Category: Pop Culture and Philosophy

There’s a weird density of religious philosophy in this book. Not a weird density of religious philosophers, but of specifically religious philosophy. Philosophy that requires not only that you believe in the Christian God (which isn’t entirely unreasonable since most of the book’s audience likely does), but that you believe that God has some specific qualities and motivations. The qualities and motivations of the Christian God are an extremely controversial subject and get even more tangled if you include Jewish and Islamic thought on the subject. Using the nature of God as a premise rather than a conclusion of an argument means that like 95% of your readers aren’t going to follow you.

Weirdly, despite faceplanting on this issue, this essay doesn’t even seem to be all that concerned with Christian apologetics. Essay author Ben Dyer quotes GK Chesterton referring to the story of Adam and Eve as a fairy tale and doesn’t feel the need to comment on it, even though that line is the end of the quote and it would’ve been just as easy to leave it off and let all the other examples stand. GK Chesterton was a devout Catholic and presumably that passage is part of a greater context whose ultimate conclusion isn’t “Christianity is a myth,” Ben Dyer doesn’t provide that context, and even refers to the Garden of Eden as a fairy tale again later on in the text. So despite having apparently very little concern for if or what type of Christian the reader is, Ben Dyer still grounds his overall point about the nature of fantasy worlds in Tolkien’s idea that creativity is a natural instinct in humanity because we were created in the image of the Christian God, who is himself the ultimate creator (in Christian theology, to which Tolkien was an adherent).

Before we examine Mr. Dyer’s overall argument in more detail, let’s take a closer look at the man himself. The contributors section is as useless as it usually is (though in this case it contains the genuinely funny line “conscientious objector to the edition wars”), but Google searching for his name turns up this almost certainly relevant hit. Goodreads contains only one quote from that book, but it’s a good one.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Dungeonmastery as Soulcraft” →

The third paragraph of this essay brings us this gem:

But in order to cast a light spell on the matter, we first need to grab one of those dusty tomes in our wizard’s library and discuss some metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that deals with some of the deepest features of the world.

In fairness to the various contributing authors of Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy, they probably didn’t have much interaction with one another and didn’t realize how incredibly played out these lame references would be by the third essay, let alone the seventh.

Our authors today are Robert A Delfino (no relation) and Jerome C Hillock. Typically with these tag-team essays there’s a pretty obvious pairing of expertise. There’s usually some kind of professional philosophy type, and then there’s someone else who is directly familiar with D&D. According to the contributors section at the back of the book, which for once has something useful to say that I don’t immediately get when Googling their names for more information, Robert A Delfino has both of those bases covered and Jerome C Hillock is just kind of tagging along, I guess. Hillock got Delfino into the game, but that was back in the neighborhood of fifth grade in 1982, so I’m pretty sure Delfino is cool to pontificate on D&D without Hillock on hand to fill him in on the minutia. I can’t find any information on Hillock, like, at all (maybe he’s this guy?), so make of all that what you will.

Anyway, the overall theme of this essay is that the Satanic Panic about D&D was dumb. Which is true, and considering our authors started playing in the 80s this is probably an issue they got to interact with firsthand, so maybe there’s some personal catharsis going on here. On the other hand, the Pulling Report was released in 1990 and its complete text is available for free online, so “BADD were lunatics” is kind of old news. The specific approach here is that Christian philosophers like Aquinas and Tolkien (whose philosophy credentials are questionable, but whose Christian credentials are ironclad amongst the sane) are okay with D&D in principle even though they predated its invention. Again, kind of seems like this battle was won a long time ago, but that doesn’t mean the argument itself can’t be interesting, so let’s go ahead and take a look.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Imagination and Creation” →

The sub-title on this one is The Phenomenology of Immersion in Dungeons and Dragons, and this is not the last time essay author William J White is going to use the word “Phenomenology.” He really likes that word. White is an associate professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State with the most lackluster faculty page I’ve seen yet. Being a professor of communication makes me way harsher on his delivery here, because he isn’t easy reading. He’s not entirely lackluster, but Save vs Death is still the easiest essay to read sentence-to-sentence. That one was written by Harvard professor of philosophy Christopher Robichaud. Harvard is a pretty posh university and all, but he’s a professor of philosophy, so I’d still expect the prize for best writing to go to the professor of communications. No dice, though.

William White is saying interesting things for the entire duration of his essay, even if his execution is sometimes lackluster. No paragraphs dedicated entirely to establishing philosophical street cred. No sudden segues into almost completely unrelated subjects which are dropped about as soon as the setup has finished and before really examining the questions posed (the sudden segues do happen, but at least they wrap themselves up before returning to the main point). There are a few paragraphs in one section that are kind of baffling for their inclusion, but outside of that the closest we get to wasted space is the setup going on a bit long, but since the very idea of phenomenology is unknown to most people and it actually is the fulcrum on which this essay turns, so it isn’t really wasted at all even if it would’ve benefited from a more compelling explanation.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Player-Character Is What You Are In The Dark” →

You know we’re not in for a top-quality essay when the first thing I have to do is establish that just because someone’s writing style is pretentious and grating doesn’t necessarily mean the content of their essay will be worthless, just that getting to that content is going to require scraping a lot of self-aggrandizing. I need to establish this because To My Other Self is really, really pretentious in its line-to-line writing. Check out this paragraph, for example:

Role-playing, then, is neither simply creation of a character nor simply acting. So what happens when I play my character? I cannot simply think as myself, or I do an injustice to the richness of what my character could be. But I cannot be someone else; this is simply impossible. I am fundamentally incapable of knowing what another person would think or do in my situation, so I must settle for a variation on what I would do. Since I cannot be someone else, what I do instead – what I must do – is to create a framework of otherness, a series of lenses and prisms through which I filter my thoughts. The pieces of this scaffolding are the components of my character.

