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Grasshopper soup : philosophical essays on games.
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5 cm of textual records
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Biographical history
Bernard Herbert Suits, philosopher and professor, was born November 25, 1925 in Detroit, Michigan. Suits attended Denby High School in Detroit and went on to receive his BA at the University of Chicago, his MA in Philosophy also at the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Illinois. Suits' area of philosophic inquiry was games and gaming and he would go on to become an authority in the field. In 1957, Suits began teaching at the University of Illinois and moved on to Purdue in 1959. In 1966, Suits became an associate professor at the University of Waterloo where he would remain until his retirement in 1994.
While teaching at the University of Waterloo, Suits would hold such positions as Chair of the Waterloo Philosophy Department, Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs in the Faculty of Arts and President of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport. Suits was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982 and was appointed Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 1995.
Outside of teaching Suits published essays in a number of journals and is best known for his book "The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia." Suits was also a visiting professor at the University of Lethbridge and the University of Bristol. In 1982, Suits was a special guest star on the TVO special "The Academy on Moral Philosophy."
Bernard Suits died in 2007.
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Scope and content
File consists of typescript draft with manuscript notes of Grasshopper Soup: Philosophical Essays on Games by Bernard Suits. Grasshopper Soup is a collection of essays, some of which appeared elsewhere, that serves as a sequel to "The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia." Essays from this collection are present elsewhere in the fonds both individually and collected under the title "Return of the Grasshopper: Further Reflections on Games, Life and Utopia." Neither manuscript was ever published as a collection under either title.
An Acknowledgements section at the front of each manuscript outlines where previously published essays appeared. It reads:
"Some of these essays have appeared, in whole or in part, elsewhere. Chapter One is a somewhat revised writing of the concluding essay in Utopias, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1984. Some of the material in Chapters Three and Four is taken from "McBride and Paddie on The Grasshopper," Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 1981; Chapter Six is substantially the same as "Is Life a Game We are Playing?" Ethics, 1967 (Copyright 1967 by the University of Chicago); Chapter Seven is an expanded version of an article which first appeared in Dialogue, 1982, under its present title; and Chapter Eight, "The Detective Story: a Case Study of Games in Literature," was published in The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 1985. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the publishers for permission to include that material here."