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: