Body integrity identity disorder is a very rare condition in which people experience long-standing anguish because there is a mismatch between their bodies and their internal image of how their bodies should be. Most typically, these people are deeply distressed by the presence of what they openly acknowledge as a perfectly normal leg. Some with the condition request that their limb be amputated. 1 We and others have argued that such requests should be acceded to in carefully selected patients.1–4 Consistent (...) with this view, a group at the University of Sydney is developing a programme to better understand and treat BIID and to offer amputation if appropriate. In a recent paper, Patrone argues that such amputations should be prohibited.5 He suggests that authors supporting amputation in BIID depend on analogies with more familiar conditions and then claim that the ‘the desires, choices and requests of BIID patients should be held to exactly the same standards and treated with exactly the same respect as the desires, choices and requests of any more conventional patient’.5 He believes that these analogies are invalid and that therefore the arguments for amputation are invalid.Patrone concentrates a great deal upon whether a decision to have a particular medical intervention is to be regarded as ‘rational’. Unfortunately, he makes no attempt to define what he …. (shrink)

A study of Picasso's status in the art community and his influence on the avant-garde market follows his early year search for a gallery and his monumental rise to fame, noting his popularity among dealers and his commercial strategies.

Resumen: El artículo aborda uno de los modos de localización de entidades en situaciones espaciales estáticas: la deíxis espacial. Nuestro objetivo principal es describir la estructura y uso del sistema demostrativo en espacio de escala menor en la lengua hablada por los gitanos de Chile: el rromané jorajané. Para la obtención de los datos se utilizó The 1999 Demonstrative Questionnaire: ‘THIS’ and ‘THAT’ in comparative perspective. Los resultados del análisis destacan que los demostrativos espaciales del rromané jorajané constituyen un grupo (...) altamente simétrico, que combina un componente semántico deíctico, junto con contenidos gramaticales. Se trata de un sistema demostrativo binario en cuanto a la categoría de distancia respecto del centro deíctico. Se concluye también que la selección del demostrativo apropiado obedece al siguiente patrón: el demostrativo proximal tiene su área focal en la zona próxima al hablante, mientras que el demostrativo distal incluye en su campo de aplicación tanto la zona próxima al oyente como la zona distante al hablante.: This paper addresses one way of locating entities in static spatial situations: the spatial deixis. Our main purpose is to describe the structure and use of the demonstrative system in small-scale space in the language spoken by Gypsies in Chile: the rromané jorajané. Data collection was performed with “The 1999 Demonstrative Questionnaire: ‘THIS’ and ‘THAT’ in comparative perspective”. The analysis results highlight that spatial demonstratives in rromané jorajané are a highly symmetrical group combining a deictic semantic component with grammatical contents. It is a binary demonstrative system in terms of the category of distance from the deictic center. Additionally, it is concluded that choice of the suitable demonstrative proceeds according to the following pattern: the proximal demonstrative has its focal area in the speaker’s zone of proximity, while the distal demonstrative includes both the addressee’s zone of proximity and the speaker’s distal zone within its application field. (shrink)

Patronizing the Public is the first detailed and comprehensive examination of how American philanthropy has transformed culture, communication, and the humanities. Drawing on an impressive range of archival and secondary sources, the chapters in the volume shed light on philanthropic foundations have shaped numerous fields, including film, television, radio, journalism, drama, local history, museums, as well as art and the humanities in general.

This article gives new information on the so-called Letter-book of John, Viscount Mordaunt beyond that in RHS Camden Series LXIX, identifies the likely scribe, and dates the transcription to late 1660. It shows how the large format book was created to record the heroic role played by Mordaunt and his wife Elizabeth in the achievement of Restoration, and how the unfinished state of the textual project adds to our knowledge of the social and political difficulties experienced by Mordaunt, a client (...) of Clarendon. Beyond its historiographical value for understanding the activities of the plenipotentiary, the book helps to tell the story of Mordaunt’s headlong career from his treason trial in 1658 to his impeachment in 1667, the extraordinary supportive agency of Elizabeth, including managing secret correspondence in 1659, the complexities of the Mordaunts’ friendship with John Evelyn, and their loyalty to their fallen patron Clarendon extending to exile in Montpellier in 1668. (shrink)

The definitive biography of Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar and Harvard PhD in philosophy, Howard University philosophy scholar, and architect of the Harlem Renaissance, who mentored a generation of artists including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Nurston and promoted the work of African Americans as the quintessential creators of American modernism. This biography explores his professional and private life, including his relationships with white patrons and his lifelong search for love as a gay man.