Let me rephrase that for clarity as opposed to narcissism:

Every character a player roleplays has at least a little bit of their own personality, because the player needs to start with something they know and build from there. Without inheriting at least some fragment of the player’s real personality, the character has no foundation of real human emotion to build on, and will at best be an automaton programmed with cliches.

Actually, acknowledging the “automaton programmed with cliches” option is something I added, so you can make my already shorter paragraph even shorter than that. So, yeah. It’s gonna be one of those philosophy essays.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: To My Other Self” →

I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the qualifications the essay authors have. It’s a fun little research project to find out just who these guys are, and it’s sometimes interesting to compare how an essay so terrible the book would have been better off if it were omitted entirely was written by an actual professor of philosophy at Quincy University, and the best essay in the entire first section was written by a business analyst for Citi who’s never done any professional philosophy in his entire life outside of a few essays for the pop culture and philosophy series.

I give this preface because I don’t want people to think Save vs Death is automatically going to be good essay just because the author works for Harvard and has a goddamn Wikipedia page. Rather the opposite, my standards are much higher on account of how this guy is apparently the star power behind this production. I got this book as part of a discounted bundle, but the MSRP is $12, and it’s looking like they’re leaning on Christopher Robichaud to deliver that twelve bucks of value.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Save vs Death” →

The first three essays in Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy have been more miss than hit, but I have some hope that, as I write this bridging post before settling in to read essay four, we’re about to get better. See, the first three essays are categorized under a section heading called Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Evil, which gives the lie to why the whole section was pretty much gonna be a trainwreck from the start: Because D&D is not GURPS.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Bridge” →

Today’s chapter of Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy comes to us from Neil Mussett for…some reason. He’s a business analyst for Citi with no apparent philosophical credentials whatsoever. The last essay, Paragons and Knaves, was an insult that failed to present a philosophical argument at all, instead just giving its condescending conclusion a couple of times and working in some awkward D&D metaphors before walking away, but it was co-written by an actual professor of philosophy so you can see why the compilers of the book might have thought it was a good idea at the time. Neil is the opposite of that. I have no idea how he got on a philosophy production’s radar, but I’m glad he did, because his essay is pretty good.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Is Anyone Actually Chaotic Evil?” →

I kind of feel like I owe Greg Littmann an apology. Partly because I wasn’t able to find anywhere to mention that he is, in fact, an associate professor of philosophy at the Southern Illinois University of Edwardsville, and that while I stand by my assertion that his philosophy (as represented in Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy, anyway) is amateur hour tripe, he is in fact a professional philosopher. It’s kind of like how Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is technically a professional work even though it has the quality of shitty fanfiction.

Mainly, though, I think I should apologize to Greg for being so harsh on him because after reading how painfully, abysmally hideous this next one is, just being wrong and occasionally misleading seems like a pretty minor offense. Greg, at least, had a fundamental respect for the intelligence of the reader. With Greg, at least, I had to get like three sections into his six section essay before I lost faith that he was going to turn this around, and it wasn’t until the last section, when he implored the reader to do something he’d just claimed was impossible, that I decided I needed to write an angry blog post to get it out of my system. With Paragons and Knaves, that moment came on page three.

Also, I want to offer an actual legit apology because in retrospect, considering the time he gave to things like compatibilism and quantum probabilities, his failure to include some valid counterarguments to his position is probably a result of human error and not an intentional omission intended to mislead readers. I maintain that he is wrong, but in retrospect he’s probably not being an asshole about it.

But look, we all know that to the extent this post will be successful, it won’t be because I took personal responsibility for things. People are here to read about how Paragons and Knaves authors JK Miles and Karington Hess are stupid assholes who are wrong about everything, so let’s get to it.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Paragons and Knaves” →

I’m not just using a generic title here to refer to a philosophical rant on Good vs. Evil in D&D. This is the title of chapter one of Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy, of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series of books, which I just got in a bundle from the Humble Bundle on a sale which I pretty much guarantee has expired by the time you read this post even though it will (hopefully) be published before the end. You can still buy it at full price, although I’m pretty iffy on whether you’d want to so far. Its examination of philosophical concepts as related to D&D has been pretty basic so far, and through to the end of the first chapter I’ve never had the kind of “huh, interesting” moment that you want from a philosophy book.

Instead, what I’ve had are a few “you presumptive ass” moments that come from reading someone packaging their answers to philosophical problems directly alongside their initial presentation of them, with no space dedicated to opposing viewpoints at all. If you’re introducing philosophical arguments to an audience who may not be familiar with them, you have an obligation to present any reasonably respectable perspective, even if only to destroy them. This is what legit philosophers like Plato and Aristotle did all the time (including to each other), presenting an opposing viewpoint so that it could be dismantled, but they still presented it. Being confident you are correct is one thing, but rigging the game undermines the search for truth and beauty, which is fundamentally the goal of philosophy.

Hi, me from the future here. Just wanted to post something from the next article on the subject of the paragraph just above this one:

“Also, I want to offer an actual legit apology [to Greg Littmann] because in retrospect, considering the time he gave to things like compatibilism and quantum probabilities, his failure to include some valid counterarguments to his position is probably a result of human error and not an intentional omission intended to mislead readers. I maintain that he is wrong, but in retrospect he’s probably not being an asshole about it.”

So let’s talk about the failures of the first chapter specifically today, and tomorrow we’ll talk about the next. Different chapters are each different, self-contained essays by different authors, so it’s very possible that despite ripping the first chapter up today, tomorrow I’ll mostly be praising the good work of a different author writing on an entirely different subject. For now, though, let’s get complaining.

Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Sympathy for the Devils” →