The paper discusses the relation between chess and philosophy, examining, among other things, how far chess might reveal important features of philosophical problemanalysis and argumentation. There is a plurality of scientific, philosophical, and other perspectives from which chess can be viewed. Some attention must be drawn to these various ways of conceptualizing the game, but the main emphasis of the paper lies in uncovering certain philosophically- and metaphilosophically- relevant basic assumptions of chess. It is argued that the thought patterns and (...) reasoning procedures typical of chess seem to merge into those practised in philosophy. Moreover, we face in the common area of chess and other disciplines a multifarious possibility of research programmes, which promise to turn out useful both for the scientific and aesthetic understanding, and perhaps also for the chess tournament practice. Certain philosophical insights inspired by the practice of chess may lead us to transform our views about various complex human phenomena: not only about the nature of calculatory problem-solving and the relation between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, but also about ethical reasoning and even philosophical argumentation itself. (shrink)

This paper develops an aesthetics of crossword puzzles. I present a taxonomy of crosswords in the Anglophone world and argue that there are three distinct sources of aesthetic value in crosswords. First, and in common with other puzzles, crosswords merit aesthetic experiences of our own agency: paradigmatically, the aesthetic experience of struggling for and hitting upon the right solution. In addition to instantiating the aesthetic value of puzzles in general, crosswords in particular can have two other sources of aesthetic value: (...) the visual appeal of grid art and the poetic delight of idiomatic language. Crossword aesthetics takes place at the intersection of the recently popular aesthetics of puzzles and games and the more familiar aesthetics of the visual and literary arts. (shrink)

This paper surveys the ontological and aesthetic character of puzzles in worlds with storytelling potential, storiable worlds (potential storyworlds). These puzzles are termed fiction puzzles. The focus is on the fiction puzzles of videogames, which are accommodated to John Dewey's pragmatist framework of aesthetics to be examined as art products capable of producing aesthetic experiences. This leads to an establishing of analytical criteria for estimating the value of fiction puzzles in the pragmatist framework of aesthetics.