Juan Sebastian Goyburu

This philosophical exploratory paper considers the ontology of play and toys, specifically balls, showing that play is an autotelic phenomenon that reorganizes time, space and material relations. Its objective will be to start developing a philosophical definition of ‘play’ that includes imaginative play but does not rest on the idea of imagination but instead on the materiality of playing, in order to make it coherent with more physical games. We start from the analysis of play in classical phenomenology, finding that its perspective fails on two counts: That it rests on the idea of ‘imagination’ in order to define play and on something akin to the Waltonian ‘prop’ as the archetype of toy and, relatedly, that choice does not seem to be able to account for more physical types of play. We will then try to explore games by placing the materiality of playing and the ball as a technical object at the centre of the analysis. This path will open the network of interactions that, following Latour, we can see actualized in the ludic, revealing its inherent political nature. We will conclude by recovering the Heideggerian and Finkean notions on autotelicity and the space-time articulating character of the game, but now on material grounds that allow a more comprehensive and nuanced characterization of games, toys, playing and player.