How can Wii Sports teach us about metaphysics?
Can playing World of Warcraft lead to greater self-consciousness?
How can we learn about aesthetics, ethics and divine attributes from
Zork, Grand Theft Auto, and Civilization?
A variety of increasingly sophisticated video games are rapidly overtaking books, films, and television as America's most popular form of media entertainment. It is estimated that by 2011 over 30 percent of US households will own a Wii console - about the same percentage that owned a television in 1953.

In Philosophy Through Video Games, Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox - philosophers with game industry experience - investigate the aesthetic appeal of video games, their effect on our morals, the insights they give us into our understanding of perceptual knowledge, personal identity, artificial intelligence, and the very meaning of life itself, arguing that video games are popular precisely because they engage with longstanding philosophical problems.
Topics covered include:
* The Problem of the External World
* Dualism and Personal Identity
* Artificial and Human Intelligence in the Philosophy of Mind
* The Idea of Interactive Art
* The Moral Effects of Video Games
* Games and God's Goodness
Games discussed include:
Madden Football, Wii Sports, Guitar Hero, World of Warcraft, Sims Online, Second Life, Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls, Zork, EverQuest Doom, Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto, Civilization, Mortal Kombat, Rome: Total War, Black and White, Aidyn Chronicles

This volume will convince readers that the swift ascent of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons to worldwide popularity in the 1970s and 1980s is "the most exciting event in popular culture since the invention of the motion picture." Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy presents twenty-one chapters by different writers, all D&D aficionados but with starkly different insights and points of view. It will be appreciated by thoughtful fans of the game, including both those in their thirties, forties, and fifties who have rediscovered the pastime they loved as teenagers and the new teenage and college-student D&D players who have grown up with gaming via computer and console games and are now turning to D&D as a richer, fuller gaming experience. The book is divided into three parts. The first, "Heroic Tier: The Ethical Dungeon-Crawler," explores what D&D has to teach us about ethics and about how results from the philosophical study of morality can enrich and transform the game itself. Authors argue that it's okay to play evil characters, criticize the traditional and new systems of moral alignment, and (from the perspective of those who love the game) tackle head-on the recurring worries about whether the game has problems with gender and racial stereotypes. Readers of Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy will become better players, better thinkers, better dungeon-masters, and better people. Part II, "Paragon Tier: Planes of Existence," arouses a new sense of wonder about both the real world and the collaborative world game players create. Authors look at such metaphysical questions as what separates magic from science, how we express the inexpressible through collaborative storytelling, and what the objects that populate Dungeons and Dragons worlds can teach us about the equally fantastic objects that surround us in the real world. The third part, "Epic Tier: Leveling Up," is at the crossroads of philosophy and the exciting new field of Game Studies. The writers investigate what makes a game a game, whether D&D players are artists producing works of art, whether D&D (as one of its inventors claimed) could operate entirely without rules, how we can overcome the philosophical divide between game and story, and what types of minds take part in D&D.

The Graham Harman Reader is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman's resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works that develop the specific fourfold structure of Object-Oriented Ontology. In the third, we find Harman's novel arguments for why causal relations between two entities can only be indirect. The fourth chapter discusses why aesthetics deserves to be called first philosophy. The fifth chapter contains Harman's underrated contributions to ethics and politics, and the sixth deals with epistemology, mind, and science. A concluding seventh chapter contains several previously unpublished writings not available anywhere else. Written in Harman's typical clear and witty style, the /Reader/ is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.

This is a shockingly new view of 'things' that will revolutionise contemporary ontological debates about substance. What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposed derivative nature of objects and in so doing provides deep insights about the world and our place in it. Tristan Garcia's original and systematic formal ontology of things strips them of any determination, intensity or depth. From this radical ontological poverty, he develops encyclopaedic regional ontologies of objects. By covering topics as diverse as the universe, events, time, the living, animals, human beings, representation, arts and rules, culture, history, political economy, values, classes, genders, ages of life and death, he shows that speculative metaphysics and ontology are alive and well. It proposes a systematic philosophy essential to the development of metaphysics, the ontology of objects and speculative realism. It combines the analytic and continental traditions, and will appeal to philosophers working on either side. It applies his metaphysics to philosophically charged practical issues such as vegetarianism, animal rights, the nature of representation, death, culture and history.

