Description
Play, Philosophy and Performance is a cutting-edge collection of essays exploring the philosophy of play. It showcases the most innovative, interdisciplinary work in the rapidly developing field of Play Studies.
How we play, and the relation of play to the human condition, is becoming increasingly recognised as a field of scholarly inquiry as well as a significant element of social practice, public policy and socio-cultural understanding. Drawing on approaches ranging through morality and ethics, language and the nature of reality, aesthetics, digital culture and gaming, and written by an international group of emerging and established scholars, this book examines how our performance at play describes, shapes and influences our performance as human beings.
This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in leisure, education, childhood, gaming, the arts, playwork or many branches of philosophical enquiry.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Play and the Performance of Morality
1 Do Toy Guns Kill People? Playing with Guns
Chris Bateman
2 Analyzing Morality via the Philosophy of Play
Martin Weichold
3 A Playful Approach to Cultivating Intellectual Virtues: Why So Serious?
Yujia Song
4 Ethical Dimensions of Play and Care: Reflections Based on Donald Winnicott’s Theory of Play and the Ethics of Care
Alice Koubová and Petr Urban
Part II: Language and Play In/And ‘The Real’
5 Language, Play, and Understanding: What Semantics Might Learn from Children
Charles Djordjevic
6 Living on the Edge: Zhuangzi, Ludus, and 遊 (you)
Brandon Underwood
7 Robert Pfaller and the Disappearance of Play in Contemporary Culture: Illusions without Subjects
Kevin Kennedy
Part III: Playful Aesthetics
8 Notes on Playful Cinema and Performance: Stop Making Sense
Elena Pachner Sarno
9 Childhood Ghosts with Boltanski and Benjamin
Rosana Kohl Bines
10 The Complexity of Play: A Response to Guyer’s Analysis of Play in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
Kate Brelje
11 How Computer Game Design Affects Moral Engagement: Mechanics Taking Over
Oliver Milne and Viktor Ivanković
Part IV: Play’s Performative Praxis
12 Unexpected Movements as Meaningful Expression in Play: Strange Twists of the Body
Ellen Mulder
13 Posthuman Interpretations of Mutual Play between a Human, Cat and Machine
Marleena Mustola
14 Time and Creativity in Survival Games: Bergson Plays with the Tao
Ivan Mussa
15 Digital Play as an Epistemic Experience
Rita Santoyo Venegas
