James Cartlidge | Central European University (original) (raw)
Papers by James Cartlidge
Phenomenological reviews, 2021
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Games and Culture
This article interprets the influential colony management simulator “Dwarf Fortress” existentiall... more This article interprets the influential colony management simulator “Dwarf Fortress” existentially, in terms of finitude, absurdity, and narrative. It applies Aarseth/Möring's proposed method of game interpretation, adopting their definition of “cybermedia” as a generalized game ontology, then providing a specialized ontology of “Dwarf Fortress” which describes its genre and salient gameplay features, incorporating Ian Bogost's concept of “procedural rhetoric.” It then gives an existentialist interpretation of “Dwarf Fortress” which centers on “finitude,” “absurdity,” and “narrative,” showing that “Dwarf Fortress” is a game about the existential tensions involved in being human. We live knowing our lives and civilizations are finite, that there are radical limits on what we can know and do. There is no meaning inherent in the world, or in history, so it is up to us to create our own, and one of our most powerful ways of doing this is narrative.
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Synthese
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Games and Culture
The developers of Red Hook Studios’ 2016 gothic horror “Darkest Dungeon” said that they wanted to... more The developers of Red Hook Studios’ 2016 gothic horror “Darkest Dungeon” said that they wanted to “capture the human response to stress.” This paper analyzes how the game does this with its “stress,” “affliction,” and “virtue” mechanics. With reference to research literature on stress, I show how these mechanics, which could easily have been cheap gimmicks, approach the topic of stress with admirable detail, offering a complex reflection on the various aspects, positive and negative, of several possible human responses to stress. They show how different responses include similar symptoms, how stress impacts the people around the stressed person, and make the case that stress can break people, but also fuel heroism. It is a fantastic example of how video game mechanics can be used to educate people about complex subjects without explicitly saying this is what they are doing.
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Biblioteca Della Libertà, 2020
Martin Heidegger gave a penetrating account of the different varieties of the moods of anxiety an... more Martin Heidegger gave a penetrating account of the different varieties of the moods of anxiety and boredom, which have no doubt been prevalent in the human experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. Heidegger theorized a particular type of anxiety and boredom as what I call 'revelatory moods', intense affective experiences that involve an encounter with our existence as such, our world, freedom and responsibility for the creation and proliferation of significance. Revelatory moods contain much emancipatory potential, acting as existential catalysts for our being able to authentically seize hold of our lives and possibilities as free agents. For Heidegger, the experiences of anxiety and boredom as ones that put us into contact with the structure of our world and the stunning scope of our freedom, letting us know what we can do and are capable of. But can the same be said of these experiences as they occur in a time when our freedom has been dramatically reduced? I claim that Heidegger's theory can be productively built on, arguing that the anxiety and boredom of the pandemic puts us into contact not with the scope of our freedom, but its reduced limits. But it is the experience of encountering these limits that makes it possible for us to begin to work out how to live in spite of them, forging new modes of solidarity and its enactment. Living authentically in this new situation in spite of our reduced freedom must take place on a prior disclosure of the limits of this freedom. Heidegger locates the possibility of such a disclosure in revelatory anxiety and boredom.
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Hungarian Philosophical Review, 2020
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Sport, Ethics and Philosophy
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Hungarian Philosophical Review, 2020
Martin Heidegger often and emphatically claimed that his work, especially in his masterpiece Bein... more Martin Heidegger often and emphatically claimed that his work, especially in his masterpiece Being and Time, was not philosophical anthropology. He conceived of his project as ‘fundamental ontology’, and argued that because it is singularly concerned with the question of the meaning of Being in general (and not ‘human being’), this precluded him from being engaged in philosophical anthropology. This is a claim we should find puzzling because at the very heart of Heidegger’s project is an analysis of the structures of the existence of ‘Dasein’, an entity that human beings are an instantiation of, the entity that has a relationship of concern towards its existence and which is capable of raising the question of the meaning of Being. Heidegger argues that because he only analyses human beings insofar as they are Daseins, he cannot be doing philosophical anthropology, but only fundamental ontology. In this paper, I refute this claim. I provide a sketch of philosophical anthropology which conceives it as the other side of anthropology’s coin. Where anthropology is concerned with understanding human difference, philosophical anthropology attempts to understand what is common to all instances of human existence and elucidate its significant features and structures. Whether he likes it or not, Heidegger is engaged in exactly this kind of project because anything that applies truly to Dasein applies truly to human beings. With this in mind, I examine Heidegger’s analysis of moods to demonstrate that Heidegger’s work is best understood as involving a kind of philosophical anthropology.
