Michael Picard, MSc, PhD writes and teaches philosophy at Douglas College in Vancouver, Canada. He ran Café Philosophy, a weekly public participatory philosophy event held in Victoria, Canada for over twelve years. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Michael Picard discusses How to Play Philosophy: A book for public thinking and the thinking public, a collection of essays inspired by conversations with participants of Café Philosophy, and Tug of Logic, a virtual philosophy game which is part of his Philosophy Sports project.
What is your work about?
How to Play Philosophy: A book for public thinking and the thinking public is a collection of texts, mostly essays, composed with the singular purpose of stimulating readers to think philosophically. The topics were suggested by the original readers, specifically, by regular participants of Café Philosophy, the public participatory philosophy events I hosted weekly in Victoria, Canada, for over twelve years. Participants voted on a long ballot of candidate topics (each usually a single word), and the winning topics became the focus of our weekly dialogues. I speak of my original readers, because I wrote the essays to them (almost like letters); yet participants were never expected to have read what I sent out in advance, which never became the focus of our discussions, and was not even presupposed. Instead, I took it to be my job to present, as if in a well-arranged bouquet, an assortment of perspectives on each weekly topic, in order to increase options for opinion, not to narrow them down or settle on conclusions. It is easy to be provocative, but that was not my goal. Better, I thought, to embody wonder, curiosity and playful humor, in order to make the sometimes hard and bitter medicine of philosophy go down the more sweetly. There is more below on the topics I write about in the book. But first some relevant background on public participatory philosophy and research springing from it.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
Café Philosophy is like a philosophy playground. In that light, it can be seen to have many similarities with philosophy for children, a mode of philosophy that is practically and theoretically far more advanced. In the area of philosophy for children, there are decades of journal articles, books, conferences, and practical as well as theoretic innovations. In public participatory philosophy, there is far less (or none) of all those. To begin to rectify that, I have now pulled together a collection of writings by animators of café philosophy and their critics in a volume forthcoming this year by Anvil Press. With contributors representing over a dozen countries, the book features reports by organizers of numerous philosophy cafes from various countries, as well as historical, theoretical and speculative chapters. Also in the book are new translations I made of relevant writings of Marc Sautet, the originator of Café Philo in Paris. Three additional chapters I wrote for the book deal with: the history of the Café Philosophy series I ran (for which the essays in How to Play Philosophy were written); a theoretical critique of my practice as facilitator; and a foundational presentation of Philosophy Sports, a new modality of public participatory philosophy I have created to overcome the limitations of Sautet-style Café Philosophy.
How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?
Public participatory philosophy is a mode of philosophical praxis. Philosophical praxis in the relevant sense owes its origins to Gerd B. Achenbach, who in 1981 opened his doors and began taking “visitors”, people seeking philosophical help for their problems. Sautet was following in Achenbach’s footsteps when, by happy accident, he created Café Philo in 1992. The phenomenon of public-facing philosophy got a boost in 1999 with the international bestseller, Plato, Not Prozac, by Lou Marinoff, who has since overseen the global growth of the phenomenon, which now exhibits a robust existence in Latin America, Russia, South Korea, India and elsewhere. Another globe-trotting café philosopher is Christopher Phillips, whose Socrates Café has practitioners on several continents. Phillips specializes in philosophy for anyone, emphasizes his democratic mission, and refrains from any sharp distinction between philosophy and spirituality. But like Plato, Not Prozac, Phillip’s Socrates Café is more a book about philosophy than a book of philosophy. Quite the reverse is true of How to Play Philosophy.
Achenbach’s books and practice are deeply grounded in the Western philosophical tradition. So far, however, they are only available in German. To begin to rectify that, I have undertaken to translate his books into English, two of which will appear in coming years with Lexington Books. Having spear-headed a movement that saw philosophical praxis spread at first through Europe and then globally, Achenbach has curiously remained semi-invisible to the non-German speaking world. Philosophical counselling, as he sees it, is not some glorified form of critical thinking applied to life, as if it were cognitive-behaviour therapy cut loose from its empirical moorings. Nor is philosophical counselling, as Achenbach understands it, logic-based therapy, or the elimination of fallacies from everyday thinking, or learning to live with the evidence when it isn’t there (as it never is when it comes to the “big questions”). Instead, in a line, “Philosophical Praxis is a free conversation.” As an alternative to psychotherapy, it is “communicative action, a dialogical reconnaissance and problem-framing, which amounts — in a phrase — to a critique of the distorted communication at work in any therapeutic “treatment”. (Quotes from “Praxis as a Profession,” in Philosophical Praxis, forthcoming at Lexington Books; my translation.) Translating Achenbach has been an intellectually thrilling experience, and the necessary background research is giving me occasion to dive into authors and domains of philosophy that I would have been unlikely to encounter otherwise.
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
As mentioned, the topics of How to Play Philosophy were determined in the first instance by participants of Café Philosophy in Victoria, Canada. They voted on a long ballot of topics that they themselves had suggested. I wrote on the winning topics, distributed the essays by email, and later selected and revised them for the book. I organized them into chapters under general themes that seemed to reflect popular interest in philosophy. Chapters (with sample topics in parenthesis) include Play it With Feeling (Desire, Stress, Anger); Games We Play (Intimacy, Loyalty, Betrayal) and Playing Fair (Values, Good, Integrity), alongside epistemological topics in Truth Sports (Knowledge, Certainty, Objectivity) and perennial metaphysical quandaries in Playing for Keeps and Playing (with) God (Human Nature, God, Faith, The Sacred, Compassion, Immortality).