To anyone who has been engaged in teaching and studying Plato, particularly the Republic , for the last thirty or forty years, one fact must stand out with special prominence. That is the remarkable increase during that period of the direct applicability of Plato's discussions to our own problems. Thirty-five years ago the concrete situations which Plato had in mind in these discussions, the general assumptions at the back of them, the possibilities for good or evil that he envisaged, would (...) all seem to the student of that time remote and almost unreal, and it required a considerable exercise of the imagination to discover that there were certain underlying ideas in them which had application to our own time. If we wanted contemporary illustrations of the rise of a tyrant we had to turn to some of the most backward States in South America. The idea of a completely planned society existed only in the minds of the writers of Utopias, to whom we were accustomed, sometimes, to say rather patronizingly that they had forgotten that constitutions, grow and are not made. We could study the criticisms of democracy as an intellectual exercise without any feeling that they might be one day applied in practice. How different is the situation now! Many of the possibilities are as near for us as they were to Plato. Many of the general ideas of Plato's day are as readily assumed by us as they were by him. Indeed the difficulty now is greater in trying to gain a sympathetic hearing for the ideas of thirty or forty years ago than for the ideas of the fourth century b.c. (shrink)

Epistula 108, one of the longest of Jerome’s letters, was written in 404 AD to console Eustochium for the loss of her mother Paula. Scholars have referred to this letter as a lengthy epitaphium with hagiographic features, a eulogistic tribute, a biographical eulogy of Paula, a laudatio funebris, a travelogue, a memoir, a metaphorical account of Paula’s pilgrimage through life, a piece of ascetic propaganda and a textual basis for a Bethlehem-centred cult of Paula the ascetic martyr-saint. The aim of (...) this article is to analyse and comment on Jerome’s letter as an example of the genre of Graeco-Roman biography, containing various features of ancient βίοι. While Jerome cast the letter ostensibly as a consolatio for Eustochium, it turned out to be a commemoration of Paula, his patron, devoted disciple and monastic companion. The article will ultimately investigate whether this letter was written to sub-serve a higher motive of Jerome, the chief architect of 4th-century asceticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rita Gross as Coeditor of Buddhist-Christian StudiesTerry C. MuckMy assignment is to celebrate Rita's editorial work on Buddhist-Christian Studies, the journal of our society. But I want to begin by acknowledging Rita's contributions to the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies overall. Her contributions to our society have been enormous. She was a founder and visionary at the beginning. She has, I believe, held every office in the society except for (...) treasurer. And her unfailing willingness to work on whatever needed to be worked on has been an inspiration to us all.But now I want to focus on her work on the editing of Buddhist-Christian Studies. I was chosen for this because Rita and I were coeditors of the journal for ten years, from 1995 to 2005.In one sense Rita and I were guinea pigs. For the first fifteen years of the society, David Chappell, the founding editor, edited the journal. When David retired, the board decided that it would be good to have two editors of the journal, one a Buddhist, one a Christian. It was also in keeping with society commitments that one of us was a man and one a woman.The question was whether two very different people could make a coeditorship work. Coeditorships do not always work. There are two issues. The first is choosing people who actually have the skills to do the job. Coeditorships seem like a great idea when decision makers are wrestling with the internal politics of an organization, especially the issues of proper representation among office holders. In order to avoid appearing to favor one or another identity group within an organization, office-holding choices are often made according to representation rather than skill sets.There is a second issue with coeditorships. Even when the chosen pair satisfies both the representational needs of an organization and the skill sets requirements, there is a question as to whether these two particular people can work together well enough to produce a good journal, whether their work styles mesh, whether their personalities have a reasonable chance of relating positively. In case you are thinking to yourselves, this sounds like my marriage, the analogy is apt.So I would like to spend a few moments remembering for you how this worked with Rita and me. My conclusion is that is worked very well, and I have heard Rita say that from her point of view it worked very well. And there are ten volumes of [End Page 85] Buddhist-Christian Studies sitting on many of our shelves, silent testimonies to the fact that this coeditorship worked well enough so that the journal came out, came out on time, and produced essays and reviews that furthered the aims of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies.My recollections will be in the form of personal anecdotes and stories, since to my mind that is really what made it the fun, voluntary endeavor that the work of the society has become for many of us. I will talk about Rita, I will talk about the editing process, and I will reflect a bit on the challenges and rewards of coediting.Rita GrossI first saw Rita Gross at one of the early meetings of the forerunner of the society, the Cobb-Abe dialogue group. It was at a press conference called by the organizers of the meeting to get some publicity. Rita was being interviewed along with a male scholar who shall remain nameless. I remember two things about the press conference. One was that Rita was wearing a pair of platform shoes that appeared to me to be tippy, and I remember thinking how hard it must be to balance oneself while wearing those things. The second thing I remember was the dynamics between Rita and the male scholar. The male scholar was coming across toward her as one of the most condescending people I have ever seen, and those of you who know Rita know that she does not take to patronization very well. After the second or third of these snide comments coming Rita's way from this very famous man, she just lit into him... (shrink)

