This paper addresses the concept of play concerning human formation, especially as manifested in the philosophies of Gadamer and Schiller. Gadamer depicted understanding as an organic motion that unfolds through seeing differences and characterized play as a flexible back-and-forth movement or interplay between possibilities and transformations. Schiller structured play as the playful impulse similarly as an interactive moving force that connects the two seemingly oppositional impulses of reason and sensation and lets the two affect the other dialogically. Both Gadamer and (...) Schiller suggest that play, as in essence an inter-play, orients us into seeing more possibilities of making a refreshing sense of our intellectual and perceptual abilities and thereby transfiguring our living being into richer and fuller meaningfulness. (shrink)

What is the value of intellectual playfulness? Traditional characterizations of the ideal thinker often leave out playfulness; the ideal inquirer is supposed to be sober, careful, and conscientiousness. But elsewhere we find another ideal: the laughing sage, the playful thinker. These are models of intellectual playfulness. Intellectual playfulness, I suggest, is the disposition to try out alternate belief systems for fun – to try on radically different perspectives for the sheer pleasure of it. But what would the cog-nitive value be (...) of such playfulness? I suggest that intellectual playfulness function as, at the very least, a kind of intellectual insurance policy against epistemic traps. An epistemic trap is a belief system that re-directs good-faith inquiry to bad results. Am epistemic trap manipulates background beliefs to fend off contrary evidence. For example, a conspiracy theory might include a set of beliefs about how the mainstream media has been taken over by some vicious cabal. Normal epistemic attempts will be captured by a well-wrought epistemic trap, because normal attempts at inquiry are guided by these background beliefs -- which set what counts as a plausible path to explore, and what is implausible or beyond the pale. And a clever epistemic trap will manipulate those background beliefs for ill effect. Intellectual playfulness, on the other hand, isn’t motivated by an epistemic interest in the truth, but in the sheer pleasure of intellectual exploration. Since intellectual playfulness isn’t oriented towards the truth, it won’t be constrained by an agent’s background beliefs – it won’t, for example, prefer to investigate apparently more plausible pathways. Intellectual playfulness offers an opportunity to escape from epistemic traps. But intellectual playfulness has its own limitations. It will only drive us to explore belief systems when that exploration is fun. What we need is an array of differently-motivated exploratory tendencies – empathy, curiosity, playfulness – each of which will each cover for the others’ limitations. (shrink)

Pretense is generally thought to constitutively involve imagination. We argue that this is a mistake. Although pretense often involves imagination, it need not; nor is it a kind of imagination. The core nature of pretense is closer to imitation than it is to imagination, and likely shares some of its motivation with the former. Three main strands of argument are presented. One is from the best explanation of cross‐cultural data. Another is from task‐analysis of instances of pretend play. And the (...) third concerns the different ways in which pretense (especially childhood pretense) and imagination impact one's evaluative/affective systems. (shrink)

Addressing both collegiate and professional sports, the updated edition of Fair Play explores the ethical presuppositions of competitive athletics and their ...

Eugen Fink is considered one of the clearest interpreters of phenomenology and was the preferred conversational partner of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Play as Symbol of the World, Fink offers an original phenomenology of play as he attempts to understand the world through the experience of play. He affirms the philosophical significance of play, why it is more than idle amusement, and reflects on the movement from "child's play" to "cosmic play." Well-known for its non-technical, literary style, this (...) skillful translation by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner invites engagement with Fink's philosophy of play and related writings on sports, festivals, and ancient cult practices. (shrink)

