HSEM3247H: Philosophy on the Rocks

Strength, play, flourishing, character, artifice, accessibility—all of these are philosophical topics. In this course, we’ll study them through their embodiment in a particular practice: rock climbing. We’ll divide our studies into three units: Sport, Wellbeing, and Social Construction. We begin with the most concrete: Sport. Is climbing sport? Play? Both? What does it take to be a sport? How do we define play? How are these related? Here, we consider C. Thi Nguyen’s recent book Games: Agency as Art and various philosophical works on the philosophy of sport. In this section, we’ll also begin our exploration of disability within climbing, beginning with a lecture from local adaptive climbing professionals. As we shift our attention to Wellbeing, we will consider the role of play and movement in a life well lived, the possibility of resistance through joyful activity, and the creation of communities and communal spaces. We’ll also learn about quiet resistance from Prof. Tamara Fakhoury and hear about the creation of movement patterns from setters at our local gym, the Minneapolis Bouldering Project. Finally, we consider social construction. The development of climbing has brought us from unstructured play in the wilderness to Olympic competition in carefully graded, pristinely crafted problems set with plastic holds on artificial, almost featureless walls. We have created fine-grained rating systems that categorize the difficulty of climbs that purport to provide objective measures, even as we know that they don’t map on to the different bodies and preferences of different climbers. We’ll look at these phenomena through the lens of social construction to understand what they mean and the role they play in our society.

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