Study of the foreign magistri and protomagistri of the medieval cathedral of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) (ca 1130-1350, rebuilt after 1693) reveals the social dynamics of artists’ travel in Mediterranean ports. Building on previous research of the builders’ artistic contexts and references, this analysis combines close reading and comparison of contract documents, discussion of Ragusa’s foreign citizenship law, and questions informed by the sociology of mobility. The study concludes that the governor patrons of Ragusa Cathedral exploited the increased physical and occupational mobility (...) of Adriatic builders, then arrested that mobility by offering the builders social advantages in the form of professional security and a path to citizenship. This balance of mobility at multiple levels manifested in the cathedral’s cosmopolitan and open-ended design. (shrink)

Este estudio tiene como objetivo identificar la tipología y los patrones de los mensajes desinformativos relacionados con la salud y la nutrición que se difundieron durante la primera etapa de la pandemia COVID-19 (marzo-noviembre de 2020). Para ello, se realizó un estudio cuantitativo exploratorio con dos tipos de datos. Los primeros provienen del estudio de 95 documentos (artículos científicos) hallados en la base de datos SCOPUS a través de búsquedas booleanas con los términos desinformación, engaño, salud y nutrición. A estos (...) documentos se les aplicó un formulario de registro, indicando los siguientes ítems: a) el tema del artículo (salud o nutrición); b) el tipo de mensaje erróneo (desinformación o engaño); c) el país en el que se realizó el estudio; d) el tipo de participantes (público general, jóvenes, ancianos, profesionales de la salud, estudiantes universitarios); y e) el tipo de canal de información estudiado (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, periódicos impresos, periódicos digitales, plataformas web, televisión, entre otros). Por otro lado, se seleccionaron 95 ingredientes o alimentos que fueron diseminados vía WhatsApp en diferentes bulos en español durante el primer mes de confinamiento (marzo-abril de 2020). Se aplicó un formulario para evaluar el contenido de los engaños, identificando: a) el tipo de sustancia o alimento (fruta, verdura, legumbre, nuez, hierba, entre otros); y b) las fuentes de información a las que se refirió el engaño (autoridades sanitarias, público general, organismos médicos, entre otros). Finalmente, los resultados de ambos estudios cuantitativos concluyeron que el patrón internacional de difusión de bulos fue principalmente sobre la salud en general, y que la desinformación sobre nutrición fue minoritaria, y en el 91% de los casos estuvo relacionada con la ingesta de frutas y verduras, afirmando que podrían prevenir o curar la COVID-19, sin ninguna evidencia científica. (shrink)

:This article uses recent findings about the diversity of political organization in Archaic and Classical Greece beyond Athens, and methodological considerations about the role of civic Hestia in oligarchic communities, to add sharpness to current work on the political contextualization of Classical enkomiastic poetry. The two works considered here remind us of the epichoric political significance of such poetry, because of their attunement to two divergent oligarchic contexts. They thus help to get us back to specific fifth-century political as well (...) as culturalRealien. (shrink)

Pixelism is the combination of three metaphysical thesis, namely a radical form of exdurantism, mereological nihilism and counterpart theory. Pixelism is a theory that evaluates all the metaphysical phenomena of persistence, composition and modality in a homogeneous and consistent manner. In a pixel world, there is no identity over time and over possible worlds and nothing persists over more than an instant or a world. Entities can be univocally identified by a five-coordinates system (the three spatial dimensions, the temporal one (...) and the possible worlds), and their relation is a counterpart relation both in different worlds and at different times or different regions of space. In this paper I will provide two models for pixelism: the first one takes pixels to be hypercubes, i. e. four-dimensional cubes, the acceptance of which is conditional on the acceptance of extended simples. The second one considers pixels as points in a four-dimensional space. (shrink)

En 1988, la fouille sous‑marine du port de Thasos permettait l’extraction d’un imposant carreau de marbre, en même temps que d’autres blocs entassés en avant de la jetée antique. En 2017, un nouvel examen de la pierre, qui appartenait originellement à l’élévation d’un édifice de l’agora toute proche, a révélé une inscription rendue très difficilement lisible par un séjour prolongé dans l’eau de mer. Le Peuple des Thasiens y honorait son patron, Caius Octavius, proconsul de Macédoine en 60‑59 av. J.‑C.

