not gesture toward deception?), but he is not actually offering fifty linked stories by fifty different hands either. What he has produced with the help of his distinguished préfacier, two editors, and a bevy of consultants is a curiously unidentifiable literary object, and quite possibly the only one of its kind.Two statements made by the translator in his introduction disturb me. He says he avoided using most twentieth-century literary models and references in order not to run into copyright issues. This is a declaration of submission to the Copyright Monster invented and unleashed by publishers in flagrant disregard of the laws of the UK, the US, and the EU, all of which allow parody and pastiche without permission of the copyright holder. Second, he “takes seriously the argument that privileged users of Standard English have no business imitating... the speech varieties associated with less privileged communities.” In all times other than our own, the privileged did not deign to use “less privileged” forms of speech (unless they were Victor Hugo), but if now they do not even dare, we can still guess what will happen. The less privileged will seek to use more privileged forms of speech, just as Anglo-Saxon serfs aped Norman French until they ended up speaking English. More recently, wealthy corporations have sought to own whole programming languages by extending the reach of copyright law; perhaps “less privileged communities” are now about to use similar weapons to protect their linguistic turf. We must object as noisily as we can to attempts to enclose public goods by corporations, by self-defining communities, or by any other entities. We would all be the poorer if they should ever succeed. (shrink)

Over the past 3 years, the authors have pursued unique cross-college collaboration. They have hosted a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)–funded Humanities Gaming Institute and team-taught a cross-listed course that brought together students from the humanities and computer science. Currently, they are overseeing the development of an NEH-supported social history game called Desperate Fishwives. In the process, the authors have realized that “game” is not the most appropriate designator for the kind of projects they are pursuing. Instead, they propose (...) critical interactives, a term that suggests projects that mobilize ludic methods in order to engage participants in socially and politically sensitive, indeed controversial, subject matter. Their most recent project, Ghosts of the Horseshoe, offers an initial look at how critical interactives are particularly apt at raising awareness about the relations among institutional policy, broader public policy, and the ways that people negotiate the public history of a particular place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 471-475 [Access article in PDF] Cosmopoiesis. The Renaissance Experiment, by Giuseppe Mazzotta; xvi & 106 pp. Toronto Italian Studies/Goggio Publication Series. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001; $35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. There is a sense in which this (most recent) book by Giuseppe Mazzotta might be seen as having been born out of his previous book The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy (...) of Giambattista Vico (Princeton University Press, 2000). For there is something unmistakably Vichian in Mazzotta's "reading" of the Renaissance as it has been revealed in his Cosmopoiesis. As a matter of fact, it is in the "Preface" to his book that Mazzotta explicitly gives a number of reason why Giambattista Vico's philosophy of history could be taken as a valuable and quite promising starting point for a better understanding of "the Renaissance experiment": "The first is that he theorized art as poiesis or making and as the work of the imagination. The second reason is that he lucidly understood the Renaissance as the ambiguous time of both extraordinary achievements and inexorable decadence. The third reason is that Vico obliquely suggests how we can move beyond the limits in our current understanding of the Renaissance" (pp. xv-xvi). Mazzotta is deeply sympathetic with this cluster of Vichian insights, which insights will constitute, so to speak, the primum movens behind his own interpretative approach to the Renaissance world, and he takes as his major task in Cosmopoiesis to creatively develop and boldly expand them.The book is actually a collection of four ample essays (resulting—largely—from the Goggio Lectures the author delivered at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1999): "Poliziano's Orfeo: The World as Fable"; "Ariosto and Machiavelli: Real Worlds/Imaginary Worlds"; "Adventures of Utopia: Campanella, Bacon, and The Tempest"; and "The Ludic Perspective: Don Quixote and the Italian Renaissance." All of these essays are "variations on the same theme," attempts at putting under a careful scrutiny one of the most fascinating aspects of the European Renaissance: the topic of "the invention of the world and the notion of making through utopias, magic, science, art, and the theatre. These are the imaginative elements that characterize the paradigm shift from the Middle Ages to the modern ages ushered in by the Renaissance" (p. xiii). [End Page 471]As such, the Renaissance marks, in Mazzotta's view, the spectacular emergence of the myth of world-making (cosmopoiesis), a myth with a tremendously wide success, a myth that was eventually to become one of the very foundations on which our own world is built. When Dr. Faust, in his quite unorthodox work as a translator, was looking for an "appropriate" equivalent of Logos, as it appears in St. John's Gospel, he unreservedly dismissed the Word (das Wort), only to embrace the deed: Am Anfang war die Tat ("In the beginning there was the deed"). Making, in the most general sense of the word (and along with the numerous symbols, representations, and values associated with it), is not for the modern man a cultural trait among others, but it is, so to say, a matter of life and death, a question of self-definition andultimate identity. For making is not only about the world one lives in (world-making), about conferring upon it a new content, or a new meaning, appearance, etc., but—maybe more importantly—making is also about the very identity of the one who lives in that world (self-making), about her or his most intimate constitution. Mazzotta considers that in order for a historian to understand exactly man's position in the world at a given moment in history s/he has to take seriously into account the deeper, sometimes obscure, theological and metaphysical presuppositions hidden behind—and, actually, making possible—the current, immediately visible cultural representations: "The modern world is no longer, as it was in the Middle Ages, a book that pre-exists us and whose signs we seek to decipher in the light of precepts drawn from biblical hermeneutics. The modern world [...] is made by human... (shrink)

Nespolo’s posters have both advertising and educative value. Their style is the same of his artwork based on the inlay technique and the puzzle effect of the configurations. Various cultural events are advertised in Nespolo’s posters: music festival, sports competitions, conferences and also his own art exhibitions. The main features of this posters are: a chromatically salience, a visually simplicity and the typical Nespolo’s ludic attitude. These are the guarantee of the success of his posters.

This article is about some issues related to applied ethics, trying to think of sport in moral terms and demanding the application of philosophy to our daily life. It is essentially an introductory presentation of the main topics in sport ethics, which is based on these two points: sport a) belongs to the ludic world b) is essentially competitive. Finally, these issues lead us to investigate the concept of fair play, without doubt the most important one in this discipline.

Regarding the question of why it is that people feel the need to travel for recreational purposes, I suggest that the answer might be found in the concept of “play.” In my paper, I consider the seriousness of play as represented in the work of Johan Huizinga, who held that play lies at the very source of culture, and the novels of Hermann Hesse, in light of Joseph Pieper’s reflections on leisure and the ludic in relation to the contemplative. In (...) the Christian humanistic tradition, to which Hesse and Huizinga belong, play is identified with freedom and affirmation of the life of the mind, in contrast to the materialist ideal of work promulgated by the Industrial Revolution, whereas the opposing Christian tradition represented by Tertullian and Kierkegaard, attacked the culture of play. Pieper’s reflections on the relationship between leisure and liturgy add emphasis on the feast or festival as an occasion for affirmation of the contemplative, eternal, and transcendent over the temporal and transitory of everyday life. (shrink)