The Virtue Of Playfulness
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The Virtue of Playfulness
This book argues that in order for people to live well, they must develop a virtue of playfulness. Inspired by Aristotle, the book draws on work from philosophy, classics, history, biology, psychology, and media studies to understand the place of play and playfulness in a good life. Many philosophers have written about play, from Presocratics such as Heraclitus to contemporary philosophers such as Bernard Suits. Some champion play as the most crucial value in life. Others deride it and warn strongly against it. This book evaluates the research on how play and playfulness bear on living a good life and becoming a good person. Its main argument is that in order to understand play as an action, we must understand playfulness as a virtue in the lives of good people. The author develops a theory of playfulness from an Aristotelian perspective. Like Aristotle sees the virtues as necessary for a happy life, the author argues that playfulness is necessary for living well. And just as Aristotle offers multifaceted characterizations of core virtues, the author argues that playfulness includes aspects of seriousness, creativity, humility, optimism, and sociality. Playful people take play seriously, learn new skills, overcome failure, strive for success, and keep others in mind. As a result, playful people have a better shot at living well. The Virtue of Playfulness is an accessible, empirically informed, and detailed treatment of the philosophy of playfulness. It will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy and related disciplines who are interested in virtue ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of games, philosophy of sport, and ancient philosophy.
Social Virtue Epistemology
This collection of 19 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time and written by an international team of established and emerging scholars, explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Relevant virtues include open-mindedness, curiosity, intellectual courage, diligence in inquiry, and the like. Relevant vices include dogmatism, need for immediate certainty, and gullibility and the like. The chapters are divided into four key sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements. And the chapters explore the most salient questions in this areas of research, including: How are individual intellectual virtues and vices affected by their social contexts? Does being in touch with other open-minded people make us more open-minded? Conversely, does connection to other dogmatic people make us more dogmatic? Can groups possess virtues and vices distinct from those of their members? For instance, could a group of dogmatic individuals operate in an open-minded way despite the vices of its members? Each chapter receives commentary from two other authors in the volume, and each original author then replies to these commentaries. Together, the authors form part of a collective conversation about how we can know about what we know. In so doing, they not only theorize but enact social virtue epistemology.
Playful Philosophy and Serious Sophistry
Author: Georgia Sermamoglou-Soulmaidi
language: en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date: 2014-08-29
This book provides an interpretation of Plato’s Euthydemus as a unified piece of literature, taking into account both its dramatic and its philosophical aspects. It aims to do justice to a major Platonic work which has so far received comparatively little treatment. Except for the sections of the dialogue in which Socrates presents an argument on the pursuit of eudaimonia, the Euthydemus seems to have been largely ignored. The reason for this is that much of the work’s philosophical import lies hidden underneath a veil of riotous comedy. This book shows how a reading of the dialogue as a whole, rather than a limited focus on the Socratic scenes, sheds light on the work’s central philosophical questions. It argues the Euthydemus points not only to the differences between Socrates and the sophists, but also to actual and alleged similarities between them. The framing scenes comment precisely on this aspect of the internal dialogue, with Crito still lumping together philosophy and eristic shortly before his discussion with Socrates comes to an end. Hence the question that permeates the Euthydemus is raised afresh at the end of the dialogue: what is properly to be termed philosophy?