Illusory attitudes and the playful stoic

Bibliographic Data

ID21371050
AuthorsMartin Ridge (0000-0003-0915-7285, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume178
Issue9
Pages2965-2990
Publication date2021-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhilosophical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8116 • E-ISSN: 1573-0883
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11098-020-01595-9
OpenAlexW3119585215
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited19

What we might usefully call “playing full-stop” and playing games plausibly figure in a well-lived life. Yet there are reasons to worry that the two not only do not naturally go hand in hand, but are in fact deeply opposed. In this essay I investigate the apparent tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games. I argue that the nature of this tension is easily exaggerated. While there is a psychological tension between simultaneously engaging in earnest competitive game play and playing fullstop, there is no logical contradiction between the two. Somewhat surprisingly, seeing how this tension is best understood teaches us something about the nature of willing an end and the “guise of the good.” With a resolution of the apparent tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games, I turn to the practical worry that playing competitive games is destructive precisely for the very reasons it is opposed to playing full-stop. Here I develop a positive proposal to mitigate the tension between playing full-stop and playing competitive games. This proposal draws on the idea of “striving play” as recently developed by Thi Nguyen and some ideas from classical Stoicism

Aesthetics · Art · Contradiction · Epistemology · Literature · make.believe · Metaphysics · Philosophy of mind · Worry · Doping in Sports · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access