This article argues that the Indian philosopher-mystic Sri Aurobindo espoused a sophisticated form of cosmopsychism that has great contemporary relevance. After first discussing Aurobindo’s prescient reflections on the “central problem of consciousness” and his arguments against materialist reductionism, I explain how he developed a panentheistic philosophy of “realistic Adwaita” on the basis of his own spiritual experiences and his intensive study of the Vedāntic scriptures. He derived from this realistic Advaita philosophy a highly original doctrine of evolutionary cosmopsychism, according to (...) which the Divine Saccidānanda is “involved” in everything in the universe and gradually manifests itself at each stage of the evolutionary process from matter to life to mind, and ultimately, to Supermind—the final stage that is yet to come, upon the attainment of which we will attain knowledge of our true divine nature as Saccidānanda. I then reconstruct Aurobindo’s novel solution to the individuation problem, according to which the Divine Saccidānanda individuates into various distinct consciousnesses by playfully limiting itself through a process of “exclusive concentration.” Finally, I highlight the continued relevance of Aurobindo’s evolutionary cosmopsychism by bringing him into conversation with Itay Shani, a contemporary proponent of cosmopsychism. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest that play is a distinctive behavioural category whose adaptive significance calls for explanation. Play primarily affords juveniles practice toward the exercise of later skills. Its benefits exceed its costs when sufficient practice would otherwise be unlikely or unsafe, as is particularly true with physical skills and socially competitive ones. Manipulative play with objects is a byproduct of increased intelligence, specifically selected for only in a few advanced primates, notably the chimpanzee.The adaptiveness of play in pongid (...) evolution is traced through the probable changes in selective pressures that occurred in hominid evolution. It is argued that fantasy was an emergent property in hominids, made possible by symbolic intelligence and language, and serving to make play complex enough to continue to provide useful practice for increasingly complex later skills.The advent of organised instruction and education has meant that play's unplanned, intrinisic goal-setting could be replaced by extrinsic goal-setting in the systematic development of particular skills. However, the need to ensure adequate motivation has continued to give play educational value. In addition, its capacity to enhance innovative behaviour seems to be a residual function of play which has acquired a new cultural importance. (shrink)

In light of the interrelation between motor and cognitive development and the predictive value of the former for the latter, the secular decline observed in motor coordination ability as early as preschool urges identification of interventions that may jointly impact motor and cognitive efficiency. The aim of this study was twofold. It (1) explored the outcomes of enriched physical education, centered on deliberate play and cognitively challenging variability of practice, on motor coordination and cognitive processing; (2) examined whether motor coordination (...) outcomes mediate intervention effects on children’s cognition, while controlling for moderation by lifestyle factors as outdoor play habits and weight status. Four hundred and sixty children aged 5-10 years participated in a 6-month group randomized intervention in physical education, with or without playful coordinative and cognitive enrichment. The weight status and spontaneous outdoor play habits of children (parental report of outdoor play) were evaluated at baseline. Before and after the intervention, motor developmental level (Movement Assessment Battery for Children) was evaluated in all children, who were then assessed either with a test of working memory (Random Number Generation task), or with a test of attention (from the Cognitive Assessment System, CAS). Children assigned to the ‘enriched’ intervention showed more pronounced improvements in all motor coordination assessments (manual dexterity, ball skills, static/dynamic balance). The beneficial effect on ball skills was amplified by the level of spontaneous outdoor play and weight status. Among indices of executive function and attention, only that of inhibition showed a differential effect of intervention type. Moderated mediation showed that the better outcome of the enriched physical education on ball skills mediated the better inhibition outcome, but only when the enrichment intervention was paralleled by a medium-to-high level of outdoor play. Results suggest that specifically tailored physical activity games provide a unique form of enrichment that impacts children’s cognitive development through motor coordination improvement, particularly object control skills, which are linked to children’s physical activity habits later in life. Outdoor play appears to offer the natural ground for the stimulation by designed physical activity games to take root in children’s mind. (shrink)

Addressing both collegiate and professional sports, the updated edition of Fair Play: The Ethics of Sport explores the ethical presuppositions of competitive athletics and their connection both to ethical theory and to concrete moral dilemmas that arise in actual athletic competition. This fourth edition has been updated with new examples, including a discussion of Spygate by the New England Patriots and recent discoveries on the use of performance enhancing drugs by top athletes. Two additional authors, Cesar R. Torres and Peter (...) F. Hager, bring to this edition a discussion of the moral issues involved in youth sports and the ethics of being a fan, as well as a fresh perspective on the theories of broad internalism and the quest for excellence. Furthermore, major criticisms of broad internalism by philosophers William J. Morgan and Scott Kretchmar add a new dimension to the discussion on the moral foundations of winning. (shrink)

