bernard suits the grasshopper games life and utopia

'Nonsense,' said the sensible Bernard Suits: 'playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.' The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. A little-known classic.' - Nigel Warburton, freelance philosopher and co-host of Philosophy Bites In the mid-twentieth century, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable there are no common threads that link them all. He engages not only Wittgenstein but human life itself at the highest level, in a book that challenges philosophical orthodoxies, while all the time flowing like honey.' - Simon Blackburn, Cambridge University 'Playful and deep. Bernard Suits not only makes philosophy enjoyable, as it should be, but does so without any compromise of real profundity. 'This unique book quite bowled me over, both intellectually and as a gorgeous literary feast. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.īook Description Paperback. “Philosophers are not generally known for fine writing, but once in a generation or two a book appears out of nowhere, unclassifiable, inspired, amazing, mesmerizing, wonderful, classic. All in the form of dialogues between an insect and his disciples! There is simply nothing else like it.” ― Shelly Kagan, Yale University While primarily an articulation and defense of a highly plausible definition of games (and we all know what Wittgenstein said about that), it also manages to raise some of the deepest and most challenging questions about the meaning of life. Philosophically profound, yet genuinely funny. We may be able to regain thereby the meaning lost as advances in technology enable us to escape one by one the tasks that necessity used to impose on humankind.” ― David Braybrooke, Dalhousie University / The University of Texas at Austin Suits offers more: an application of his definition in a discussion of how much we may have to rely on games―deliberately using relatively inefficient means to reach freely stipulated goals―if life is to continue to have meaning. That is achievement enough to make a new classic in the history of philosophy.

Defying certain discouragements, Suits constructs an illuminating definition of games, which he defends in lively dialogues, amusing parables, and cascades of subtle analytical distinctions. “Like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, Suits’s The Grasshopper sparkles with wit and fun and outranks those wonderful works in clear, firm philosophical conclusions.

Bernard suits the grasshopper games life and utopia