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Biblioteca della Liberta, 2020
Martin Heidegger gave a penetrating account of the different varieties of the moods of anxiety an... more Martin Heidegger gave a penetrating account of the different varieties of the moods of anxiety and boredom, which have no doubt been prevalent in the human experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. Heidegger theorized a particular type of anxiety and boredom as what I call 'revelatory moods', intense affective experiences that involve an encounter with our existence as such, our world, freedom and responsibility for the creation and proliferation of significance. Revelatory moods contain much emancipatory potential, acting as existential catalysts for our being able to authentically seize hold of our lives and possibilities as free agents. For Heidegger, the experiences of anxiety and boredom as ones that put us into contact with the structure of our world and the stunning scope of our freedom, letting us know what we can do and are capable of. But can the same be said of these experiences as they occur in a time when our freedom has been dramatically reduced? I claim that Heidegger's theory can be productively built on, arguing that the anxiety and boredom of the pandemic puts us into contact not with the scope of our freedom, but its reduced limits. But it is the experience of encountering these limits that makes it possible for us to begin to work out how to live in spite of them, forging new modes of solidarity and its enactment. Living authentically in this new situation in spite of our reduced freedom must take place on a prior disclosure of the limits of this freedom. Heidegger locates the possibility of such a disclosure in revelatory anxiety and boredom.
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Phenomenological Reviews, 2019
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Phenomenological Reviews, 2019
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This dissertation presents a comparative reading of Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? and Wittgens... more This dissertation presents a comparative reading of Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the intent of arguing that the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is a spurious one of no real benefit to the enterprise of philosophy as long as it remains so pronounced and important philosophers of either side are neglected in their opposite tradition. It shows that these two philosophers, undeniably held up as important and influential in their respective traditions, can not only be meaningfully compared but actually display similar motives, projects, arguments and methods, and when read together productively illuminate each other’s work. This I think can be done not just with these two philosopher’s bodies of work, but with many others either side of the divide. The divide then, does not mean very much, merely denoting a difference in focus and method. My main comparative point I will make in arguing this is that both Heidegger and Wittgenstein use a negative concept (nothing and nonsense, respectively) as part of a project of initiating an overcoming of metaphysics. Heidegger questions nothingness in order to get to the heart of what metaphysics is and having done so informs us that even questioning the nature of metaphysics questions beyond metaphysics. Metaphysics is engaged with and put on display as something to be overcome. Something similar, I argue, happens in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein engages with previous ways of doing philosophy (and thus metaphysics), putting them on display before informing us that they are in fact nonsense. What he actually sees as nonsense is engaged with, reproduced and declared as something to be overcome. Other points are made along the way, such as that Wittgenstein’s thought is more continuous than was originally supposed and that the early Wittgenstein can be just as meaningfully compared with Heidegger as the later Wittgenstein has been, but our main point of comparison will be on negative concepts used as parts of projects that engage with metaphysics in order that it can be overcome. This is more than a superficial similarity in method and project, so if the divide really does denote something significant, it does not seem to in this area.
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper, I address Sartre's theory of committed literature. for Sartre, all literature is c... more In this paper, I address Sartre's theory of committed literature. for Sartre, all literature is committed, or engaged, politically in some way. This however has nothing to do with the intentions of the writer but rather, sartre claims, is an indisputible fact that follows from the nature of literature itself. My main focus here is to account for this claim.
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In this short paper, I aim to elucidate what I take to be the key chapter in Being and Time, the ... more In this short paper, I aim to elucidate what I take to be the key chapter in Being and Time, the chapter on temporality as the ontological meaning of care. In this chapter, Heidegger identifies Temporality as the ontological meaning of the structure of the Being of Dasein, care. This chapter brings together a string of arguments that run throughout the book about the nature of our being and its relation to time. I will conclude that if we take Heidegger's meaning of terms like 'ontological meaning' and 'ecstatic temporality' and 'care' seriously, the natural conclusion we draw from his arguments must be that we are in fact, time.