Ken Binmore's previous game theory textbook, Fun and Games, carved out a significant niche in the advanced undergraduate market; it was intellectually serious and more up-to-date than its competitors, but also accessibly written. Its central thesis was that game theory allows us to understand many kinds of interactions between people, a point that Binmore amply demonstrated through a rich range of examples and applications. This replacement for the now out-of-date 1991 textbook retains the entertaining examples, but changes the organization to (...) match how game theory courses are actually taught, making Playing for Real a more versatile text that almost all possible course designs will find easier to use, with less jumping about than before. In addition, the problem sections, already used as a reference by many teachers, have become even more clever and varied, without becoming too technical. Playing for Real will sell into advanced undergraduate courses in game theory, primarily those in economics, but also courses in the social sciences, and serve as a reference for economists. (shrink)

Play resides at the heart of the Platonic dialogues, shaping their insights as well as informing their style. "The Play of the Platonic Dialogues" traces the prominent role of play, both as a general philosophical characteristic and as influencing the treatment of key issues. The nature of the forms, of the city, of virtue, of the soul and its immortality - these and others have been shaped by play. This book shows how Platonic playfulness is joined with the deepest seriousness (...) throughout the dialogues. (shrink)

In his paper “Fairness, Political Obligation, and the Justificatory Gap” (published in the Journal of Moral Philosophy), Jiafeng Zhu argues that the principle of fair play cannot require submission to the rules of a cooperative scheme, and that when such submission is required, the requirement is grounded in consent. I propose a better argument for the claim that fair play requires submission to the rules than the one Zhu considers. I also argue that Zhu’s attribution of consent to people commonly (...) thought to be bound to follow the rules by a duty of fair play is implausible. (shrink)

In this paper the authors seek to contribute to a new ontology of an embodied, desiring subject through an exploration of their own subjectivities and of the ways in which subjectivities are produced and transformed through affective attachments to place. Using the method of collective biography (Davies, Gannon 2006) and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and territorialization they examine their affective responses and attachments to place: Australia and the Czech Republic. As a point of departure for their (...) analysis, the authors ask: What does it mean to be homesick for a place which is not one’s home? What does it mean to desire a place? What of the other place is inscribed in the body? In asking this, the authors show the extent to which place is a zone of immanence in which a continual play of de- and re-territorialization occurs. (shrink)

Most of the reports on synthetic biology include not only familiar topics like biosafety and biosecurity but also a chapter on ‘ethical concerns’; a variety of diffuse topics that are interrelated in some way or another. This article deals with these ‘ethical concerns’. In particular it addresses issues such as the intrinsic value of life and how to deal with ‘artificial life’, and the fear that synthetic biologists are tampering with nature or playing God. Its aim is to analyse (...) what exactly is the nature of the concerns and what rationale may lie behind them. The analysis concludes that the above-mentioned worries do not give genuine cause for serious concern. In the best possible way they are interpreted as slippery slope arguments, yet arguments of this type need to be handled with care. It is argued that although we are urged to be especially vigilant we do not have sufficiently cogent reasons to assume that synthetic biology will cause such fundamental hazards as to warrant restricting or refraining from research in this field. (shrink)

Play The concept of play has received considerable attention in the past, yet one can generally conclude from modern work on the subject that its stature ...

In this paper I develop an alternative to prevailing moral development assumptions in early childhood education. Drawing on a Bakhtinian theoretical framework, theories of identity formation, and examples from my longitudinal research study of child-adult play, I reframe development as a lifelong process of coauthoring ethical identities that may begin in early childhood when adults join children in dramatic play.

According to the safety principle, if one knows that p, one's belief that p could not easily have been false. One problem besetting this principle is the lottery problem – that of explaining why one does not seem to know that one will lose the lottery purely based on probabilistic considerations, prior to the announcement of the lottery result. As Greco points out, it is difficult for a safety theorist to solve this problem, without paying a heavy price. In this (...) paper, I first reject three existing safety-based solutions to the lottery problem, due to Pritchard, Sosa, and Broncano-Berrocal. Failure of these accounts reveals that there is something crucial missing in the safety principle. By way of remedying this, I propose to integrate a safety principle with a condition regarding one's own awareness of (nearby) error-possibilities. The resulting account, as I argue, enjoys a number of theoretical advantages, including its capacity to handle the lottery problem. (shrink)

