Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [141]
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For their detailed commentary, encouragement, and laughter, I want to thank my friends Chris Worsley of Montréal and Leslie Ortquist-Ahrens of Otterbein College. And for his support of my research agenda in teaching and learning, my deepest thanks go to my supervisor, colleague and friend Larry Miners of Fairfield University.
49
Eric Voegelin, Order and History III: Plato and Aristotle (Louisiana State University Press, 1957), p. 300.
50
Nicomachean Ethics, 1124b20.
51
Nicomachean Ethics, 1113a29-35.
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Protagoras 315a.
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Protagoras 315e-316a.
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Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Beacon Press, 1955), p.30.
55
DK B52.
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Politics, 1339a.
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Politics, 1337b35. In the words of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, thinking in an Aristotelian spirit, “Entertainment, like labor and sleep, is irrevocably part of the biological life process.” Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (Penguin, 1961), p. 205.
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Politics, 1339a.
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Kurt Riezler, “Play and Seriousness,” Journal of Philosophy 38:19 (1941), p. 513.
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The coinage “bread and circuses” originates with the Roman satirist Juvenal. See Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” p. 206.
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Cited in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Second and Revised Edition,. Second Part of the Second Part; Question 168, Article 2, “Can There Be a Virtue about Playful Actions?”, online edition: www.newadvent.org/summa/3168.htm, accessed on September 22nd, 2008.
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Summa Theologica, Question 168, Article 4, “The Sin Existing in a Lack of Play.”
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This is Colbert’s self-description in his interview with Deborah Soloman, “Funny about the News,” (New York Times Magazine, September 25th, 2005).
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Praise of Folly, p. 35.
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Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
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Edmund S. Morgan “Puritan Hostility to the Theater,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110:5 (1966), p. 342.
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The text of Colbert’s speech is conveniently located at the end of I Am America, pp. 218-227.
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Episode 2148, originally aired November 28th, 2006. The WØRD of the night was “Ecu-Menace.”
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For more on race in the Report, see Chapter 14 in this volume.
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Episode 3016, originally aired February 1st, 2007.
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Wikiality.com: The Truthiness Encyclopedia. (http://www.wikiality.com/) Retrieved on June 11th, 2008.
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I would like to thank my closest family, Charles Bancroft, Penelope Blum, and Randall Moore, who each, from their very unique but wise perspectives, shared my questions and helped to shape my thoughts on play in 2008.
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This work was originally published as articles in 1918 and 1924, and as a book in 1972. I’m using the Open Court edition of 1985.
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William Lycan is the first person to refer to the test as the “spot check test,” and he does so in Philosophy of Language: a Contemporary Introduction. The most recent edition of the book was published in 2008, and anyone interested in philosophy of language should own a copy.
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These maxims are regularly employed by Grice, but made their first appearance in his “Logic and Conversation” (1975) which has often been reprinted. The copy I am using can be found in Studies in the Way of Words published in 1989 by Harvard University Press.
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Two good books that will help you get a handle on linguistic context are Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning and Truth, by Gerhard Preyer, (Oxford University Press, 2005), and Vagueness in Context by Stewart Shapiro (Oxford University Press, 2008).
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Episode 1001, originally aired October 17th, 2005.
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Episode 3032, originally aired March 8th, 2007.
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For any reader who wants to know more about how we establish meaning with nothing but context, here are some works I recommend that you read. W.V. Quine, in an article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and in a book, Word and Object (MIT Press, 1964), discusses how we might