MASTER

2022-2023

 

 

 

MASTER : 2

 

Semestre : 1

N° BCC : 5

UE : 3 The Philosophcal Tradition Today

Intitulé du séminaire : Phenomenology, World and Play 

 

Nombre d’heures global de l’UE : 31  H / SEMESTRE 2

Cours : 2   h par semaine

Nom de l’enseignant (ou des enseignants) : Claudio Majolino

 

Présentation du cours :

By variously drawing from the philosophical tradition, many authors belonging to the so-called “phenomenological movement” have thougtt appropriate to thematized the relationship between the (apparently ludic) activity of playing games and the (allegedly serious) philosophical attempt to make sense of the world. Franz Brentano, for instance, was not only a major chess player and published author of riddles, but also a reader of Heraclitus’s fragments in which the world is compared to the play of a child. Husserl has firmly maintained that the crisis of Pre-Socratic cosmologies, the birth of Plato’s genuine philosophy and the first breakthrough of transcendental thinking are momentous side-effects of one major event in the history of philosophy, i.e. that of the Sophist “playing the game of philosophy”. While discussing Kant’s existential concept of the world, Heidegger has plainly stated that the world has “the character of play”, while, drawing from Descartes and the Stoics, Sartre has taken the activity of playing as evidence for the existential freedom of human consciousness and its power to transcend the reality of the world as it is. Finally, Eugen Fink has gone as far as to develop a full metaphysics, entirely revolving around the idea of the “play as a world-symbol”, opposing Plato’s understanding of ludic activities to the importance of Heraclitus’s world wisdom. In this seminar we will try to 1) present some of these
views, 2) expound their driving motives, 3) see how they differently refer to the philosophical tradition (Heraclitus, Plato, Gorgias, the Stoics but also Descartes and Kant), 4) draw a map of their possible connections and 5) question the reasons and significance of thinking the “world” as a phenomenological concept from the standpoint of the “play”.

Reading list (the texts will be studied in their English translations)

Franz Brentano, Aenigmatias: Neue Rätsel (1869).
Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1916-1919) (Husserliana Materialien IX)
Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in Die Philosophie (WS 1928/29) (Gesamtausgabe 27)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingnes (1940)
Eugen Fink, Play as a World Symbol (1960)

 

 

Validation du séminaire : Oral presentation or short essay