Category: Pop Culture and Philosophy

This essay spends a lot of time talking about, as the title implies, Nietzsche and Foucalt. This is kind of unfortunate, since Nietzsche and Foucalt were objectively wrong. I don’t mean in the sense that their philosophical opinions were fundamentally invalid because I have unlocked the secrets of objective morality and can measure the ethicalness of a statement with the inarguable exactness of a ruler measuring length. I mean that they justify their philosophies using a history that never happened.

Let’s start with Foucalt. Foucalt describes an evolving opinion of madness in which, during the middle ages, insane people were considered to have some greater understanding of the universe that humanity was unable to grapple with, driving them mad. Sane people could thus learn by listening to them for scraps of intact wisdom that fell from their shattered minds. Then, in the Age of Enlightenment, reason become the ultimate source of good, which meant those whose reasoning was impaired became inherently evil, whence the insane asylum was developed.

The problem with this is that we don’t have a goddamn clue how the insane were treated during the medieval era, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the insane asylum is not a new thing. The Royal Bethlehem Hospital is the oldest psychiatric institution in continuous operation, having been “treating” the mentally ill since at least 1403, at which time its inventory included multiple sets of shackles, stocks, and locks. No record explicitly states that these were used to restrain mentally unstable patients, but it’s hard to imagine what else a set of shackles would be used for in a hospital. There’s no evidence that treating the mentally ill like criminals regardless of whether they have actually committed crimes was an invention of the Age of Enlightenment.

Nietzsche claims that in the beginning, “good” simply meant “superior,” in the objective sense of being better at something. Like a sturdy chair being good compared to a flimsy one. Then at some point there was a “slave revolt” in which the weak ruled over by the strong grew tired of being subjugated and developed a morality in which “good” was associated with virtues like meekness and compassion. The closest you could get to such a “slave revolt” would be the rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire, but that then led to medieval Christian kingdoms in which the strong subjugated the weak even more than they had under imperial Rome. Nietzsche talks of the “slave morality” as reigning over the modern world he lived in and only beginning to crumble during his lifetime, but he lived in 19th century Germany right amidst the great powers of Europe who were at that exact moment scrambling for Africa, and in so doing committing the latest in a long history of colonial atrocities against native populations across the world. The idea that the European powers contemporaneous to Nietzsche operated under any kind of morality that exalted meekness and compassion is laughable. The success of early Christianity had turned those concepts into moral buzzwords but powerful empires had never once followed them no matter how Christian they claimed to be.

This isn’t a history book, though, it’s a philosophy book, and while the digressions elucidating Foucalt and Nietzsche’s completely inaccurate histories take up plenty of space, they aren’t the ultimate point. Rather, the ultimate point is an existential one: Kefka’s omnicidal mania is not especially manic. After ascending to godhood, Kefka sees no meaning in the world and has therefore decided to destroy it. This perspective isn’t insane. It doesn’t defy reason. You can’t sit down and objectively prove that it’s morally correct for the world to continue to exist. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of people want to go on living and Kefka’s desire to end everything puts him in opposition to practically everyone he hasn’t already killed, but that doesn’t make him unreasonable. He has a terminal goal that’s different from everyone else’s.

Then it ends by speculating that Kefka’s near-annihilation of the planet was the best thing for everyone because the struggle to overcome him made the six-ish people in the party better, and apparently the untold hundreds of thousands of lives he exterminated along the way don’t count for shit. I’m not sure Kylie Prymus thought this all the way through.

Speaking of that guy, he was studying for a PhD in 2009 and now manages a game store. His education field claims he has a master’s in philosophy from Duke University, but nothing about a PhD, so I guess he never finished that thesis. This isn’t the first time someone with a degree specifically in philosophy has submitted an article that drops the ball on ethics to the tune of completely forgetting hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders murdered, but it is the first time a degree from as prestigious a university as Duke has managed it. Achievement unlocked, I guess.