According to the fair play defense of political obligations citizens have a reciprocity-based duty to share the costs involved in the production of public goods. But sometimes, states produce collective goods through wrongdoing. For example, sometimes states’ wrongful immigration policies can contribute to the welfare of their own populations. Do citizens have duties of reciprocity in light of such wrongful benefits? I argue that the answer to this question is negative. Drawing on the observation that beneficiaries of wrongdoing incur compensatory (...) duties to the victims of that wrongdoing, I argue that, rather than having a duty of reciprocity for wrongful benefits, citizens have a duty to disgorge the benefits in compensation. Furthermore, the fair play defense of political obligations entails that citizens can be justified in disobeying the law in order to comply with their compensatory duties to victims of their state’s wrongdoing. (shrink)

The central concern of this paper is to explore the efforts of Schiller's post-Kantian idealism and Marcuse's critical theory to develop a new conception of free human experience. That conception is built on the notion of play. Play is said to combine the human capacities for physical pleasure and reason, capacities which the modern world has dualized. Analysis of their respective accounts of play reveals its ambivalent form in the work of both philosophers. Play supports the ideal of ‘freedom from (...) necessity’, understood as a release from all external constraint. But it also appears to serve as a model for ‘freedom as a higher necessity’. In the case of Schiller, the ambivalence encompasses idle play and an obligation to make ourselves worthy of freedom. For Marcuse, play represents a kind of libidinal idleness while also underpinning a non-alienated conception of labour. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is much to learn about “wild justice” and the evolutionary origins of morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living mammals. Because of its relatively wide distribution among the mammals, ethological investigation of play, informed by interdisciplinary cooperation, can provide a comparative perspective on the evolution of ethical behavior that is broader than is provided by the usual focus on primate sociality. Careful analysis of social play reveals rules of (...) engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. Because of its significance in development, play may provide a foundation of fairness for other forms of cooperation that are advantageous to group living. Questions about the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality are best answered by attention to the details of what animals do when they engage in social play – how they negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, and to develop trust. We consider questions such as why play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does “being fair” mean being more fit? Do individual variations in play influence an individual’s reproductive fitness? Can we use information about the foundations of moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? We conclude that there is likely to be strong selection for cooperative fair play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play, to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. (shrink)

Are we being played? Is our understanding of the traditionally fixed and static concepts of philosophy based on an oversimplification? This book explores some of the theories of the self since Descartes, together with the rationalism and the empiricism that sustain these ideas, and draws some startling conclusions using Gadamer's philosophical study of play as its starting point. Gadamer's ludic theory, Sampson argues, reveals a dynamic of play that exists at the deepest level of philosophy. It is this dynamic that (...) could provide a solution in relation to the Gadamer/Habermas hermeneutics debate and the Gadamer/Derrida relativism debate, together with a theory of totality. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 20 According to the fair play defense of political obligations citizens have a reciprocity-based duty to share the costs involved in the production of public goods. But sometimes, states produce collective goods through wrongdoing. For example, sometimes states’ wrongful immigration policies can contribute to the welfare of their own populations. Do citizens have duties of reciprocity in light of such wrongful benefits? I argue that the answer to this question is negative. Drawing on the observation that (...) beneficiaries of wrongdoing incur compensatory duties to the victims of that wrongdoing, I argue that, rather than having a duty of reciprocity for wrongful benefits, citizens have a duty to disgorge the benefits in compensation. Furthermore, the fair play defense of political obligations entails that citizens can be justified in disobeying the law in order to comply with their compensatory duties to victims of their state’s wrongdoing. (shrink)

In paperback for the first time, Randolph Feezell's Sport, Play, and Ethical Reflection immediately tackles two big questions about sport: "What is it?" and "Why does it attract so many people?

Recent philosophy of science has seen a number of attempts to understand scientific models by looking to theories of fiction. In previous work, I have offered an account of models that draws on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of art. According to this account, models function as ‘props’ in games of make-believe, like children’s dolls or toy trucks. In this paper, I assess the make-believe view through an empirical study of molecular models. I suggest that the view gains support when we (...) look at the way that these models are used and the attitude that users take towards them. Users’ interaction with molecular models suggests that they do imagine the models to be molecules, in much the same way that children imagine a doll to be a baby. Furthermore, I argue, users of molecular models imagine themselves viewing and manipulating molecules, just as children playing with a doll might imagine themselves looking at a baby or feeding it. Recognising this ‘participation’ in modelling, I suggest, points towards a new account of how models are used to learn about the world, and helps us to understand the value that scientists sometimes place on three-dimensional, physical models over other forms of representation. (shrink)

