ABSTRACTMy goal in this article is to give a portrait of how modern sport philosophy, which started in 1972, developed from relatively narrow paradigmatic borders to become a diverse and multi-para...

This engaging and informative text will hold the attention of students and scholars as they take a journey through time to understand the role that history and philosophy have played in shaping the course of sport and physical education in Western and selected non-Western civilizations. Using appropriate theoretical and interpretive frameworks, students will investigate topics such as the historical relationship between mind and body; what philosophers and intellectuals have said about the body as a source of knowledge; educational philosophy (...) and the value of physical education and/or sport; philosophical positions that have impacted the historical development of sport and physical education; the history of women in sport and physical education; the role and scope of sport and physical education in Ancient Greece and Rome; the Ancient Olympic Games; the relationship between sport and religion in ancient and modern times; the theoretical and professional development of physical education; the rise of sport in modern America; the history and politics of the modern Olympic Games; and the contributions of men, women, and social movements to the development of sport and physical education from ancient times to the modern era. (shrink)

(2007). Sport, ethics and philosophy; context, history, prospects. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1080/17511320601173329.

Volume 46, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 111-114.

The philosophy of sports is a relatively young discipline in China which we argue, can be divided into four stages of development over the past four decades. This paper attempts to map the history...

This book examines doping in Germany, with primary attention given to West Germany, from 1950 to the present, including what societal, cultural, and institutional pressures arose after WWII to bring about such prevalence of doping in the country.

This book rethinks the discussion of sport as a cinematic subject. Arguing for the vitality of the sports film as distinctively 'modern' genre, the book looks at its innovative potential to capture twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport in all its complexity. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout, the book integrates work and ideas from film studies with thinking from sports psychology, philosophy, data theory and ecocriticism. In its detailed analyses of a wide-ranging group of films, the book (...) shows how film, from fictional works to biopics to experimental documentaries, can illuminate individual sporting experience, as well as sport's wider place in modern life. (shrink)

In Germany, philosophy of sport is still a young discipline which developed in the 20th century as a result of the growing significance of sport in society. Whereas the academic discussion in Germany which took place in the founding phase of the discipline in the early 1970s had much in common with that conducted in the Anglo-American academic community thanks to such integrative figures as Hans Lenk and Gunter Gebauer, who hosted the international conferences held in Germany by the Philosophic (...) Society for the Study of Sport (PSSS)1 in the early 1980s and the 1990s, the transnational dialogue abated almost completely in the following years.2 As a consequence, philosophy of sport in Germany underwent a development of its own and acquired its own profile. The specific characteristics of German philosophy of sport are not rooted so much in any cultural particularities of sport practice, as is the case for bicycling in the Netherlands or hunting and cricket in England, for example, but rather in regional philosophical traditions established by such philosophers as Wittgenstein, Plessner, Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel.3 In order to give the reader an overview of the historical development and current status of research in philosophy of sport in Germany, relevant exemplary publications will be presented in the following and treated firstly in terms of their genesis, secondly in the context of current trends and tendencies, thirdly from the perspective of differences and commonalities between the German and the Anglo-American academic discussion, and fourthly concerning status and degree of institutionalization. Lastly an outlook on future developments will be given. (shrink)

Sports are as varied as the people who play them. We run, jump, and swim. We kick, hit, and shoot balls. We ride sleds in the snow and surf in the sea. From the Olympians of ancient Greece to today's professional athletes, from adult pickup soccer games to children's gymnastics classes, people at all levels of ability at all times and in all places have engaged in sport. What drives this phenomenon? In Sport, the neuroscientist Jay Schulkin argues that (...) biology and culture do more than coexist when we play sports—they blend together seamlessly, propelling each other toward greater physical and intellectual achievement. To support this claim, Schulkin discusses history, literature, and art—and engages philosophical inquiry and recent behavioral research. He connects sport's basic neural requirements, including spatial and temporal awareness, inference, memory, agency, direction, competitive spirit, and endurance, to the demands of other human activities. He affirms sport's natural role as a creative evolutionary catalyst, turning the external play of sports inward and bringing insight to the diversion that defines our species. Sport, we learn, is a fundamental part of human life. (shrink)

In this article, we examine philosophy of sport as a field of study in Japan, its history, characteristics, and future prospects, as part of a contribution to the international development of the discipline of sport philosophy. The Japan Society for the Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education has been holding an annual sport philosophy conference every year since its inception in 1978. Nevertheless, the trends of sport philosophy in Japan have not been conveyed abroad. The language barrier between Japanese (...) and English as an international communication tool makes it difficult to spread our work on the philosophy of sport throughout the world. The question arises as to whether the philosophy of sport in Japan has the same trends as those in the Western countries. Is it reasonable to assume that it has different aspects and interests than philosophy of sport in English-speaking countries? We will also try to address these questions for our audience. (shrink)

The Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) have their own traditions when it comes down to sports. Sports such as football, cycling (Belgium) or skating (the Netherlands) take center stage with the sports-minded public, and are a central element in popular culture, somewhat similar to the way cricket is part of the British culture. Since many years now, social scientists and philosophers in this countries have started to think about the impact of sports on everyday society (...) and the different aspects involved in it. At first, in the eighties, topics like physicality, game, fair play and the definition of sport were discussed; later on, and especially from the beginning of the 20th century the debate on doping, enhancement in general and the relationship of sports and technology became more prominent; today, also themes like sports and nationality or sports and the value of sports are at the centre of the debates. In this article, we present an overview of the development of the philosophy of sports in the Low Countries in the last two decades. We sketch the main strains of interest, and focus on the most relevant topics. In particular we concentrate on the characteristic features and issues of philosophy of sports in the Low Countries: what are these features and issues? How can they be explained and appreciated, and how do they contribute to the international, largely Anglo-American and analytical debate in philosophy of sports. (shrink)

Although sports and athletics provide a nearly universal social context for the learning of such cherished values as courage, honesty, discipline, communal efforts, and the pursuit of excellence, little attention has been devoted to the philosophy of this important element in human life. In a fascinating survey of the philosophic dimensions of sports and athletics, the author delves into a variety of topics, including game and play theory, play-forms and game principles in history, existentialism and sports, (...) the popularity of sports, its educational values, the function of ethics and moral values, and the role of competition, violence and aggression, self discovery, spirituality, and joy. He also considers recurrent problems such as corruption, the excessive emphasis on winning, and the exploitation of student athletes and suggests specific ways of preserving perspective and integrity. -- From publisher's description. (shrink)

Good Sport argues that the values and meanings embedded within sport provide the guidance we need to make difficult decisions about fairness and performance-enhancing technologies. By examining how sport's history, rules and practices identify and celebrate natural talent and dedication, the book illuminates not just what we champion in the athletic arena but more broadly what we value in human achievement.

In this essay I explore the relationship of sport to art. I do not intend to argue that sport is one of the arts. I will rather argue that sport and art have a commonality, in that both are alienated philosophy. This is to propose – in an argument that has its roots in Hegel's aesthetics – that sport and art may both be interpreted as a way of reflecting upon metaphysical and normative issues, albeit in media that are alien (...) to philosophy's conceptual language. The medium of art is the manipulation of sensuous materials, such as stone, paint, or sound. The medium of sport is the pursuit of a physical challenge, at which the athlete may fail. I will develop this argument by borrowing from the philosophy of art of Arthur C. Danto. In particular, I will suggest that a parallel to his concept of ‘artworld’ can be seen in a ‘sportworld’. As the artworld is an ‘atmosphere of theory’ and a ‘knowledge of history’ through which an event is interpreted and thereby constituted as art, so a sportworld is the atmosphere of theory through which an event is constituted as sport. I will argue that much of the existing discussion of the relationship between sport and art is grounded in an ill-conceived aesthetics. In order to be appreciated and appropriately interpreted, sport must be understood within a modernist aesthetics and hermeneutics. As such, the core issue of an aesthetics of sport is not that of beauty, but rather of the meaning of the sport, and what I shall call the capacity of sport to ‘speak as a world’ – to bring to consciousness through play the taken-for-granted cultural conditions through which our social lives are constituted, and within which metaphysical and normative problems are articulated. I will propose that the hermeneutics of music provides a useful model for the interpretation of sport. (shrink)

Sport often seems to teeter on the edge, on one side of the entertainment industry, on the other of cheating violent aggression: from a make-believe simulacrum of serious play to a nasty chemically enhanced descent into a Hobbesian state of nature. Such perversions lend credibility to reductive views of sport itself as a metonymic feature of capitalism. But that sport as entertainment means fixing it to produce exciting outcomes and amplifying capacities to superhuman proportions, while sport as aggression means treating (...) rules as mere obstacles to brute dominance, shows how far we in fact are from these abysses, even in the days of the Coca Cola/Nike Olympics, Vinny Jones and cricket sledging. In this essay, I try to delineate through history— from Homer to … Gomer?—a common culture of sport and sportsmanship that, with its excesses and perversions, continues to operate as one, albeit complex, ideal of human excellence. (shrink)