Derek Parfit played a crucial role in the XX century philosophical debate. His masterpiece, Reasons and Persons, has been highly influential both in moral philosophy, and personal identity. It is hard to overlook the fact that Parfit’s ideas gave the main contribution to the contemporary philosophy of persons. He reformulates a debate stuck in the classical contraposition between psychological and physical criteria of personal identity, by introducing his most famous idea: identity doesn’t matter in survival. This thesis, and its moral (...) implications, has been a challenge for everyone tackling the issues related to persons and normative moral philosophy. (shrink)

Quello che ci rende le persone che siamo è l’insieme delle nostre caratteristiche psicologiche (i ricordi, le emozioni, i desideri) o la persistenza delle nostre caratteristiche fisiche? La questione dell’identità personale è tra le più dibattute nella storia della filosofia fin dalle sue origini. Facendo uso di un copioso numero di esempi tratti dal quotidiano, questo libro conduce per mano dentro uno dei temi filosofici più sorprendenti.

This dissertation studies the way entities inhabit our world. According to my analysis, there is only one way to exist, i.e. being an arrangements of atomic entities with a five-dimensional shape. I call this thesis “pixelism”.

Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. (...) Game-playing, then, illuminates a distinctive human capacity. We can take on ends temporarily for the sake of the experience of pursuing them. Game play shows that our agency is significantly more modular and more fluid than we might have thought. It also demonstrates our capacity to take on an inverted motivational structure. Sometimes we can take on an end for the sake of the activity of pursuing that end. (shrink)

L’article propose une étude lexico-syntaxique de la polysémie du nom truc en français, qui connaît cinq types d’emplois différents, dont certains le rapprochent de noms sous-spécifiés et/ou de noms généraux. L’analyse s’appuie sur un vaste corpus de données attestées et sur une batterie de patrons syntaxiques permettant à la fois de départager et de caractériser les différentes acceptions du nom truc. Il est ainsi montré que chaque type d’emploi de ce nom en tant que Nss se caractérise par une construction (...) privilégiée, tout en en admettant une ou plusieurs autres. Il s’avère en effet que chacun des sens du substantif truc peut être défini par une conjonction de propriétés discriminantes de nature syntaxique et sémantique. (shrink)

[This book] develops an account of rationality and justice that is tradition specific.-http://undpress.nd.edu.

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. The best explanation, I suggest, is (...) that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. Deferring to aesthetic testimony, then, makes the same mistake as looking up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments. -/- *There is an audio version available: look for the Soundcloud link, below.*. (shrink)

I propose to study one problem for epistemic dependence on experts: how to locate experts on what I will call cognitive islands. Cognitive islands are those domains for knowledge in which expertise is required to evaluate other experts. They exist under two conditions: first, that there is no test for expertise available to the inexpert; and second, that the domain is not linked to another domain with such a test. Cognitive islands are the places where we have the fewest resources (...) for evaluating experts, which makes our expert dependences particularly risky. -/- Some have argued that cognitive islands lead to the complete unusability of expert testimony: that anybody who needs expert advice on a cognitive island will be entirely unable to find it. I argue against this radical form of pessimism, but propose a more moderate alternative. I demonstrate that we have some resources for finding experts on cognitive islands, but that cognitive islands leave us vulnerable to an epistemic trap which I will call runaway echo chambers. In a runaway echo chamber, our inexpertise may lead us to pick out bad experts, which will simply reinforce our mistaken beliefs and sensibilities. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are digital technologies that will have significant impact on the development of humanity in the near future. They have raised fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve, and how we can control these. - After the Introduction to the field (§1), the main themes (§2) of this article are: Ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e., tools made and used (...) by humans. This includes issues of privacy (§2.1) and manipulation (§2.2), opacity (§2.3) and bias (§2.4), human-robot interaction (§2.5), employment (§2.6), and the effects of autonomy (§2.7). Then AI systems as subjects, i.e., ethics for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (§2.8) and artificial moral agency (§2.9). Finally, the problem of a possible future AI superintelligence leading to a “singularity” (§2.10). We close with a remark on the vision of AI (§3). - For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, outline existing positions and arguments, then analyse how these play out with current technologies and finally, what policy consequences may be drawn. (shrink)