Postdigital Play and Global Education: Reconfiguring Research is a re-turn to a large-scale, international project on children's digital play. Adopting postqualitative and posthumanist theories, research practices are reconfigured, all the way down from what counts as 'data', 'tools', 'instruments', 'transcription', research sites', 'researchers', to notions of responsibility and accountability in qualitative research. Through a series of vignettes involving complex human and more-than-human collaborators (e.g., GoPros, octopus, avatars, diaries, sack ball, LEGO bricks), the authors challenge who and what can be playful (...) and creative across contexts in the global north and south. The diffractive methodology enacted interrupts western developmental notions of agency that are dominant in research involving young children. The concept of 'postdigital' offers fresh opportunities to disrupt dominant understandings of children's play. Play emerges as an enigmatic and shape-shifting human and more-than-human agentic force that operates beyond digital/non-digital, online/offline binaries. By attuning to race, gender, age and language, invisible and colonising aspects of postdigital worldings the authors show how global education research can be reimagined through a posthumanist decentering of children without erasure. Postdigital Play and Global Education puts into practice Karen Barad's agential realism, but also a range of postdevelopmental and posthumanist writings from diverse fields. The book will be of particular interest to researchers looking for guidance to enact agential realist and posthumanist philosophies in research involving young children. (shrink)

Philosophy has a schizophrenic relationship with games. On the one hand, philosophers love using games as model, arguing that phenomena as diverse as linguistic meaning, meta‐ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, law, and aesthetics can be illuminated via an analogy with games. On the other hand, there is scant focused discussion of the concept of a game as such. This is problematic; the appeal to games as a model to clarify philosophically puzzling questions has limited utility if games themselves (and the (...) concept of a game) are poorly understood. Moreover, playing games plausibly is an important element in a good life; anyone interested in the theory of welfare, a traditional philosophical topic, should be interested in games. We play games, but if anything, play itself has been more neglected by philosophers than games. This neglect is unwarranted. Historically, philosophy has investigated foundational questions about human nature, and a disposition to play plausibly is a deep part of human nature. Moreover, play is an important concept in evolutionary biology and psychology, yet those working in those fields struggle to define the concept to their own satisfaction. E.O. Wilson went so far as to remark that “no behavioural concept has proved more ill‐defined, elusive, controversial, and even unfashionable than play.” One might have hoped philosophers could help here. In this paper, I provide an opinionated introduction to the philosophy of play and games. (shrink)

This chapter presents a conception of understanding where understanding emerges out of the joint experience of conversation. On this conception, understanding requires more than the pre-reflective acquisition of shared social meanings – a conception of understanding historically highlighted by existential phenomenologists. Beyond this, it requires what occurs in genuine conversation, namely, that one put one’s pre-reflective social meanings at risk in the process of critical self-reflection. Drawing from the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I argue that conversation is that joint (...) experience that gives rise to such critical self-reflection and that it is conversation’s play-structure in particular that makes it a source of understanding in this sense. (shrink)

According to cognitive psychologists, moral decision-making is a dual-process phenomenon involving two types of cognitive processes: explicit reasoning and implicit intuition. Moral development involves training and integrating both types of cognitive processes through a mix of instruction, practice, and reflection. Serious games are an ideal platform for this kind of moral training, as they provide safe spaces for exploring difficult moral problems and practicing the skills necessary to resolve them. In this article, we present Morality Play, a model for the (...) design of serious games for ethical expertise development based on the Integrative Ethical Education framework from moral psychology and the Lens of the Toy model for serious game design. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present a phenomenological description of how athletes in specific risk sports explore human interaction with natural elements. Skydivers play with, and surf on, the encountering air while falling towards the ground. Kayakers play on the waves and with the stoppers and currents in the rivers. Climbers are ballerinas of the vertical, using cracks and holds in the cliffs to pull upwards against gravity forces. The theoretical background for the description is found in the (...) phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The phenomenology of Husserl focused on the theoretical intentionality of the transcendental ego. With Heidegger the human being's concrete and practical interaction with the environing world moved to the foreground. Heidegger's analyses of ?equipmentality? also throw important light on equipmentality in sports and how we deal with tools and equipment in sports. However, in Heidegger's analyses the body resides in the background both as subject and object. The importance of the active body-subject is well documented in the work of Merleau-Ponty, and also Todes. The human being is a bodily ?being-in-the-world? and the body is the active medium through which the world is grasped. The body is however also situated and aligned with the fundamental dimensions of the world, with vertical gravity and with horizontal action space. In this article I show in a concrete way how in some sports we use fundamental characteristics of the environing world in a mode of playfulness. In these sports human beings play in an extreme way with fundamental elements of nature. The article thus puts phenomenology to a test. It should be able to move from general characteristics to specific features of our bodily human involvement with the environing world. (shrink)