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In this paper, I go through Heidegger's destruction of the history of ontology as articulated in ... more In this paper, I go through Heidegger's destruction of the history of ontology as articulated in the introduction to Being and Time. In order to fullt understand what Heidegger is doing, I clarify some of the key terms and one of his key distinctions in relation to the destruction, eventually concluding that what he had in mind was not so much of a destruction, but a firm, constructive criticism and polemicism of the history of philosophy.
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This paper assesses whether the thing-in-itself as illustrated by Immanuel Kant in the Critique o... more This paper assesses whether the thing-in-itself as illustrated by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason is refuted by Nietzsche’s critique of it. I hope to do this by first reconstructing the case for the thing-in-itself as put forward in the Critique before reconstructing Nietzsche’s contrary stance from the various texts where he published arguments against it. Upon presenting both cases, I will assess whether Kant’s thing-in-itself stands up to Nietzsche’s scrutiny. Kant insisted that the thing-in-itself is a necessary consequence of his work in the Transcendental Aesthetic, which implies that our understanding is limited by our constitution so that we can only perceive things as they appear to us and never the thing as it exists considered independent of us. Nietzsche viewed the thing-in-itself as self-contradictory and marshalled a perspectival attack against it, drawing arguments from various sources and employing various tactics over the course of his career to expose it as unworthy of being taken seriously any longer. The main contention I will be defending is that Nietzsche could not refute the thing-in-itself because all of his arguments against it are based on a misinterpretation of the thing-in-itself. Kant himself clarified his position on how best to interpret the thing-in-itself later in the Critique. The main purpose of the closing chapters of this paper will be to account for that position and show that because of this misinterpretation, Nietzsche’s case against the thing-in-itself fails.
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In this paper, I examine what exactly Kant set out to do in his famous refutation of idealism arg... more In this paper, I examine what exactly Kant set out to do in his famous refutation of idealism argument, how he went about it and whether or not he succeeded.
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In this paper, I deal with Spinoza's claim presented in the Ethics that there only exists one sub... more In this paper, I deal with Spinoza's claim presented in the Ethics that there only exists one substance, and it is god. My aim is to account for his position and present possible objections to it.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Phenomenological reviews, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Games and Culture
This article interprets the influential colony management simulator “Dwarf Fortress” existentiall... more This article interprets the influential colony management simulator “Dwarf Fortress” existentially, in terms of finitude, absurdity, and narrative. It applies Aarseth/Möring's proposed method of game interpretation, adopting their definition of “cybermedia” as a generalized game ontology, then providing a specialized ontology of “Dwarf Fortress” which describes its genre and salient gameplay features, incorporating Ian Bogost's concept of “procedural rhetoric.” It then gives an existentialist interpretation of “Dwarf Fortress” which centers on “finitude,” “absurdity,” and “narrative,” showing that “Dwarf Fortress” is a game about the existential tensions involved in being human. We live knowing our lives and civilizations are finite, that there are radical limits on what we can know and do. There is no meaning inherent in the world, or in history, so it is up to us to create our own, and one of our most powerful ways of doing this is narrative.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Synthese
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Games and Culture
The developers of Red Hook Studios’ 2016 gothic horror “Darkest Dungeon” said that they wanted to... more The developers of Red Hook Studios’ 2016 gothic horror “Darkest Dungeon” said that they wanted to “capture the human response to stress.” This paper analyzes how the game does this with its “stress,” “affliction,” and “virtue” mechanics. With reference to research literature on stress, I show how these mechanics, which could easily have been cheap gimmicks, approach the topic of stress with admirable detail, offering a complex reflection on the various aspects, positive and negative, of several possible human responses to stress. They show how different responses include similar symptoms, how stress impacts the people around the stressed person, and make the case that stress can break people, but also fuel heroism. It is a fantastic example of how video game mechanics can be used to educate people about complex subjects without explicitly saying this is what they are doing.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Biblioteca Della Libertà, 2020