An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible with recognizing the (...) inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

We offer an account of the generic use of the term “porn”, as seen in recent usages such as “food porn” and “real estate porn”. We offer a definition adapted from earlier accounts of sexual pornography. On our account, a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with primarily for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content. We demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of generic (...) porn by using it to isolate a new type of such porn: moral outrage porn. Moral outrage porn is representations of moral outrage, engaged with primarily for the sake of the resulting gratification, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with morally outrageous content. Moral outrage porn is dangerous because it encourages the instrumentalization of one’s empirical and moral beliefs, manipulating their content for the sake of gratification. Finally, we suggest that when using porn is wrong, it is often wrong because it instrumentalizes what ought not to be instrumentalized. (shrink)

The ninth edition of Media Ethics: Issues and Cases has been updated to reflect the most pressing ethical issues in media. Featuring 25 new cases on hot topic issues from fake news to drones and a new chapter on social justice, this authoritative case book gives students the tools to make ethical decisions in an increasingly complex environment.

The current science publishing system is in need of a positive transformation for the good of scientists and society as a whole. Herein, we propose features that, in our view, will distinguish the science publishing system of the future.

:This article reexamines the “prostitution objection” to paid surrogacy, and argues that rebuttals to this objection fail to focus on surrogates as embodied persons. This failure is based on the false distinction between “selling one’s reproductive services” and “selling one’s body.” To ground the analysis of humans as embodied persons, this article uses Kant’s late ethical theory, which develops the conceptual framework for understanding human beings as embodied selves. Literature on surrogacy commonly emphasizes that all Kantian duties heed to the (...) categorical prohibition to treat persons as mere means. What this literature leaves out is that this imperative commands us more specifically to engage ourselves and others as embodied persons. This article aims to relate this point to a specific issue in assisted reproduction. It argues that a Kantian account of human beings as embodied persons prohibits paid surrogacy on exactly the same grounds as it prohibits prostitution. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of lives. According to Regan, lives that have the highest value are lives which have more possible sources of satisfaction. Regan claims that the highest source of satisfaction, which is available to only rational beings, is the satisfaction associated with thinking impartially about moral choices. Since rational beings can bring impartial reasons to bear on decision making, (...) Regan maintains that they have an additional possible source of satisfaction that nonrational beings do not have and, consequently, the lives of rational beings turn out to have greater value.. (shrink)

What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical subdisciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks and asked questions about the authorship of games, about the ontology of the work (...) and its performance. Yet others, from the philosophy of sport, have focused on normative issues of fairness, rule application, and competition. The primary purpose of this article is to provide an overview of several different philosophical approaches to games and, hopefully, demonstrate the relevance and value of the different approaches to each other. Early academic attempts to cope with games tried to treat games as a subtype of narrative and to interpret games exactly as one might interpret a static, linear narrative. A faction of game studies, self-described as “ludologists,” argued that games were a substantially novel form and could not be treated with traditional tools for narrative analysis. In traditional narrative, an audience is told and interprets the story, where in a game, the player enacts and creates the story. Since that early debate, theorists have attempted to offer more nuanced accounts of how games might achieve similar ends to more traditional texts. For example, games might be seen as a novel type of fiction, which uses interactive techniques to achieve immersion in a fictional world. Alternately, games might be seen as a new way to represent causal systems, and so a new way to criticize social and political entities. Work from contemporary analytic philosophy of art has, on the other hand, asked questions whether games could be artworks and, if so, what kind. Much of this debate has concerned the precise nature of the artwork, and the relationship between the artist and the audience. Some have claimed that the audience is a cocreator of the artwork, and so games are a uniquely unfinished and cooperative art form. Others have claimed that, instead, the audience does not help create the artwork; rather, interacting with the artwork is how an audience member appreciates the artist's finished production. Other streams of work have focused less on the game as a text or work, and more on game play as a kind of activity. One common view is that game play occurs in a “magic circle.” Inside the magic circle, players take on new roles, follow different rules, and actions have different meanings. Actions inside the magic circle do not have their usual consequences for the rest of life. Enemies of the magic circle view have claimed that the view ignores the deep integration of game life from ordinary life and point to gambling, gold farming, and the status effects of sports. Philosophers of sport, on the other hand, have approached games with an entirely different framework. This has lead into investigations about the normative nature of games—what guides the applications of rules and how those rules might be applied, interpreted, or even changed. Furthermore, they have investigated games as social practices and as forms of life. (shrink)