Minecraft and Philosophy

Edited by Ian Schnee

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Please circulate and re-post widely

Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.

Submission Guidelines:

Submission deadline for abstracts (100-500 words) and CV(s): March 23, 2015.
Submission deadline for drafts of accepted papers: July 10, 2015.
Kindly submit by e-mail (with or without Word attachment) to: Ian Schnee (ian.schnee@wku.edu)

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

Mining Plato’s Cave
Aristotle, Happiness and an RS Nor Latch
Sisyphus, Mob Farming and the Meaning of Life
TNT, Tripwires and Moral Luck
Redstone and Logic Gates
Riding Pigs and Animal Rights
Stealing Swag and Lockean Property Rights
Survival Mode and the Hobbesian State of Nature
Possible Minecraft Worlds and Philosophy of Language
Tribal Warring and Ethical Objectivity
The Nietzschean Free Spirit’s Sandbox
Villagers, Servers, and Colonization
Personhood and Trans-World Identity
Backstabbing and Social Contract Theory
Mods and Marxism

Enchantment and Miracles
The Ethics of Griefing
Portals and Wormholes
Farming and Food Ethics
Skins, Ethnicity and Race
Ready-to-hand and present-to-hand: coping in survival mode
While you sleep: the present and the metaphysics of time
Crowded servers: philosophy and urban spaces
1st person, 3rd person, and the view from nowhere
MinecraftEdu and philosophy of education
Group action and collective intentionality
“Piracy is not theft”: digital intellectual property rights
Video games and interactive cinema
Flying arrows: Shooter bias and avatars

To propose ideas for future volumes in the Blackwell series please email the Series Editor, William Irwin. If you have comments or criticisms for the series, please contact the series editor after reading “Fancy Taking a Pop?” and “Writing for the Reader: A Defense of Philosophy and Popular Culture Books”