Analysing race as the metaphor of life - by means of which Thomas Hobbes describes the passions in The Elements of Law, natural and politic - seems to be the right occasion to underline the relationship between the mechanistic idea of human being and sports activity. This approach makes a paradigm come to the surface - where factors such as extreme competition, the pursuit of success at any cost, ineliminable fear of defeat confirm the relevance of the Malmesbury born (...) philosopher's thought, even within the so popular but little investigated field of sport. (shrink)

This essay concerns the place of e-sport in the history of sport. E-sport is construed as an entity in this corpus, by seeking out historical counterparts that display similar forms of play and organisation. Thus, ancient Roman games are identified as an early instance of what could be called public gaming, i.e. competitive digital games in a public setting. Two recent philosophical statements regarding the history of sport furnish the point of departure of the analysis: Steven Connor's historicising (...) of the term sport, and Heather Reid's treatise of virtue in the games and athletics of antiquity. The varying content of sport in its course through time is discussed foremost in relation to how the human and nonhuman elements have been organised. In order to settle the role of public gaming in the history of sport, two aspects of Roman games are highlighted to 'fabricate' its legacy in the history of e-sport: Pollice Verso and simulations. It is concluded that the way Roman games ha... (shrink)

While sport has been practised since pre-historic times, it is a relatively new subject of systematic philosophical enquiry. Indeed, the philosophy of sport as an academic sub-field dates back only to the 1970s. Yet, in this short time, it has grown into a vibrant area of philosophical research that promises both to deepen our understanding of sport and to inform sports practice. Recent controversies at the elite and professional level have highlighted the ethical dimensions of sport in particular. Lance (...) Armstrong’s use of performance-enhancing drugs raised new issues in the ethics of cheating, middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has challenged prevailing rules around sex classification in sport, and Oscar Pistorius’s prosthesis has problematized the distinction between able-bodied and disabled sport. While philosophical analysis may help to achieve a deeper understanding of sport, such analysis may also illuminate problems of philosophy beyond sport, ranging from the nature of skill to the ethics of altruism. -/- This entry proceeds in three sections. Section 1 introduces the philosophy of sport with particular emphasis on the history of systematic philosophical thinking about sport. Section 2 examines the nature and value of sport, and it considers the main normative theories of sport developed in the literature. Section 3 addresses a cluster of topics that are central to the philosophy of sport, including: sportsmanship; cheating; performance enhancement; violent and dangerous sport; sex, gender, and race; fans and spectators; disability sport; and the aesthetics of sport. (shrink)

This article explores the ethical implications of recent discussions that naturalize the relationship between race, the body and sport within the frame of genetic science. Many suggestions of a racially distributed genetic basis for athletic ability and performance are strategically posited as a resounding critique of the `politically correct' meta-narratives of established sociological and anthropological forms of explanation that emphasize the social and cultural construction of race. I argue that this use of genetic science in order to describe and explain (...) common-sense impressions of racial physiology and sporting ability is founded on erroneous premises of objectivity and disinterest, and inflates the analytical efficacy of scientific truth claims. I suggest that assertions of a value-free science of racial athletic ability reify race as inherited permanent biological characteristics that produce social hierarchies and are more characteristic of a longer history of `racial science'. (shrink)

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this (...) book, sports fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are. (shrink)

