Leiden University was founded as an institution that would embody a particular set of academic ethics that sought to improve society through the acquisition of knowledge. In this volume, author Willem Otterspeer draws on the idea of Leiden as a “bastion of liberty” and proposes that concepts such as “equilibrium” and “scale” are key to understanding the university as an institution, ultimately showing how universities are a form of social capital, one of Western society’s answers to the dilemma of collective action, and an instrument for preserving and restoring continuity in the world.

The Bastion of Liberty: Leiden University Today and Yesterday (Amsterdam University Press - Leiden University Press Academic)

Education & Teaching

Otterspeer, Willem

Higher & Continuing Education

Leiden University Press

<div> In Praise of Ambiguity&nbsp;presents a discourse about the seriousness of play. Erasmus and Huizinga are its main subjects, their books&nbsp;In Praise of Folly&nbsp;(1511) and&nbsp;Homo Ludens&nbsp;(1938) its main texts. Though published more than four hundred years apart, Otterspeer treats those books as contemporaries and asks what they still have to say to us. The main theme of both books is the contrast between two attitudes of life: the conviction that each subject has two or more sides as opposed to the certainty that there is always only one side to the subject. It is relativism versus essentialism, play versus seriousness. In these times of populism and fundamentalism, the relationship between play and seriousness is more significant than ever. Erasmus and Huizinga conceive&nbsp;a compromise as brilliant as it is paradoxical: turn seriousness into play, play into seriousness. Their solution is the life blood of literature. Literature is always paradoxical, always "true"&nbsp;and "not true'&nbsp;at the same time, both reality and fiction. Ambiguity is its home territory. Literature is the best answer to the purity and peremptoriness of prophets. </div>

In Praise of Ambiguity: Erasmus, Huizinga and the Seriousness of Play

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Johan Huizinga, one of the founders of cultural history, ranks among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Published in the 1930s, his The Waning of the Middle Ages, Homo Ludens and Erasmus were immediately recognised as masterworks and widely translated. Perhaps the most influential is Huizinga’s study of the formative role of play in human culture in the celebrated Homo Ludens. This engaging study by the renowned Dutch scholar Willem Otterspeer shows the same hallmark passion with which Huizinga immersed himself in history. For Huizinga, philology was the mother of all interpretative endeavour, the master skill from which all branches of humanities originate and to which they all ultimately return. Reading and writing were both part of a collective ritual that channeled human passion into beautiful forms, while passion, and how to master it, remained the fundamental fact of human life. Throughout this powerful analysis of Huizinga’s oeuvre, Otterspeer remains faithful to his main philosophical tenets, in which contrast and harmony, memory and desire, are the warp and weft of his work. And again, this is precisely what Otterspeer does. Reading and writing, passion and detachment, method and mysticism are here combined in a way that would have delighted Huizinga himself.

Reading Huizinga

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Amsterdam University Press

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Books by Otterspeer, Willem