The first goal of this paper is to reply to a number of criticisms levied by Gunnar Breivik and Robert L. Simon against an account of sporting skills I published almost 20 years ago in which I distinguished between constitutive and restorative skills and examined their normative significance. To accomplish this goal, I first summarize my characterization and classification of skills and then detail the criticisms. After responding to the latter, and thus reconsidering and hopefully strengthening my account of skill (...) in sport, I turn my attention to Scott Kretchmar and Tim Elcombe’s inquiry into the skills involved in competitive sport. These authors claim that contesting skills demand the same respect usually accorded to testing skills. The second goal of this paper is then to explore Kretchmar and Elcombe’s inquiry under the light of my reconsidered analysis of skill. I specifically advocate a plausible relationship, both in terms of their distinctive character and relative import, between testing and contesting skills and constitutive and restorative skills. In doing so, I seek to present a more comprehensive account of skill in non-competitive and competitive sport. (shrink)

Almost four decades ago, Kathleen Pearson examined deceptive practices in sport using a distinction between strategic and definitional deception. However, the complexity and dynamic nature of sport is not limited to this dual-categorization of deceptive acts and there are other features of deception in sport unaccounted for in Pearson's constructs. By employing Torres’s elucidation of the structure of skills and Suits's concept of the lusory-attitude, a more thorough taxonomy of in-contest sport deception will be presented. Despite the ubiquitous presence of (...) deception in sport, few scholars have examined this concept in the sport philosophy literature since Pearson’s contribution. This paper hopes to advance a deeper understanding of deceptive practices in competitive sport and also comment on the ethical permissibility of certain sport skills from a moral perspective. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that formalism and the logical incompatibility thesis together imply that fouls cannot be part of the game. Some philosophers think this proves that therefore strategic fouls are always morally wrong, but other philosophers think this result undermines formalism itself, since strategic fouls clearly are part of the game and are at least sometimes morally permissible. I show that formalism in fact does accommodate strategic fouls and that it is neutral about whether strategic fouls are morally permissible (...) or not. (shrink)

Contributors to the literature on gamesmanship typically assume that gamesmanship can be clearly distinguished from other legal strategies used in sports. In this article, we argue that this is a m...

Though many scholars have made claims as to the nature of sport, this article argues that these claims tend to narrowly focus on modern ideas derived primarily from Western competitive sport. Thus, most notions of sport fail to capture how various historical and non-Western cultures valued sport. In an attempt to provide a broader and more durable description of the nature of sport, this article argues that sports are fundamentally about telling a story about ourselves. These stories are meaningful narratives. (...) Meaningful narratives, the article argues, exist in three ways: the individual, the collaborative, and the collective. By seeing sport as inherently about ‘a story we tell ourselves about ourselves’, the article concludes that not only do philosophers realize a more complete understanding of what sport is about but also receive and apply this understanding to normative debates within sport ethics. (shrink)