One expects to find Peanuts discussions in all sorts of places, to the degree that while I’m tempted to say it was a surprise to find the topic in The Background of Social Reality: Selected Contributions from the Inaugural Meeting of ENSO (that’s the European Network on Social Ontology), I’d be lying. In a chapter entitled “Trying to Act Together”, philosophy professor Hans Bernhard Schmid of the University of Basel spends several pages discussing “[o]ne of the most famous cases of failing cooperation in all of world literature”, regarding Charlie Brown, Lucy, and a football. Despite his referring to the strip as “The Peanuts” and to Charlie Brown by his first name, Schmid has taken the time to get a grasp on the full history of the failed placekicks and how readers react to it, how they place the blame for the event on Lucy’s abuse of the expected agreement, rather than to Charlie Brown’s choice to maintain unrealistic expectations after dozens of failures. So if any of you want to read a discussion of the philosophy of intentionality in regards to failed cooperation, here you can get it with Peanuts!

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