Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Chess

  • You Touch It, You Move It

    One should always insist on the touch-move  rule with every opponent in every (non-blitz) chess game whether serious or casual, rated or unrated. You will save yourself a lot of unnecessary vexation if you do. Now you might  think you knew all there was to know about the touch-move rule; but if you are like…

  • Richard Feynman on How Science is Like Chess

    An excellent analogy.  (HT: Ron Brinegar) But every analogy limps.  There is no such thing as a perfect analogy.  A perfect analogy would be an identity, and  one cannot (usefully) compare a thing to itself.  So, after enjoying Feynman's fine analogy, you should ask yourself what the points of disanalogy are.

  • Chess and Philosophy

    In chess, the object of the game is clear, the rules are fixed and indisputable, and there is always a definite outcome (win, lose, or draw) about which no controversy can arise.  In philosophy, the object and the rules are themselves part of what is in play, and there is never an incontrovertible result.  So I…

  • Ayn Rand on Bobby Fischer

    It is hard to believe that Bobby Fischer has been dead for over three years now.  The king of the 64 squares died at age 64 on 17 January 2008.  Fischer's sad story well illustrates the perils of monomania. Ayn Rand did not realize how right she was in her 1974 "An Open Letter to…

  • Frank Brady’s End Game Reviewed

    It is hard to believe that Bobby Fischer has been dead three years already.  He died on 17 January 2008.   Last night I saw Frank Brady on C-Span's Book Notes.  Brady was pitching his new book End Game which tells the rest of the Fischer story.  I will definitely be on the lookout for it in…

  • Against Best Play

    It may be that in philosophy it is as in chess:  against best play one can only hope for a draw.

  • Krauthammer as Chess Player

    Here.

  • My Angelic Wife

    One indicator of her angelicity is her support of my chess activities — in stark contrast to the wives of two acquaintances both of whose 'better' halves destroyed their chess libraries in fits of rage at time spent sporting with Caissa. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," wrote old Will. I'm no bard,…

  • Stefan Zweig on Caissa’s Allure

    An old Hindu proverb has it that chess is an ocean in which a gnat may drink and an elephant bathe. Similarly pelagic is the literature of the game. Some of it is of high literary merit. An example follows for your delectation. Stefan Zweig, "The Royal Game" in The Royal Game and Other Stories,…

  • Eat, Drink, and Beat Harry

    There are cartoons we never forget. One in Chess Life some years back depicted two intense guys bent over a chess board. The caption read, "Eat, drink, and beat Harry." Emmanuel Lasker would have liked that. He was always going on about the role of Kampf, stuggle, in chess. Lasker would also have liked this…

  • Arizona SB 1070: The Threat is Stronger than the Execution

    Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung is a saying often attributed to grandmaster Aron Nimzovich.  (On the correctness of the attribution, chess aficionados will find interesting this piece by Edward Winter.)  It occurred to me this morning that the maxim also applies to SB 1070, about which I have said quite a bit of late. (Scroll…

  • The One Chess Book a Person Should Have

    Joe from New York writes: I have a question about chess. Would you be kind enough to tell me in your opinion what is the one chess book a person should have? What is your favorite? I am presently reading [Irving Chervev's]Logical Chess Move by Move. I am a patzer. I think your blog is…

  • Chess: Game or Sport?

    Paul Weiss, Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 142-143: Hockey demands bodily exertion. Like every other sport, it tests what a rule-abiding man can bodily be and do. Though chess also has rules, and these have a history, and though a masterly game makes considerable demands on the stamina of the…

  • How the World is Like Chess

    A wise saying about chess, often attributed to Goethe, but apocryphal for all I know, goes like this. "For a game it is too serious, and for seriousness too much of a game." Something similar is true of the world. The world is is too real, too much with us, for us to detach ourselves…

  • Marcel Duchamp and the Superiority of the Useless

    Marcel Duchamp abandoned art for chess because of the latter's superior uselessness. Art objects, after all, have exchange value as commodities, and may make the artist some money. But with few exceptions chess lies entirely beyond the sphere of the utile. In this sense, the art of the 64 squares is the highest art. There…