新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

This paper explores the relationship between philosophy, teaching, and university social responsibility (USR) by examining the question raised by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality II: The Use of Pleasure: “what does doing philosophy mean?”. Foucault asserted that individuals who are doing philosophy reflect on their current situation and experience the transformation of the self. If Foucault’s assertion is accurate, then what should the philosophical landscape illustrated by philosophers in Taiwan be, according to Foucault’s philosophical discourses? By participating in a USR program, the study’s author had the opportunity to explore in depth the discourse of the “critical ontology of ourselves,” which Foucault proposed as . This enabled the author to extract the concept of publicness from the discourse and use this concept to lay the theoretical foundation of this study. Specifically, the author used board games as a medium to explore the concept of publicness and discuss his experience participating in the USR program. This paper presents how this experience gradually transformed the relationships between the author and philosophy, between other students and communities, and between philosophy and society. These gradual transformations accord with how Foucault used the concept of fiction to create different experiences and actions to surpass one’s limits. In addition, this paper describes local viewpoints on “doing philosophy” covering conceptions of publicness, the design of board game mechanisms, and practical experience.