Martin Heidegger gave a penetrating account of the different varieties of the moods of anxiety an... more Martin Heidegger gave a penetrating account of the different varieties of the moods of anxiety and boredom, which have no doubt been prevalent in the human experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. Heidegger theorized a particular type of anxiety and boredom as what I call 'revelatory moods', intense affective experiences that involve an encounter with our existence as such, our world, freedom and responsibility for the creation and proliferation of significance. Revelatory moods contain much emancipatory potential, acting as existential catalysts for our being able to authentically seize hold of our lives and possibilities as free agents. For Heidegger, the experiences of anxiety and boredom as ones that put us into contact with the structure of our world and the stunning scope of our freedom, letting us know what we can do and are capable of. But can the same be said of these experiences as they occur in a time when our freedom has been dramatically reduced? I claim that Heidegger's theory can be productively built on, arguing that the anxiety and boredom of the pandemic puts us into contact not with the scope of our freedom, but its reduced limits. But it is the experience of encountering these limits that makes it possible for us to begin to work out how to live in spite of them, forging new modes of solidarity and its enactment. Living authentically in this new situation in spite of our reduced freedom must take place on a prior disclosure of the limits of this freedom. Heidegger locates the possibility of such a disclosure in revelatory anxiety and boredom.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Hungarian Philosophical Review, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sport, Ethics and Philosophy
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Hungarian Philosophical Review, 2020
Martin Heidegger often and emphatically claimed that his work, especially in his masterpiece Bein... more Martin Heidegger often and emphatically claimed that his work, especially in his masterpiece Being and Time, was not philosophical anthropology. He conceived of his project as ‘fundamental ontology’, and argued that because it is singularly concerned with the question of the meaning of Being in general (and not ‘human being’), this precluded him from being engaged in philosophical anthropology. This is a claim we should find puzzling because at the very heart of Heidegger’s project is an analysis of the structures of the existence of ‘Dasein’, an entity that human beings are an instantiation of, the entity that has a relationship of concern towards its existence and which is capable of raising the question of the meaning of Being. Heidegger argues that because he only analyses human beings insofar as they are Daseins, he cannot be doing philosophical anthropology, but only fundamental ontology. In this paper, I refute this claim. I provide a sketch of philosophical anthropology which conceives it as the other side of anthropology’s coin. Where anthropology is concerned with understanding human difference, philosophical anthropology attempts to understand what is common to all instances of human existence and elucidate its significant features and structures. Whether he likes it or not, Heidegger is engaged in exactly this kind of project because anything that applies truly to Dasein applies truly to human beings. With this in mind, I examine Heidegger’s analysis of moods to demonstrate that Heidegger’s work is best understood as involving a kind of philosophical anthropology.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Biblioteca della Liberta, 2020
Martin Heidegger gave a penetrating account of the different varieties of the moods of anxiety an... more Martin Heidegger gave a penetrating account of the different varieties of the moods of anxiety and boredom, which have no doubt been prevalent in the human experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. Heidegger theorized a particular type of anxiety and boredom as what I call 'revelatory moods', intense affective experiences that involve an encounter with our existence as such, our world, freedom and responsibility for the creation and proliferation of significance. Revelatory moods contain much emancipatory potential, acting as existential catalysts for our being able to authentically seize hold of our lives and possibilities as free agents. For Heidegger, the experiences of anxiety and boredom as ones that put us into contact with the structure of our world and the stunning scope of our freedom, letting us know what we can do and are capable of. But can the same be said of these experiences as they occur in a time when our freedom has been dramatically reduced? I claim that Heidegger's theory can be productively built on, arguing that the anxiety and boredom of the pandemic puts us into contact not with the scope of our freedom, but its reduced limits. But it is the experience of encountering these limits that makes it possible for us to begin to work out how to live in spite of them, forging new modes of solidarity and its enactment. Living authentically in this new situation in spite of our reduced freedom must take place on a prior disclosure of the limits of this freedom. Heidegger locates the possibility of such a disclosure in revelatory anxiety and boredom.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Phenomenological Reviews, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Phenomenological Reviews, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This dissertation presents a comparative reading of Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? and Wittgens... more This dissertation presents a comparative reading of Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the intent of arguing that the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is a spurious one of no real benefit to the enterprise of philosophy as long as it remains so pronounced and important philosophers of either side are neglected in their opposite tradition. It shows that these two philosophers, undeniably held up as important and influential in their respective traditions, can not only be meaningfully compared but actually display similar motives, projects, arguments and methods, and when read together productively illuminate