Why do billions of people around the world love sports? This informative book attempts to find out why—by examining sports in all its facets, providing an overview of the history of sports, with a constant focus upon the social conditions through which sport arises.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sport Realism: A Law-Inspired Theory of Sport by Aaron HARPERTim ElcombeHARPER, Aaron. Sport Realism: A Law-Inspired Theory of Sport. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. viii + 172 pp. Cloth, $95.00At a crucial moment in the 2019 World Series all six on-field umpires, in communication with Major League Baseball’s headquarters, engaged in an 8-minute discussion to determine if a baserunner should be called out for interference. The deliberation stemmed (...) from a tension between the formal rules of baseball and the game’s unwritten rules about a baserunner’s traveled path to first base. This example of a “hard case” in sport officiating sets Aaron Harper’s book Sport Realism: A Law-Inspired Theory of Sport in motion. Harper’s aim in Sport Realism is to provide a new “theory of sport” drawing primarily from American legal realism—and supplemented by philosophical pragmatism and virtue jurisprudence. Sport realism, Harper argues, serves as the best resource to understand how rules are applied in sport and how officials make in-game decisions, and it highlights the importance of participants being able to develop an expectation for how calls will be made in the future and to make difficult normative judgments.In chapter 1, Harper provides an excellent overview of the sport philosophy literature related to “theories of sport.” Using a chronological approach, he develops a clear and extensive “history” of the evolution of the field’s most influential theories and their connections to legal theory. Harper summarizes how formalism’s rigid commitment to “constitutive” rules that supposedly define a sport led to criticisms from conventionalists who alternatively generated their account of how nonwritten rules or a sporting ethos defines how a sport is played. However, the laissez-faire nature of conventionalism, as well as the inflexibility of formalism, gave rise to now-dominant interpretivist theories of sport that Harper covers in significant detail. Primarily inspired by Ronald Dworkin, philosophers developed theories that relied on the interpretation of principles that affirmed a sport’s point and purpose. Emergent formulations of interpretivism—from realist accounts to antirealist/historicist versions—all relied on the interpretation of some essential starting point (rules, principles, ethos, deep conventions) to both explain sport and provide officials with normative guidance.Harper regularly lauds interpretivism as the best theory of sport developed to date. However, in chapter 2 he highlights deficiencies with interpretivist accounts via two case studies: New York Yankees’ pitcher Michael Pineda’s “illegal” use of pine tar to improve his grip on the [End Page 147] baseball, as well as Tiger Woods taking a favorable drop after hitting his golf ball into a water hazard. From these two cases, Harper concludes that all variations of interpretivism (from realist to antirealist accounts) fall short in the purpose of developing a theory of sport: to both explain sport (Pineda case) and give a wide swath of formal and informal decision-makers tools to make difficult ethical judgments (Woods case).Harper turns to American legal realism in chapter 3 to develop a superior theory of sport. Crucial to Harper’s sport realism account is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s resistance to understanding law as a set of rules or principles, and instead as an ongoing process of “policymaking” best characterized by the role of the appellate courts. “Understanding the law” from a Holmes perspective, Harper writes, “entails successful prediction of how courts will act in deciding cases... which actions will, in fact, prompt sanction by a court.” This alternative view of the law led to the rise of American legal realism—and subsequently serves as the source of Harper’s sport realism account sketched out in the latter half of chapter 3. According to sport realism, sport ought to be explained by how “it is actually played in order to provide a more accurate account of sport as an activity.” This “best explanation of sport” therefore “provides normative guidance” for sporting challenges.Continuing his development of sport realism, Harper sets out in chapter 4 to define cheating as “an instance of rule-breaking [that] warrants a restorative sanction given by sport officials, and we would expect such sanction to be given if the action... (shrink)

This book places the phenomenon of sports and games in its philological, archeological, and art historical context, and examines its connections to cultural and social history. The temporal scope extends from Tacitus' mention of dice games to courtly falconry and includes the culture of games among 17th century Swedish miners. The thematic spectrum includes among others dice and board games and the chivalrous septem probitates.

This book probes the cultural forces and legacies at play in three events in sports history, exploring how racial, national, sporting, and personal identities overlap and conflict. The author taps into a deep well of Western philosophy and literature to read the resonances in these three moments.

Introduction to the Philosophy of Sport begins with the history of sport, delves into both the metaphysics and ethics of sport, and also addresses dimensions of the social and political elements of sport. This book is a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of sport with a straightforward layout that professors can plan and build their courses around.

The article looks at sport as a form of human action where the participants display various forms of Intentionality. Intentionality may be defined as ‘that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world.’ Sporting actions are about human intentions, beliefs, desires, perceptions and not to forget, movements. This means that sports typically display what we call ‘Intentionality.’ The study of Intentionality and intentional (...) actions has previously received relatively little attention among sport philosophers, but deserves more attention. Even though there is a tension and several differences between continental and analytical approaches to philosophical problems, there is a common understanding of the phenomenon we call ‘Intentionality.’ The debate between John Searle, representing the analytical camp, and Hubert Dreyfus, representing the phenomenological camp, is instructive to see the differences, and also the commonalities between the two approaches. The article starts with a clarification of the concept of Intentionality and sketches some of the history and background of the concept. It then presents the main conceptual framework that Searle uses to distinguish the different types and forms of Intentionality and his views on sporting actions. This is followed by a presentation of the phenomenological approach of Dreyfus and the response by Searle. The article ends by discussing the possibility of a combined and enriched view where a clarification of the logic as well as the phenomenology of sporting actions is needed. It may thus be possible to bridge the gap between the two approaches. (shrink)

In this article we use a hybrid methodology to better understand the skilful performance of sports teams as an exemplar of distributed cognition. We highlight key differences between a team of individual experts and an expert team, and outline the kinds of shared characteristics likely to be found in an expert team. We focus on the way that shared knowledge contributes to expert team performance. In particular, we suggest that certain kinds of shared knowledge and shared skill, potentially developed (...) through a team’s history of playing and training together, facilitate successful coordination. These kinds of shared knowledge and skill may be less developed in a team of experts without a shared history. Exploring the expert performance of sports teams informs our understanding of distributed cognition and collaboration more generally and creates avenues for further philosophical and empirical investigation. (shrink)