Background: The application of the philosophical mode of investigation called “phenomenology” in the context of sport. Objective: The goal is to show how and why the phenomenological method is very often misused in the sportrelated research. Methods: Interpretation of the key texts, explanation of their meaning. Results: The confrontation of concrete sport-related texts with the original meaning of the key phenomenological notions shows mainly three types of misuse – the confusion of phenomenology with immediacy, with an epistemologically subjectivist stance (phenomenalism), (...) and with empirical research oriented towards objects in the world. Conclusions: Many of the discussed authors try to take over the epistemological validity of phenomenology for their research, which itself is not phenomenological, and it seems that this is because they lack such a methodological foundation. The authors believe that an authentically phenomenological analysis of sport is possible, but it must respect the fundamental distinctions that differentiate phenomenology from other styles of thinking. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to differentiate between religion and spirituality more strictly, or, specifically, between the religious and spiritual aspects of sport. The text is written in an autoethnographic genre from an ‘outsider’ position, by an author who is not Christian. Religion, including Christianity, represents a connectedness between the natural world and an ontologically different reality and its transcendence towards the sacrum. But spirituality is the centre of the human way of being and a manifestation of personality. So (...) spirituality and spiritual values can and should be an integral part of human movement, including sport, while any religion is not an inherent quality of sport but an external factor that is only accidentally associated with the area of human physical activity. Despite this fact, the argumentation leads toward a conclusion that sport can serve as a tool and means for the realization of Christian values. If the instrumentality of sport means the realization of love as a basic Christian attitude to all people, then this should be a positive outcome not only for religious people, but also for agnostics and even atheists. (shrink)

The designation of Diego Maradona’s ‘handball’ goal, that it was an intervention by God himself, brings the phenomena of sport and religion into an interrelationship. The basic thesis of this paper is that, despite many of their phenomenal similarities, explicit religion is not, and cannot be, substantially related to sport, as the two manifest themselves in different ways of being. This thesis is supported by arguments from three philosophical areas: 1. The ontological dimension of the manifestation of the sacred in (...) the profane through the process of hierophany in sport does not refer to a specific deity or God, and is therefore not a presentation but an indirect representation of the sacred; 2. The epistemological perspective of the intentional relation of consciousness to religious ritual justifies the necessity of situating them in an overall horizon of references and meanings to the horizon of the lifeworld; 3. The existential and experiential aspects of transformative sport experiences transform the horizon of meanings of empirical reality, but lack the sacramental perspective. Implicit religion as a possibility of transition on a continuum of complementary existential states is a suitable explicative framework for analyzing the phenomenal similarities and essential differences of religion and sport. (shrink)

The title of the book refers to a banner at a hockey game in the early 1980s, on which were words scribbled ‘On the 8th day, God created Gretzky’. If God created the world in six days and rested on...

The paper asks the question, whether nakedness embodies a potential wisdom. It deals with two different approaches to the phenomenon of nakedness: the first one rejecting, the second one appreciating the corporeality. The authors show different meanings the various cultures and civilizations attributed to nakedness, e.g. nakedness as a religious symbol of social subordination or belittling or of a specific national dominance . Attention is paid also to the meanings of nakedness in Jainism, where the nakedness is a symbol of (...) non-possessiveness; in Christianity, where the approach to nakedness is ambiguous, in tantrism with its vision of a person with numerous bodies, where the role of nakedness and sexuality is seen in cosmic context. Thus the meaning of nakedness remains multiple, depending on its context and visualization. The authors reject the pornography culture of contemporary society in favor of gymnosophy as the hierophany of the naturalness of nakedness. (shrink)

Until recently, English-speaking scholars have had few outlets to review the philosophy of sport literature generated in Slavonic countries. Existing English texts of this nature consist primarily of review essays providing little historical and cultural context from which to understand the development of specific tendencies in lines of inquiry from this part of the world (23,24,27). This article attempts to fill this gap in understanding by 1) briefly describing the cultural history of the Slavonic region, and, within this context, 2) (...) identifying key sport philosophers and their current trends of philosophic thought in sporting practices. It is hoped that this project will better inform scholars of the philosophy of sport research being done in Slavonic nations, will advance new scholarship in the English-speaking world, and will encourage more international collaboration within the discipline of philosophical kinanthropology. (shrink)

This paper points out the potential of using sport for the analysis of society. Cultivated human movement is a specific social and cultural subsystem, yet it becomes a part of wider social discourses by extending some of its characteristics into various other spheres. This process, theorised as sportification, provides as useful concept to examine the permeation of certain phenomena from the area of sport into the social reality outside of sport. In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of sportification which (...) we parallel with visual culture and spectatorship practices in the Renaissance era. The emphasis in our investigation is on theatricality and performativity; particularly, the superficial spectator engagement with modern sport and sporting spectacles. Unlike the significance afforded to visualisation and deeper symbolic interpretation in Renaissance art, contemporary cultural shifts have changed and challenged the ways in which the active a.. (shrink)