What you are reading is an emergency backup plan that should’ve been put into action eighteen hours before it actually was. This isn’t really the kind of thing I want to do while letting the LitRPG genre cool off, for two reasons: One, I think this blog would benefit from a new kind of content, and I did one of these books before, and two, a significant benefit of my reviews is that they force me to take a closer look at books in a genre I have at least some intention of writing in, and I don’t particularly plan to ever contribute to one of these books or start up a competitor series or whatever. But we’ve once again reached that point where I’m already behind schedule which means either I review Final Fantasy and Philosophy article-by-article in order to buy myself some time to figure out what I really want to do with my M/W/Th/Sa articles or else I just let those days lie completely fallow until I think of something. So welcome to the Chamomile review of Final Fantasy and Philosophy, where our motto is “at least it’s better than a blank page.”

Our first article is brought to us by one Benjamin Chandler, whom the contributors section at the back of the book informs is a creative writing PhD from Flinders University, Australia. Normally I try to dig up more information on these guys online, but with a lead that cold I’m not even gonna try. In any case, he falls firmly into the category of “not actually a professional philosopher,” so in context of this post, he basically exists solely to produce this one essay for Final Fantasy and Philosophy.

We get this paragraph towards the beginning of the essay:

The characters in FFVII possess two different types of signifiers. The first type is built into the characters by the game developers, so we might call them presets ; they are the fixed aspects of the characters: hair color, speech, age, and so on.
Cloud Strife is a spiky-haired badass, Aeris is an ill-fated Cetra, and so on.

So we can add Benjamin Chandler to the list of people who don’t get the point of Final Fantasy VII. Cloud Strife isn’t a badass, he’s a mook cosplaying a badass.

Continue reading “Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Spiky-Haired Mercenary vs. The French Narrative Theorist” →

The title quote (“others play at dice”) comes from Aristotle, and the essay is dedicated entirely to explaining Aristotle’s categorization of friendship through the lens of D&D groups and fantasy stories. So, essay author Jeffery L Nicholas intersperses the essay with examples from fantasy stories like Lord of the Rings and also from his own gaming group. Hearing about other people’s gaming stories is eye-glazing by default and Jeffery doesn’t have the talent to climb that hill, but he doesn’t lean on it too strong so it doesn’t hurt the essay that much.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: “Others Play at Dice…”” →

Today we’re talking about sex and gender in Dungeons and Dragons, so this oughta be a hoot. I’ll go ahead and get things started with this quote, not directly from the essay, but instead from Shelly Mazzanoble and which appears in the essay:

One of the coolest things about D&D is gender equality. As in real life, whichever gender you choose to play is a matter of personal preference but unlike the real world, female and male characters are equals.

So trans people willingly choose to experience discrimination and dysmorphia for, I guess, the street cred? We’re not off to a good start, here.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Berserker in a Skirt” →

D&D didn’t used to be on podcasts, but now it is. If this is a YouTube video this is where I’d do the fake roll credits gag. That’s only slightly oversimplified. This essay spends almost its entirety talking about how D&D was the basis for some reality TV shows, kind of, and there was a cartoon, then later on popular video games like World of Warcraft gave mainstream gamers a few points of reference that made learning D&D easier, and then D&D podcasting took off and became a big deal. It’s worth noting that this history of D&D in other media doesn’t seem to be aware that the Gold Box and Infinity Engine games were a thing. This kind of “history of a hobby” thing can be interesting (although I didn’t find the text here particularly engaging), but it’s not philosophy. There’s no philosophical argument being made here, no real idea being played with. It’s just a brief history of D&D as portrayed in other media, and how that affected how easy it was for people who didn’t yet play D&D to get started. That’s not philosophy. That’s history. They’re different.

Having one of those trendy double last names, essay author Esther MacCallum-Stewart is pretty easy to track down…I assume. I’ve found staff pages for her at Staffordshire University and the University of West England, but not for the Digital Cultures Research Centre or the University of Surrey, the two places where the contributors page says she actually works. Maybe the last three years she’s taken a swerve a bit?

As abbreviated as this post is (it’s not even long enough to justify a page break), that’s kind of it? There’s no philosophy to discuss, it’s just an uninspired history of D&D in popular media.

