Innehållsförteckning för May 2018 från New Philosopher

“An hour of play reveals more than a year of conversation.”Anonymous At its best, play provides a spark in life, releasing us from the burden of playing ourselves. At its worst, play becomes a game to win at all costs: think Lance Armstrong’s doping or the Australian cricket team’s ball tampering. For better or for worse, play reveals us – to ourselves and to others. Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits, in his playful book Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, in which a Socratic grasshopper seeks to prove the value of play, wrote that a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. But why would we set unnecessary obstacles to overcome? Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute of Play, argues that we do so because play is “the vital…

On a foggy night in 1990, a jockey by the name of Sylvester ‘Sly’ Carmouche steered his horse Landing Officer to a comprehensive 24-length win at the Delta Downs racetrack in Louisiana, USA. It was subsequently discovered that Sly Carmouche had hidden his steed in the fog while the others raced around the track, joining them for the final stretch. He was banned for ten years. In a similar vein, Rosie Ruiz famously ‘won’ the Boston Marathon by entering the course half a mile from the finish. It’s not just in a race to the finish line that competitors have tried to gain an (illegal) edge. In 1994 Tonya Harding hired someone to club her opponent Nancy Kerrigan on the leg before the competition; and in 2015 Grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze…

“When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport, than she makes me?” Michel de Montaigne “Football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.” George Orwell, 1984 “If all the year were playing holidays; to sport would be as tedious as work.” William Shakespeare “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” Albert Einstein “If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.” Peter Sellers “The relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture.” Thorstein Veblen “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”…

How important is play and playfulness in elite sport? More important than conventional wisdom permits: playfulness is central to both the acquisition of skill and the ability to perform under pressure. Superficially, my opening question is an odd one, because the language of play is bound up with the language of sport. We ‘play sport’ (or at least we say we do); sportspeople are interchangeably described as ‘players’; one athlete is said to be ‘playing well’ while another is ‘playing badly’. In many instances, ‘play’ has become a synonym for ‘perform’ or ‘achieve’. A great player is a great achiever. So, there is an understandable conflation of two different definitions of play. And in trying to make a case that one influences the other, the two must first be disentangled.…

Most people’s image of Ludwig Wittgenstein is shaped by that famous photograph of him standing against a wall, dour-faced and intense; by stories of him living alone like a hermit by a Norwegian fjord to get the peace he needed to work on the ideas that formed his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; or telling graduates to give up philosophy and go and work in a factory. But he did seem to have had a playful side that occasionally surfaced, though ‘playful’ is not how the eleven-year-old children he taught (and sometimes beat, in one case, to unconsciousness) at an Austrian elementary school in the 1920s would have described him. Wittgenstein’s friend, Norman Malcolm, recollected how once, after supper in Cambridge, he and Mrs Malcolm were on a walk on Midsummer Common with…

The Gamesman Stephen Potter 1900-1969 Not really my game While playing squash, let it be known that rackets is your Game, and that squash is that very different thing, a game which you find it occasionally amusing to play at, for the fun of the thing. R. Simpson first drew my attention to this gambit when I was playing lawn tennis with him on a damp grass court on the borders of Lyme Regis. I happened to be seeing the ball and for once in my life really was driving it on to that precious square foot in the backhand corner of the base line. After one of these shots, Simpson was “carried away” enough to tap his racket twice on the ground and cry “chase better than half…

Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I’ll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I’ll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges.…

The grey, hopeless wasteland Gamification is bullshit. I’m not being flip or glib or provocative. I’m speaking philosophically. More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway. bogost.com/writing/blog/gamification_is_bullshit Devil’s dictionary OLYMPIAN: adj. Relating to a mountain in Thessaly, once inhabited by gods, now a repository of yellowing newspapers, beer bottles and mutilated sardine cans, attesting the presence of the tourist and his appetite. The hooligan problem They hunt in packs, fuelled by cocaine, hooked on violence, and occasionally wielding chains. Some are as old as 65. They use mobile phones and the internet to arrange showdowns with rival…

Some five-year-olds play chess competitively, including mine. This alone makes me queasy. But it’s the environment, the chess culture, that propels me into nausea. Modelled on Texas football culture, the Texas chess circuit teaches children that it’s OK to break the standard rules, like no eating chips at 9am and no running in the hallways, provided they crush the competition. As the children make their way to the gym to compete, the coach yells: “Go out there and win!” As they return from their games – winners and losers exiting the same doors wearing opposite expressions – they are met by a sea of parents and coaches asking: “How’d it go?” Their ears correct for this ambiguous question in time for their mouths to announce whether they won or lost.…

newphilosopher.com is an online portal for exploring philosophical ideas on ways to live a more fulfilling life. Read the articles, join in discussions, watch free online documentaries, and plan a trip to the next festival near you. Get a life! “Life,” the American journalist and author Elbert Hubbard once quipped, “is just one damned thing after another.” newphilosopher.com/articles/get-a-life/ 13 questions: Ricky Gervais Q: What is your demon? A: Laziness. And fear of failure. Luckily, they usually cancel each other out, but it’s a constant war. newphilosopher.com/articles/13-questions-ricky-gervais/ New Philosopher online store Visit our online store for previous issues of New Philosopher magazine, subscriptions, and other gift ideas. www.newphilosopher.com How to live (like a Stoic) Does life have meaning? What is a life worth living? How can we best deal with…

“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvellous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as…