How can Wii Sports teach us about metaphysics? Can playing World of Warcraft lead to greater self-consciousness? How can we learn about aesthetics, ethics and divine attributes from Zork, Grand Theft Auto, and Civilization? A variety of increasingly sophisticated video games are rapidly overtaking books, films, and television as America's most popular form of media entertainment. It is estimated that by 2011 over 30 percent of US households will own a Wii console - about the same percentage that owned a television in 1953. In Philosophy Through Video Games, Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox - philosophers with game industry experience - investigate the aesthetic appeal of video games, their effect on our morals, the insights they give us into our understanding of perceptual knowledge, personal identity, artificial intelligence, and the very meaning of life itself, arguing that video games are popular precisely because they engage with longstanding philosophical problems. Topics covered include: * The Problem of the External World * Dualism and Personal Identity * Artificial and Human Intelligence in the Philosophy of Mind * The Idea of Interactive Art * The Moral Effects of Video Games * Games and God's Goodness Games discussed include: Madden Football, Wii Sports, Guitar Hero, World of Warcraft, Sims Online, Second Life, Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls, Zork, EverQuest Doom, Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto, Civilization, Mortal Kombat, Rome: Total War, Black and White, Aidyn Chronicles

Throughout the history of human societies, the question of 'we' has always entailed the question of 'us and them', the reconciliation of which can either give birth to or mark the end of a politics. Tristan Garcia's radical historicisation of the ways we have imagined ourselves is more than a commentary on the dynamics of representation in a given society. This work is a rigorous engagement with the history of humanity's attempts at being collectively. For fans of The Life Intense, the first volume in the Letting Be series, We Ourselves is the next step in the development of Garcia's thought, but for those who have not read it, it also stands alone. Garcia provides a methodological framework that critically reinvigorates our dreams of the society to come and clears the way for the return to ontology in Letting Be III.

Throughout the history of human societies, the question of 'we' has always entailed the question of 'us and them', the reconciliation of which can either give birth to or mark the end of a politics. Tristan Garcia's radical historicisation of the ways we have imagined ourselves is more than a commentary on the dynamics of representation in a given society. This work is a rigorous engagement with the history of humanity's attempts at being collectively. For fans of The Life Intense, the first volume in the Letting Be series, We Ourselves is the next step in the development of Garcia's thought, but for those who have not read it, it also stands alone. Garcia provides a methodological framework that critically reinvigorates our dreams of the society to come and clears the way for the return to ontology in Letting Be III.

The publication of Form and Object: A Treatise on Things by Tristan Garcia, Prix de Flore-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, and screenwriter is a genuine event in the history of philosophy. Situating this event within classical, modern and contemporary dialectical space, Jon Cogburn evaluates Garcia's metaphysics, differential ontology, and militant anti-reductionism through a series of seemingly incompatible oppositions: substance/process, analysis/dialectic, simple/whole and discovery/creation. Cogburn also includes a critical assessment of the consequences of Garcia's philosophy, the various unresolved problems in his treatise and the future prospects of speculative metaphysics.

The publication of Form and Object: A Treatise on Things by Tristan Garcia, Prix de Flore-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist and screenwriter, is a genuine event in the history of philosophy. Situating this event within classical, modern and contemporary dialectical space, Jon Cogburn evaluates Garcia's metaphysics, differential ontology and militant anti-reductionism through a series of seemingly incompatible oppositions: substance/process, analysis/dialectic, simple/whole and discovery/creation. Cogburn also includes a critical assessment of the consequences of Garcia's philosophy, the various unresolved problems in his treatise and the future prospects of speculative metaphysics.

Our lives today are oppressed by the demand that we live, feel and experience with ever greater intensity. We are enticed to try exotic flavors and smells; urged to enjoy a wide range of sexual experiences; pushed to engage in extreme sports and recreational drugs - all in the pursuit of some new, unheard-of intensity. Tristan Garcia argues that such intensity rarely lives up to its promise. It always comes at a price: one that defines the ethical predicament of contemporary life. The notion of intensity was the hidden key to Garcia's landmark book Form and Object. In The Life Intense, the first part of his ambitious Letting Be trilogy, he begins to develop it in detail. This first book focuses on ethics; the forthcoming volumes will be devoted to politics and then metaphysics.

Our lives today are oppressed by the demand that we live, feel and experience with ever greater intensity. We are enticed to try exotic flavors and smells; urged to enjoy a wide range of sexual experiences; pushed to engage in extreme sports and recreational drugs - all in the pursuit of some new, unheard-of intensity. Tristan Garcia argues that such intensity rarely lives up to its promise. It always comes at a price: one that defines the ethical predicament of contemporary life. The notion of intensity was the hidden key to Garcia's landmark book Form and Object. In The Life Intense, the first part of his ambitious Letting Be trilogy, he begins to develop it in detail. This first book focuses on ethics; the forthcoming volumes will be devoted to politics and then metaphysics.