The _play of formulas_ is a new theory designed to explain the manner in which discourses (Suttas, Sūtras) were composed in the early Buddhist tradition, focusing at present mainly on the _Dīgha-_ and _Majjhima- Nikāyas_ (the collections of the Buddha’s Long and Middle-length discourses). This theory combats the commonly accepted views that texts are mainly an attempt to record and preserve the Buddha’s teachings and life events, and that the best way to understand their history is to compare parallel versions (...) of them. By identifying the creative, mainly the literary, vectors alive in the shaping of the texts, the theory explains how discourses are the products of formulas, which themselves are the primary texts of early Buddhism. Formulas combine in order to produce meaningful textual patterns, with little account of historical context and with much interest in aesthetic appeal and emotive potency. Formulas connect according to set narrative designs, in which different types of audiences are represented not only through unique formulas, but also with their specific narrative trajectories and complementing doctrinal emphases. It is not that the early authors were not at all interested in safeguarding the tradition. It is only that there was much more going on, and that thinking about the texts in this way misses their entertaining faces and ignores their beauty. These probably tell us more about what the early discourses actually were for the people that first produced and studied them than dry philosophical doctrine. (shrink)

This book attempts to bridge the gulf that still exists between 'literary' and 'philosophical' interpreters of Plato by looking at his use of characterization. Characterization is intrinsic to dramatic form and a concern with human character in an ethical sense pervades the dialogues on the discursive level. Form and content are further reciprocally related through Plato's discursive preoccupation with literary characterization. Two opening chapters examine the methodological issues involved in reading Plato 'as drama' and a set of questions surrounding Greek (...) 'character' words, including ancient Greek views about the influence of dramatic character on an audience. The figure of Sokrates qua Platonic 'hero' also receives preliminary discussion. The remaining chapters offer close readings of select dialogues, chosen to show the wide range of ways in which Plato uses his characters, with special emphasis on the kaleidoscopic figure of Sokrates and on Plato's own relationship to his 'dramatic' hero. (shrink)

This essay defends a new account of wrongful benefiting based on the principle of fair play. In particular, I argue that certain structurally-conferred group-based benefits or privileges can ground obligations on the part of innocent beneficiaries to relinquish specific gains for purposes of redistribution regardless of whether their receipt is sourced in wrongdoing or involves the imposition of harm upon relevant others. I call this approach to fair play reasoning externalist insofar as it turns on a novel conception of free-riding (...) that eschews necessary appeal to beneficiaries’ mental states or volition. After presenting an empirical example to help illustrate the sort of benefiting at issue and distinguishing my account from arguments rooted in the notion of structural injustice, I defend it via what I call the extension argument, respond to two salient objections, and close by suggesting its potential political utility in the American context specifically. (shrink)

Serious Play provides a rich, multilayered argument that engages and contributes to contemporary theory and cultural studies.--Victorian Studies.

In Playing Politics with Science, David B. Resnik explores the philosophical, political, and ethical issues related to the politicalization of science and ...