each other’s work. This I think can be done not just with these two philosopher’s bodies of work, but with many others either side of the divide. The divide then, does not mean very much, merely denoting a difference in focus and method. My main comparative point I will make in arguing this is that both Heidegger and Wittgenstein use a negative concept (nothing and nonsense, respectively) as part of a project of initiating an overcoming of metaphysics. Heidegger questions nothingness in order to get to the heart of what metaphysics is and having done so informs us that even questioning the nature of metaphysics questions beyond metaphysics. Metaphysics is engaged with and put on display as something to be overcome. Something similar, I argue, happens in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein engages with previous ways of doing philosophy (and thus metaphysics), putting them on display before informing us that they are in fact nonsense. What he actually sees as nonsense is engaged with, reproduced and declared as something to be overcome. Other points are made along the way, such as that Wittgenstein’s thought is more continuous than was originally supposed and that the early Wittgenstein can be just as meaningfully compared with Heidegger as the later Wittgenstein has been, but our main point of comparison will be on negative concepts used as parts of projects that engage with metaphysics in order that it can be overcome. This is more than a superficial similarity in method and project, so if the divide really does denote something significant, it does not seem to in this area.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper, I address Sartre's theory of committed literature. for Sartre, all literature is c... more In this paper, I address Sartre's theory of committed literature. for Sartre, all literature is committed, or engaged, politically in some way. This however has nothing to do with the intentions of the writer but rather, sartre claims, is an indisputible fact that follows from the nature of literature itself. My main focus here is to account for this claim.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this short paper, I aim to elucidate what I take to be the key chapter in Being and Time, the ... more In this short paper, I aim to elucidate what I take to be the key chapter in Being and Time, the chapter on temporality as the ontological meaning of care. In this chapter, Heidegger identifies Temporality as the ontological meaning of the structure of the Being of Dasein, care. This chapter brings together a string of arguments that run throughout the book about the nature of our being and its relation to time. I will conclude that if we take Heidegger's meaning of terms like 'ontological meaning' and 'ecstatic temporality' and 'care' seriously, the natural conclusion we draw from his arguments must be that we are in fact, time.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper, I go through Heidegger's destruction of the history of ontology as articulated in ... more In this paper, I go through Heidegger's destruction of the history of ontology as articulated in the introduction to Being and Time. In order to fullt understand what Heidegger is doing, I clarify some of the key terms and one of his key distinctions in relation to the destruction, eventually concluding that what he had in mind was not so much of a destruction, but a firm, constructive criticism and polemicism of the history of philosophy.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This paper assesses whether the thing-in-itself as illustrated by Immanuel Kant in the Critique o... more This paper assesses whether the thing-in-itself as illustrated by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason is refuted by Nietzsche’s critique of it. I hope to do this by first reconstructing the case for the thing-in-itself as put forward in the Critique before reconstructing Nietzsche’s contrary stance from the various texts where he published arguments against it. Upon presenting both cases, I will assess whether Kant’s thing-in-itself stands up to Nietzsche’s scrutiny. Kant insisted that the thing-in-itself is a necessary consequence of his work in the Transcendental Aesthetic, which implies that our understanding is limited by our constitution so that we can only perceive things as they appear to us and never the thing as it exists considered independent of us. Nietzsche viewed the thing-in-itself as self-contradictory and marshalled a perspectival attack against it, drawing arguments from various sources and employing various tactics over the course of his career to expose it as unworthy of being taken seriously any longer. The main contention I will be defending is that Nietzsche could not refute the thing-in-itself because all of his arguments against it are based on a misinterpretation of the thing-in-itself. Kant himself clarified his position on how best to interpret the thing-in-itself later in the Critique. The main purpose of the closing chapters of this paper will be to account for that position and show that because of this misinterpretation, Nietzsche’s case against the thing-in-itself fails.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper, I examine what exactly Kant set out to do in his famous refutation of idealism arg... more In this paper, I examine what exactly Kant set out to do in his famous refutation of idealism argument, how he went about it and whether or not he succeeded.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper, I deal with Spinoza's claim presented in the Ethics that there only exists one sub... more In this paper, I deal with Spinoza's claim presented in the Ethics that there only exists one substance, and it is god. My aim is to account for his position and present possible objections to it.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact