do you like to play? Or at least from time to time? The answer to this question is probably yes, for example, if one realizes that over 30 million Germans at least occasionally play parlor or computer games and over 20 million at least occasionally play the lottery. . And with more than 13 million underage children, millions of adults probably play occasionally, too.
Of course, one question that comes to mind when reading a list like this is: What do all these games have in common? Is this Call of Duty, Spiral of Fortune, Monopoly, Cheese Box and My Left, Left Seat Free? Philosophically, one might ask: can all of these leisure activities be reduced to a general, defined word “sport”?
The traditional, so-called hierarchical or taxonomic way of defining concepts dates back at least to Aristotle’s time. It deals with the specification of the next higher genus (»Genus Proximum«) and the peculiar difference (Specific difference, »Differential Specific»). The next higher genus indicates the population that is already known. The peculiar difference is the property shared by all the objects within the population that fall under the concept (and no other).
Thus a “rectangle” can be defined as a quadrilateral (the next higher genus) in which all angles are right angles (strange differences). It is quite possible to put the same group of individuals under different definitions – a rectangle can also be defined, for example, as a parallelogram with diagonals of equal length.