There is much I should have liked to include in the book but did not. The book is in fact a selection from a much larger number of essays written to the same purpose, namely to stimulate and provoke thought in advance of live weekly dialogue. Many of those cut from the book for reasons of length will appear sporadically on www.philosophical-coaching.com. Others (from a period featuring double-topics when each week we discussed two opposing concepts) I hope to bring out on their own in a future companion volume. At one point, I planned to include a history of Café Philosophy in Victoria and a critique of my practice there, but these pieces found a place in the edited collection Café Conversations (Anvil Press, forthcoming 2022).
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
The future of Café Philosophy is Philosophy Sports, a new modality of public participatory philosophy conceived to improve Sautet-style café philo by using a purpose-built Internet-mediated audience response system to provide logical infrastructure for conversation. Café Philosophy conversation typically lacks coherence, with each speaker striking out in their own direction, often with little to no relation to what has been said previously. Controversial stands are rarely taken except to provoke (that is, not in earnest) and, when they are, they are not logically challenged. Instead, in the name of hospitality to all, the next person is given the floor and is likely to say what they had been preparing to say all along, related or not to what has gone before. As this suggests, no one is ‘held accountable’ for what they say, in the sense of being required to defend their opinions with evidence and argument. The blunt introduction of that sort of rigor into the discussion would counteract the principle of hospitality that invited the participants in, and would drive everyone away except those with a taste for “conceptual fisticuffs”, unless a way could be found to soften the hard edge of rigor. Philosophy Sports is that way. And the Internet-connected phone in everyone’s pocket provides a mechanism.
To illustrate the concept, I will refer to a particular web app game I have developed called Tug of Logic. The game gives players a chance to submit revisable reasons for or against a controversial MainClaim, which is chosen to start the game by an initial straw poll. Only when players disagree enough on a MainClaim is there a game to be played. (Ideally, the room would be divided roughly equally, if not in numbers, then in numbers/enthusiasm).
The bulk of the game then consists in a series of facilitated dialogues called Bouts of Logical Scrimmage, each focused on a single (revisable) reason for or against the MainClaim. Players submit reasons to play, and the Logic Referee, who facilitates throughout, chooses one to begin the first Bout. During the Bout, the Logic Referee ask the player whose reason was chosen first to explain it, while other players vote for or against the reason as submitted. The ongoing Bout vote tally is displayed as a form of social feedback, indicating the changing level of support or opposition to the reason in play. The focus narrows to the meaning of the reason currently in play, the wording of which can be revised, resulting in unpredictable vote swings; for players revisit their votes along with each change in wording. Only reasons that gain sufficiently large majority support (determined at the discretion of the Referee) can be elevated to a common ground; that is, relied upon in the construction of a consensus argument.
One-premise arguments are rarely complete. With the assistance of the Logic Referee, any missing premises are sought out, formulated, and subjected to their own votes in subsequent Bouts of Logical Scrimmage. In this way, the shared objective becomes to build persuasive arguments whose premises have broad support. In practice, however, vital points of dissensus, sometimes initially hidden, also come up for discussion, and the deeper differences separating parties get an airing. The game appears to be a decision-making process, but it is in fact often a difference-exploring process.
Formally, a two-stage voting structure has been imposed on simple facilitated dialogue.
Making progress in the game requires taking sufficient numbers of players along with one for each premise in one’s argument. If one or more complete arguments are constructed over the course of several Bouts (each premise gaining sufficient support), the game moves to the final stage, in which the initial straw poll is reprised to determine if any players have changed their position on the MainClaim. Indeed, it is only players who change their mind on the MainClaim in the course of the game who are declared winners. Their reward is the last word: to explain to others what it was that changed their mind.
The game has obvious uses in a discussion-based classroom, where exact wording and group participation have importance. However, the game was actually designed for use in a café, to modify and support citizen debate, and to subtly shift players attention away from subjective expression of one’s own opinion to a shared task of reasoning together. One way this is achieved is by carefully chosen voting terminology. Instead of thin terminology (like “true”, “false”, “agree” “disagree”), the game adopts thick terminology which mitigates against prevailing forms of subjectivism and relativism. Thus players are initially asked if they are “convinced” or “not yet persuaded” of the MainClaim; and individual premises are to be classified as “established” or “contested”. Thus, when asked to account for their votes, players are invited to explain, not why they regard a statement as true, but how it can be seen to be established, which is a question about objective grounding not personal opinion. Similarly, if they vote “contested”, they are invited actually to contest the proposition, to share reasons why others too should join them in denying that it has been established. With this game, Café Philosophy is no more a mere public pedestal for the voicing of personal opinions. The task of reasoning together is at least begun.
The approach to collaborative reasoning built into Tug of Logic and other Philosophy Sports embodies the approach to social reasoning developed by Anthony Simon Laden (Social Reasoning, OUP, 2012).
For more on Philosophy Sports, go to https://www.philosophy-sports.com.
Michael Picard
Michael Picard, MSc, PhD writes and teaches philosophy at Douglas College in Vancouver, Canada. He got his graduate degrees in philosophy of mathematics at MIT. Besides philosophy, he has taught in various capacities in mathematics, psychology, cognitive science, leadership and sustainability. Author of How to Play Philosophy and This is Not a Book, and creator of Philosophy Sports, he is an APPA-certified philosopher-practitioner and consults with the public via www.philosophical-coaching.com.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
the term ‘play philosophy’ sparked my interest and I bought it. I have to say its quite and interesting read. And the read is spot on, thanks.