26/02/2026
A lovely post about Grant Tavinor from Hamish Rennie
Associate Professor (Planning & Environmental Management) at Lincoln University New ZealandAssociate Professor (Planning & Environmental Management) at Lincoln University New Zealand
6mo • 6 months ago • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn
Sadly our beloved faculty colleague, philosopher Grant Tavinor passed away last week. Grant served for many years as chair of the University Human Ethics Committee. Planning alumni may recall him teaching the second year course "The Living City".
As many Lincoln University alumni are on linkedin and may well have missed the notice of his passing I am posting the following which was written by our Interim Dean Emma Stewart here:
"It has been a terribly sad week for our Faculty. We have lost a treasured colleague, friend and scholar. During his 22 years of service, Grant Tavinor made an indelible mark on the Faculty, and beyond. Not long after the news broke, I had a lovely visit from a former student who revealed that Grant had expanded the way she sees the world, and that he was fantastic at explaining big philosophical concepts. She always looked forward to the next class. As a teacher, I don’t think it gets much better than that.
As other tributes flow in we also realise how modest Grant was. Clearly, he was a founding scholar in his discipline. His former PhD supervisor, Emeritus Professor Stephen Davies, noted Grant’s first book “The Art of Videogames” (2009) is “particularly noteworthy for being the first philosophically sophisticated, book-length treatment of its subject. Its importance is apparent from the explosion in the philosophical literature of books and articles on various aspects of videogames that followed its appearance. Most of the philosophers who work in this sub-area are members of the American Society for Aesthetics or the British Society of Aesthetics and I know Grant was widely respected and admired in these international, professional groups. But more than that, the accessible style and clarity of The Art of Videogames facilitated engagement with many non-philosophers in the vast gaming community, so Grant’s influence reached far beyond the academy”. Given these comments, I thought it would be appropriate to share a small selection of Grant’s work:
Tavinor, G. (2009). The Art of Video Games. United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell. https://lnkd.in/gMsvSMTe
Tavinor, G. (2010). Videogames and aesthetics. Philosophy Compass, 5(8), 624-634. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00317.x
Tavinor, G. A. (2017). What's my motivation? Video games and interpretative performance. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 75(1, Winter 2017), 23-33. doi:10.1111/jaac.12334
Tavinor, G. (2019). On virtual transparency. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 77(2), 145-156. doi:10.1111/jaac.12626
Tavinor, G. (2022). The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality. USA: Routledge. Retrieved from https://lnkd.in/g_kWau28
Tavinor, G. (2023). Against Metaphysical Interpretations of VR. In Exploring Extended Realities Metaphysical Psychological and Ethical Challenges (pp. 40-56). doi:10.4324/9781003359494-5
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