Toy stories: A metaphysics of playthings

Abstract Although toys are culturally ubiquitous, they have received little attention in the philosophical tradition. Existing accounts define toys in contrast to games or purely in relation to play. I argue that both strategies are inadequate: the former offers only a negative and incomplete account, while the latter is overly broad. As an alternative, I propose a novel definition of toys based on a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: x is a toy if and only if x is an artifactual, inanimate, and manipulable continuant, whose proper function—by design or appropriation—is to enable open-ended play, and where x, when replicating a technical artifact of kind K, lacks the proper function of the Ks.