How profound is a little plastic building block? It turns out the answer is very! 22 chapters explore philosophy through the world of LEGO which encompasses the iconic brick itself as well as the animated televisions shows, feature films, a vibrant adult fan base with over a dozen yearly conventions, an educational robotics program, an award winning series of videogames, hundreds of books, magazines, and comics, a team-building workshop program for businesses and much, much more.

Roy T. Cook is CLA Scholar of the College and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. He is the author ofParadoxes (Polity, 2013) andThe Yablo Paradox (2014), the editor ofThe Arché Papers on the Mathematics of Abstraction (2007), and co-editor ofThe Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Wiley Blackwell, 2012) andThe Routledge Companion to Comics (2016). No matter how much LEGO he buys, he never seems to have enough headlight bricks.

Sondra Bacharach is Senior Lecturer in the philosophy department at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She works in philosophy of art and philosophy for children. She is co-editor ofCollaborating Now: Art in the Twenty-first Century(2016) and is the former co-editor of the American Society for AestheticsNewsletter. When she's not doing philosophy, she can be found building Classic Spaceships (Spaceship, Spaceship, SPACESHIP!) with her kids' big box of LEGO.

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction: Play Well, Philosophize Well! 1Sondra Bacharach and Roy T. Cook

Part I LEGO® and Creativity 5

1 Constructing Creativity 7Mary Beth Willard

2 Building Blocks of Thought: LEGO® and the Philosophy of Play 17Tyler Shores

3 LEGO® Formalism in Architecture 27Saul Fisher

4 That Was My Idea!: LEGO® Ideas and Intellectual Property 39Michael Gettings

Part II LEGO®, Ethics, and Rules 49

5 You Know the Rules! Whats Wrong with The Man Upstairs? 51Jon Robson

6 Searching for The Special: The LEGO® Movie and the Value of (LEGO®) Persons 59Alexander Quanbeck

7 LEGO® and the Social Blocks of Autonomy 69Eric Chelstrom

8 Building and Dwelling with Heidegger and LEGO® Toys 79Ellen Miller

Part III LEGO® and Identity 89

9 Ninjas, Kobe Bryant, and Yellow Plastic: The LEGO® Minifigure and Race 91Roy T. Cook

10 Girl, LEGO® Friends is not your Friend! Does LEGO® Construct Gender Stereotypes? 103Rebecca Gutwald

11 Representation in Plastic and Marketing: The Significance of the LEGO® Women Scientists 113Rhiannon Grant and Ruth Wainman

12 Real Signature Figures: LEGO® Minifigures and the Human Individual 123Robert M. Mentyka

Part IV LEGO®, Consumption, and Culture 133

13 LEGO® Values: Image and Reality 135Sondra Bacharach and Ramon Das

14 Small Farms, Big Ideas: LEGO® Farm and Agricultural Idealism 145Craig Van Pelt

15 The Reality of LEGO®: Building the Apocalypse 153David Lueth

16 The American Archipelago: Touring the Nation at Miniland USA 163Samantha J. Boardman

Part V LEGO®, Metaphysics, and Math 173

17 The Brick, the Plate, and the Uncarved Block: LEGO® as an Expression of Dao 175Steve Bein

18 LEGO®, Impermanence, and Buddhism 185David Kahn

19 LEGO® and the Building Blocks of Metaphysics 197Stephan Leuenberger

20 What Can You Build? 207Bob Fischer

21 Playing with LEGO® and Proving Theorems 217Fenner Tanswell

Glossary 227Alice Leber-Cook and Roy T. Cook

Index 233