Here are a few teasers for you of what was on offer at the 4th Philosophy at Play conference on 11 and 12 April 2017. You can find more information on the conference itself here.
Keynote speakers
Peacemaking through Ludic Ubuntu, Dr Mechthild Nagel, SUNY Cortland
In western philosophy, ethical thinking and criminal justice tends to be individualized. It is the individual who makes errant judgments and will be punished according to codified law. With the concept of ludic Ubuntu, I introduce an alternative path to conflict resolution and peacemaking. Criminal justice ethics based on Ubuntu is a sociocentric approach that captures the Southern African sociocentric imagination while drawing on a Nietzschean approach to playfulness, being caught between Dionysian and Apollonian aesthetic elements. With the five-stage spiral model of ludic Ubuntu, I will introduce cross-cultural peacemaking strategies.
The paradoxes of the philosophy-play nexus, Dr Wendy Russell and Dr Malcolm MacLean, University of Gloucestershire
Working in the space created by a philosophy-play relationship is, at times, paradoxical. It challenges the common sense of play as spontaneous and frivolous, and of philosophy as one of the most demanding of disciplines: in short, philosophy is hard and deliberate(d) work; play is not. Yet, over the last decades or so play seems to have emerged from its limited, marginalised sphere to take on a sense of being the (old) new big thing.
This brief presentation offers an overview of how this paradox is explored in the third book to come out of the Philosophy at Play conference, due to be published in December 2017. It will also open up a space to consider the emerging international community of the philosophy of play and the play of philosophy, in particular to extend the invitation for the fifth conference in 2019 to be hosted somewhere other than the University of Gloucestershire.
Papers listed by author
We had 35 papers from presenters from 17 different countries across a whole range of topics:
Author | Title | |
1 | Chris Bateman | Do toy guns kill people |
2 | Rosana Kohl Bines | Boltanski and Benjamin at play |
3 | Noel E. Boulting | ontologies of play – conceptions of play |
4 | Kate Brelje | The Complexity of Play: A Response to Guyer’s Analysis of Play in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man |
5 | Edgar Cabanas | Experiencing designs and designing experiences of play |
6 | Ivan Davidov | 玩 [wán] instead of Ludus: The Metamorphosis of Playfulness in Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, and Farmville |
7 | Ivan Davidov | Machina Ludens: Biomimicry Indicates Playful AI to Achieve Integration |
8 | Charles Djordjevic | Play, language and understanding |
9 | Andrew Edgar | The charms of role-play |
10 | Imara Felkers | Tell me, where have all the flowers gone? The role of fantasy in reality |
11 | Alba Giménez | Serious Games: War, simulacra and the display of violence in Harun Farocki’s Immersion |
12 | Stefan Gualeni and Johnathan Harrington | Leaving Virtual Selves: De-Roling from Play within Digital Games |
13 | Ali Harmer | Musical play of two- to four-year olds in practice: Playful interactions as becomings |
14 | Johnathan Harrington and Stefan Gualeni | Yours truly – playing with a personal narrative identity |
15 | Miroslav Imbrisevic | What is Wrong with the Strategic Foul? |
16 | Kevin Kennedy | Ownerless Illusions: Robert Pfaller and The Disappearance of Play in Contemporary Culture |
17 | Alice Koubová and Petr Urban | Ethical Dimensions of Care and Play |
18 | Grant Lambie | Decaff coffee, fat-free cake and play-less playgrounds |
19 | Vincent Leroux | Games in Leibniz’s theoretical work: what is a game for Leibniz? |
20 | Stuart Lester | Play as protest – becoming democratic |
21 | Oliver Milne and Viktor Ivanković | Mechanics Taking Over: Reasoning About Game-World Representations |
22 | Ellen Mulder | Strange twists of the body? |
23 | Ivan Mussa | Bergson plays with the Tao: Survival and invention in the gameworld interface |
24 | Marleena Mustola | The Case of a Used Piece of Gum – Children’s Play with Agentic Objects |
25 | Jennesia Pedri | Playful Bodies: Toward a Genealogy of Children’s Play |
26 | Mari-Jatta Rissanen | Encountering Contemporary Photography – Young Children’s Aesthetic Agency |
27 | Elena Sarno | The ludic conspiracy in filmmaking: playing with the rules, causality and story in narrative cinema |
28 | Kent Sjöström | Ludic representations |
29 | Yujia Song | Why So Serious? – Play and Intellectual Virtues |
30 | Adam Toon | Scientists at play |
31 | Brandon Underwood | Living on the Edge: Zhuangzi, play and 遊 (you) |
32 | Rita Santoyo Venegas
|
Digital Play as Epistemological Experience |
33 | Laura Walsh | Play, resistance and the phenomenological approach to accounting for value |
34 | Debby Watson | Approaches to playfulness and children with profound impairments |
35 | Martin Weichold | The Game of Morality |