Until recently, if you’d told me I needed to spend more of my life relaxing or having fun, let alone playing, I’d have smiled and nodded in agreement, while privately concluding you must be one of life’s underachievers, attempting to make a virtue of your loserhood. I was – and to be honest, largely still am – the other kind of person: productive, driven, happiest when absorbed in something constructive, vaguely agitated when obliged to stop and appreciate a beautiful sunset or a stunning work of art. This preference for goal-focused activity may owe something to my early training as a newspaper reporter. When an impatient editor is hassling you for an article he needs in two hours’ time, you don’t announce your intention to step outside and soak up…

At the heart of play, games and sport lies a paradox concerned with triviality and seriousness. Running around a large rectangular pitch trying to kick a ball into a net is a completely pointless activity and yet every week millions of people do it, or watch others do it. It is the cause of both heartbreak and elation. The FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games is watched by billions of people worldwide. And for those involved as spectator or participant, the result matters. As football manager Bill Shankly was reported to have said: “Football is not a matter of life and death, it’s much more important than that.” And yet the game or result doesn’t really matter at all. Our team lost at the weekend, so what? We might feel…

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.” There’s a lot packed into that sentence, which is as relevant today as when it was written 86 years ago. It comes from Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay, In Praise of Idleness (see page 100). In it he urged us to realise we have been duped into working more than we have to. Rather, we should work no more than four hours a day, and spend the rest of our time embracing leisure and “idleness”. But first things first: is there really too much work done…

Creativity likes to break the mould. It lives ‘outside the box’, which is to say that it cannot be constrained. And it soars: think of the ‘blue sky thinking’ that has become synonymous with corporate innovation, or the flights of fancy we associate with imaginative prowess. Sprite-like, winged, and airborne, creativity has a way of coating the plodding work of earth-bound effort and sweaty perseverance with a sparkle of fairy dust. We cherish the creative mind for sparking novelty and digging light-filled solutions out of problems that seem intractable, leading to all manner of scientific breakthroughs, political and social triumphs, and artistic originality; but bottling it up so that you have creativity on tap is another matter entirely. In the mid-2000s, I took part in a UK government initiative called…

Beyond a Boundary C. L. R. James Good for nothing Matthew’s pitiable existence as an individual and the attitude people had towards him filled my growing mind and has occupied me to this day. I came into personal contact with Matthew. His brother was my playmate and when we got in Matthew’s way he glared and shouted at us in a most terrifying manner. My aunts were uncompromising in their judgments of him and yet my grandmother’s oft-repeated verdict: “Good for nothing except to play cricket,” did not seem right to me. How could an ability to play cricket atone in any sense for Matthew’s abominable way of life? Philosophy of Play Emily Ryall (editor) Equally impractical Whether it is Mozart of marbles, Shakespeare of soccer, all play forms are…

What is your demon? An unfashionable attachment to reason and a false expectation that others, particularly philosophers, will act upon it. What is the most important part of your education? Realising that all education is a vehicle for authority and current institutional beliefs packaged as truths. Which ‘thinker’ has had the greatest influence on your life? Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Derrida. As a result of their determination to provide coherent accounts of the world, and more importantly their failure to do so. What do you doubt most? Our ability to provide a definitive account of the world. What illusion do you suffer from? That I have no illusions. What would you never do, no matter the price? Willingly trade being for pretence. If you could choose, what would you have for…

Simon Critchley Simon Critchley is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the moderator of The Stone, an opinion series in The New York Times, and he has written for The Guardian, The LA Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of 29 books, including What We Think About When We Think About Football, Suicide, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, and The Book of Dead Philosophers. Tiffany Jenkins Tiffany Jenkins is an author, academic, and broadcaster. Her books include Keeping Their Marbles and Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections, and she has written for The Observer, The Financial Times, The Scotsman, and The Spectator. She is an Honorary Fellow at the University of…

Xenophanes “For neither if there were a good boxer among the people, nor if there were a pentathlete or wrestler, nor again if there were someone swift of foot – which is most honoured of all men’s deed of strength – would for this reason a city be better governed.” Richard Hofstadter “Intellectual life has a certain spontaneous character and inner determination. It has also a peculiar poise of its own, which I believe is established by a balance between two basic qualities in the intellectual’s attitude toward ideas – qualities that may be designated as playfulness and piety.”…

As a teenager, I would go with my father to football matches in London. In the heaving stalls, among the smell of salty hot chips and ketchup, we’d holler for our heroes: Peter Schmeichel and Eric Cantona, Ryan Giggs and Michael Owen. Unlike most people, however, I was a fair-weather sports fan: I went as much to people-watch – and to witness great play – as to cheer on any one team. Seeing David Beckham score from the halfway line, as I did in that legendary game of 1996, garnered admiration, but I remained agnostic about committing to Manchester United. I am the exception, though, in British football. For most fans, the fun – indeed the fundamental core – is derived from a form of tribalism. Die-hard sports fans don’t…

/ pleɪ / 1. Activity engaged in for enjoyment and recreation, especially by children; 2. Behaviour or speech that is not intended seriously; 3. Designed to be used in games of pretence; not real; 4. The conducting of a sporting match; 5. The action or manner of engaging in a sport or game; 6. The status of the ball in a game as being available to be played according to the rules; 7. The state of being active, operative, or effective; 8. A move or manoeuvre in a sport or game. Origin: Old English pleg(i)an ‘to exercise’, plega ‘brisk movement’, related to Middle Dutch pleien ‘leap for joy, dance’. Source: Oxford English Dictionary…

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: “Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.” Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveller in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of…