While Bernard Suits's understanding of games has significantly influenced the philosophy of sport, the longest sustained investigation in The Grasshopper is of make-believe and roleplaying games. Suits’s discussion of make-believe and roleplaying is found in chapters 9 through 12, but what he says there is uncharacteristically unclear. To clarify Suits’s account, the present paper distinguishes between two arguments that Suits interweaves. In the first, Suits argues that game playing is not a species of play. In the second, Suits argues that (...) playing a make-believe or role-playing game is the same — at heart — as playing a game of any type. While the paper takes no position on the former, it defends the latter argument against several important objections by Thomas Hurka and C. Thi Nguyen. It contends, furthermore, that Suits is not simply trying to show that his theory of game playing can account for make-believe and roleplaying games. Rather, Suits is also using make-believe and roleplaying games to clarify exactly how his theory of game playing should be understood. (shrink)

Legal positivists typically describe law as ‘thinly’ normative to distinguish it from the ‘thick’ normative force moral norms have; which legal norms may lack. One popular account of thin normativity is social normativity. But a number of scholars have offered accounts of what it is to be a thin norm that are distinct from social normativity. This paper addresses these alternative accounts of what it is to be a thin norm. It also explores whether law counts as necessarily ‘thinly normative’ (...) on these accounts. I argue that some accounts of thin normativity are so generic (‘super-thin’) that they are unable to distinguish between (thin) norms and nonnormative facts and thus collapse into triviality. I also consider more metaphysically demanding accounts of thin normativity, such as the view that everything is a norm that is essentially represented by deontic modals. However, law might fail to meet the demands of these slightly thicker accounts. I thus propose a view of law as consisting in nonnormative facts (diagnostic categories) and suggest sketching accounts of thin normativity as contingent, rather than necessary, features of laws and legal systems. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that language is the medium of all understanding and thus that it is the medium through which we can reach understanding with one another. Yet many today are sceptical of this claim and worry that Gadamerian hermeneutics ignores at its own peril the limits of the particular discourses that people utilize to reach understanding with one another. I argue here that this criticism rests on the assumption that, for Gadamer, it is the semantic features of a language (...) alone that allow it to function as the medium for shared understanding. I argue that focusing solely on semantic agreement as the source of understanding ignores the role that mutual recognition plays in allowing language to serve as a medium for shared understanding. I turn to discussions in several of Gadamer’s later essays to examine how he conceives of the mutual recognition that is essential for communicative understanding. (shrink)

This paper follows the implications of Gadamer’s hermeneutics after Truth and Method in which the forming of social life, and with it the idea of worldly understanding, receives greater attention. I argue that the emphasis in his later writings on worldly understanding draws less on the idea of the hermeneutic circle and problematic of the Geisteswissenschaften in which the concept of tradition is prominent than on the movement in language and the encounter with the other. As in the example of (...) translation, I argue that this movement has the character of passage from one place to another that holds within it an element of opacity. The development of this issue draws on a comparative analysis with the work of the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant. From this analysis I show how Gadamer’s hermeneutics addresses the issue of understanding across cultures and in mixed cultures. (shrink)

The post–Kantian idea of a system demands complete intelligibility, taking systematicity all the way. Many would prefer more moderate or balanced forms of philosophy, indifferent to this ‘nothing–halfway’ idea of a system. But I argue that post–Kantian reasons for the importance of their idea are surprisingly strong. Some at the time advance what I call ‘system–critique’: defending the idea’s importance while yet rejecting systems. Jacobi is a paradigm, influencing Kierkegaard and later system–critique. He shows that reasons for the idea’s importance (...) are not contingent on defense or acceptance of a system—and are stronger for this independence. Such reasons are shared with post–Kantians taking a more positive view of systems, as in Schelling’s ‘Vom Ich’. So there are surprisingly strong reasons to prefer both nothing–halfway system–critique and system–building over more moderate, balanced, or indifferentist philosophy. (shrink)

American distance running legend Steve Prefontaine – ‘Pre’ – claimed that he was an artist and that his races were works of art. In this article, I examine and defend Pre’s claims. Using Robert Stecker’s definition of art as a guide, I argue that a race can be a work of art – specifically, performance art. I then argue that Pre’s 3,000 m American record race at the 1972 Bislett Games in Oslo, Norway, and his 5,000 m final at the (...) 1972 Munich Olympics illustrate his view of himself as an artist and are works of art in Stecker’s sense of achieving excellence in fulfilling an artistic function. (shrink)