I describe how close attention to the process of sculpting clay from the perspective of Material Engagement Theory can create a detailed description of a mutable sense of agency and of self. First, I show that sculpting is associated with a loss of sense of agency and self. Second, that to sense agency as a systemic phenomenon creates anxiety. Third, that meaning in an art encounter develops in association with an anterospective viewpoint. Fourth, that within the logic of the extended (...) mind, emergent meaning becomes openly available for further exploration. Fifth, that artistic creativity is not an opaque process. It proceeds in a similar manner to other forms of human, sense-making activities. Finally, that playing seriously with clay can be used in an investigative manner—as a tool for material conceptualisation. (shrink)

Here I briefly discuss some comparative data on social play behaviour in hope of broadening the array of species in which researchers attempt to study animal morality. I am specifically concerned with the notion of ‘behaving fairly'. In the term ‘behaving fairly’ I use as a working guide the notion that animals often have social expectations when they engage in various sorts of social encounters the violation of which constitutes being treated unfairly because of a lapse in social etiquette. I (...) will cash this out below in my discussion of social play behaviour. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time the highly influential essays, many of them classics, of one of the most prominent scholars in social philosophy and feminist theory. These essays provide a compelling view of many of the major trends in social theory over the past fifteen years—trends that Linda Nicholson herself helped to shape. The Play of Reason examines the legacies of modernity in contemporary political, social, and feminist thought and the unraveling of these legacies in postmodern times. (...) Linda Nicholson first focuses on the tension in modern social theory between attempts to recognize change and diversity and struggles to capture such change in overarching frameworks of meaning and value. She illuminates the consequences of these conflicting tendencies in relation to Marxism, feminist theory, and classical liberal accounts of the family and the state. Nicholson then asks how theory and the resolution of difference are possible after such overarching frameworks are abandoned. She shows how a pragmatic understanding of theory answers widespread fears about relativism. The Play of Reason is a powerful demonstration of a politically engaged social theory. (shrink)

Text představuje aktivní role-playing jako výzkumnou experimentální metodu v sociálních vědách. Zasazuje role-playing do rámce simulačních výzkumných metod, rozkrývá jeho epistemo- logii a dosavadní metodologická uchopení zejména v sociální psychologii. Hlavní linií textu je obhajoba epistemologických kvalit metody a experimentu v sociálních vědách obecně. Inspiračním zdrojem je zde na jedné straně Latourova kvalitativní sociologie asociací, tázající se po původu sociality a problematizující samotný před- mět sociálních věd, tj. sociálno. A na druhé straně přístupy naturalizující sociálně- vědné výzkumy propojením (...) s kognitivní vědou. V tomto ohledu je naším klíčovým předpokladem pro smysluplné uchopení sociální reality v její simulované podobě shodnost kognitivních mechanismů skutečného i simulovaného jednání. V pojetí textu jsou oba zdroje spojeny jejich akcentem na tematizaci sociálna jako inter-psychologického fenoménu mezi tradiční mikro a makro úrovní. Analogií s Petriho miskou text promýšlí posunutí původní metody situační sociální psycho- logie směrem k využití konstruovaných diegetických liminálních situací jako svého druhu laboratoří sociálna. (shrink)

The literature on mass communication is now dominated by "objective sociological "approaches. What makes the work of Stephenson so unusual is his starting points: his frank willingness to adopt a "subjective "and "psychological "approach to the study of mass communication. In short, this is an internal analysis of how communication processes are absorbed by individuals. The theory of play is not a doctrine of frivolity, but rather a way in which Stephenson gets at such sensitive areas of communication theory as (...) what is screened out and why. Without a notion of the play element in communication one would be led to imagine that every televised docudrama would be immediately lived out by every adolescent. Clearly, this is not the case. People can distinguish quite well between imaginary and real events in mass communication contexts. "The Play Theory of Mass Communication "is a work that studies subjective play, how communication serves the cause of self-enhancement and personal pleasure, and the role of entertainment as an end in itself. In short, for those who are tired of cliche-ridden volumes on the political hidden messages and meanings of communication, or the economic management of media decisions, this volume will come as a refreshment, a piece of entertainment as well as instruction. But with all the emphasis "on "aspects, Stephenson's volume is shrewdly political. He takes up themes ranging from the reduction! of international tensions to the happily alienated worker to such pedestrian events as the reporting of foreign Soviet dignitaries in their visits to democratic cultures. This is, in short, an urbane, wise book--sophisticated in its methodology and critical in its theorizing. (shrink)

In Playing Fair, Richard Dagger provides a unified theory of political obligation and the justification of punishment that takes its bearings from the principle of fair play. Dagger argues that members of a just polity have an obligation to obey its laws because they have an obligation of reciprocity or fair play to one another.