This essay is by Samantha Noll, a doctoral candidate over at Michigan State University, where she is getting a PhD in animal ethics. This essay is about the ethics of summoning furry friends to do your bidding. In it, she examines a couple of different situations in which D&D makes use of animals as a game mechanic and whether or not such uses are ethical (from the perspective of in-game casters, she thankfully does not start a tedious conversation about whether or not D&D’s authors are evil for including the options in the game). In order to determine if they are ethical or not, she uses moral yardsticks provided by various other animal ethicists. Of course, none of these animal philosophers agree with each other on what constitutes an unethical action with regards to animals at all, so the ultimate conclusion is that every spell and class feature examined either is or is not ethical depending on who you ask, because that is how philosophy do.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: By Friendship or Force” →

This essay is about why labeling necromancers as inherently evil aligned is dumb. To summarize, since True Resurrection works whether or not the target’s original body has been turned into an undead, animating an undead clearly does not affect the target’s soul at all (also, in D&D souls are definitely real, so we don’t need to worry about that argument at all). In most editions of the game, mindless undead like skeletons and zombies are completely unable to act without the command of a necromancer. They’re given an evil alignment, but this doesn’t make any goddamn sense at all because they take no actions whatsoever of their own volition.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Expediency and Expendability” →

God, Kevin McCain is a fanboy for Raistlin. Fully the entire first page of this essay is spent squeeing about him like a fourteen year old girl over Sephiroth in 1999. McCain asks who Raistlin Majere is, which I assume is in reference to that one time Raistlin body-jacked rival archmage Fistandantilus and wound up with the memories of both, leaving it completely unclear whether or not Raistlin actually bodyjacked Fistandantilus or if he was obliterated by Fistandantilus and his half-cast bodyjacking spell just transmitted all his memories into Fistandantilus at that moment. In the immediate aftermath of that confrontation, Raistlindantilus even directly confronts the existential horror of having no idea who actually won the fight. He ultimately decides that he’s Raistlin, not Fistandantilus, but that’s a personal decision on his part, not necessarily an accurate perception of reality. There’s a reason why Raistlindantilus is a term that exists in the Dragonlance fandom.

McCain intends to explore the question of “who is Raistlin” as part of answering the more general philosophical question of “what makes you, you?” Considering you’re (hopefully) a significantly different person from who you were ten years ago, what makes you the same person? One possible answer to this question is that you aren’t the same person. McCain refuses to consider this with the following paragraph:

Now one might be tempted to say that there is an easy answer to this question: these Raistlins aren’t the same. It wasn’t one person who performed all of the feats that are attributed to Raistlin. This would give us an easy answer to our question, but it wouldn’t shed much light on what it is that makes you numerically identical to yourself when you were a child. Worse still, this answer would make it so that we shouldn’t consider Raistlin to be such a great character. According to this answer to the question, there is no single person who accomplished everything that is credited to Raistlin. But, this easy answer is false. There is only one Raistlin and he did accomplish all of these feats. Any acceptable answer to our question must respect this truth.

Drink that in for a bit. The philosophical idea that a child and their adult self are literally different people, that the continuity of being provided by memory is an illusion, is discarded because it would make Raistlin less badass. So when Raistlindantilus is sitting in that lab in Istar asking himself what really just happened and who he even is, Kevin McCain’s answer is “you’re definitely Raistlin, and I know you’re Raistlin because Raistlin is awesome and couldn’t ever lose.” I like to imagine Raistlindantilus would’ve disintegrated McCain for interrupting his personal crisis with such a stupid answer. I’m going to point out here that Kevin McCain is an associate professor of philosophy for the University of Alabama. There is no God.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Who Is Raistlin Majere?” →

I usually omit the essay sub-titles to prevent colon cancer in the blog post titles, but in this case the title Menzoberranzan doesn’t do a very good job of introducing the concept on its own. Uncharacteristically, the contributors section of the book is actually helpful, though only because essay author Matt Hummel is really hard to Google even after the book told me he’s a lawyer, let alone going from the name alone. Hummel gets himself off to a bad start with his first line:

We can all probably agree that Menzoberranzan is very near the bottom on the list of must-visit fantasy realms (worse than Mordor and the ninth circle of hell combined!).

I would rather visit Menzoberranzan than Mordor or Nessus. All three of them are viciously evil slave states in which I can be immediately identified as not part of the ruling class by virtue of my race and/or non-evil aura, but at least Menzoberranzan is a city-state and not an entire kingdom or multi-planar empire. At least the ultimate evil at the heart of Menzoberranzan is “only” like a 17th-level Cleric of Lolth or something, and not Asmodeus or motherfucking Sauron.

I’m nitpicking, though. Let’s look at the actual important content of this essay.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Menzoberranzan: A Perfect Unjust State” →