In his recent work, ‘Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor’, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the ‘cornerstone of aesthetic theory’. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend the (...) usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi’s distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art. (shrink)

Philosophic inquiry into the mental states of elite athletes during skilled motor performance continues to grow. In contrast to the bulk of these works that focus almost exclusively on skillful performance, this paper examines athletic motor behavior from a point of inexactness – or even failure – in athletic performance. Utilizing the works of Michael Polanyi, who believed that both ideas of achievement and failure were equally necessary to understand the behavior of living things and their physical actions, I examine (...) the notion of failure as a framework to scrutinize the cognitive processes occurring during the development and performance of skilled motor behavior. After reviewing Polanyi’s conceptions of personal knowing to locate the source of inaccuracy in human activity, I present Polanyi’s distinction between two kinds of mistakes and apply each to inaccurate sport performance. I then suggest that mistakes in sport should be re-conceptualized beyond their current negative connotations. Instead, conceptions of mistakes should also include respect for ‘man’s most distinguished act’ – that being the production of knowledge. From this expanded perspective, the value of inexact motor performance can be found in addition to notions of uncertainty and skill development in what Polanyi calls ‘metaphysical implication of a groping for reality’. In some final thoughts, I will suggest future implications of the value of the inexact on broader sport issues. (shrink)

Within the context of sports, the term 'miracle' is regularly associated with game-winning shots, holes-in-one, completed Hail Marys and other improbable outcomes. These conceptions of miracles largely focus on the success of specific sport actions at specific times when such success is deemed highly improbable. While prominent in the popular sports literature, most scholars agree that this perspective on miracles is very simple and highly unsophisticated. Events portrayed as simply 'beating the odds' would represent pale versions of miracles at best. (...) Some conceptions of miracles, however, include characteristics that reach beyond improbable outcomes. From more sophisticated perspectives, miracles are often viewed as divine action guiding the ordinary course of human experience. To be considered 'miraculous', improbable outcomes in sport would need to be perceived as interactions between the supernatural (God or other divine entity) and the natural (physical world). In addition, miraculous occurrences would have to be a part of a divine master-plan. Scholars argue that without such connections, miracles would yield no direction or meaning to the evolving world. The differences between these two perceptions raises several questions: Why do some view these extraordinary athletic performances from spiritually sophisticated perspectives while others have not the 'ears to hear' or the 'eyes to see' the divine possibilities in these experiences? Why are common uses and perceptions of miracles in sport simplistic and thin? What is a sophisticated view of miracles? What human abilities and processes are needed for one to achieve a sophisticated perspective? And, finally, what is the purpose of the true or sophisticated miracle in sport? In this paper, I will examine the notion of the miracle in sport. At its core, this paper describes how an athlete intellectually and spiritually moves from the unsophisticated to the sophisticated conception of a miracle. Through the writings of James, Lewis, Polanyi and others, I will show how human intellectual operations allow one to have 'ears to hear' and 'eyes to see' the spiritually miraculous in sport. I will begin by presenting an unsophisticated version of miracles in sport. After critically examining several types of miracles, I will present a more sophisticated definition. I will then explore the human processes necessary to view miraculous experiences in sport as interactions between the natural and the supernatural rather than interpreting these experiences simply as improbable outcomes. Finally, I will show how miracles present opportunities for spiritual conversion and have a use and place in the divine's master plan. (shrink)

In his recent work, ‘Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor’, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the ‘cornerstone of aesthetic theory’. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend the (...) usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi’s distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Two‐Wheeled Sensations The “Bicycling Method” Lessons from the Saddle Finding the Words Notes.

To date, scholars have side-stepped examining the applicability of the Anti-Blowout thesis in parallel sports. This essay is an attempt to test this construct in the context of endurance footraces....

Volume I. Metaphysics and sport -- volume II. Ethics of sport -- volume III. Sport and the good life -- volume IV. Sport and education.

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 article presents the first author's experiences as an Australian doctoral student undertaking a PhD by publication in the arena of the social sciences. She published nine articles in refereed journals and a peer-reviewed book chapter during the course of her PhD. We situate this experience in the context of current discussion about doctoral publication practices, in order to inform both postgraduate students and academics in general. The article discusses recent thinking about PhD by publication and identifies the factors that (...) students should consider prior to adopting this approach, in terms of university requirements, supervisors' attitudes, the research subject matter, intellectual property, capacity and working style, and issues of co-authorship. It then outlines our perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of undertaking a PhD by publication. We suggest that, in general, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. We conclude by reflecting on how the first author's experiences relate to current discussions about fostering publications by doctoral students. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

Although the relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, this is the first full-length study of this key concept. Showing that mereology, or the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology, Simons surveys and critiques previous theories--especially the standard extensional view--and proposes a new account that encompasses both temporal and modal considerations. Simons's revised theory not only allows him to offer fresh solutions to long-standing problems, but also has far-reaching consequences for (...) our understanding of a host of classical philosophical concepts. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, yet until now there has been no full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of such classical philosophical (...) concepts as identity, individual, class, substance and accident, matter, form, essence, dependence, and integral whole. It also enables the author to offer new solutions to long-standing problems surrounding these concepts, such as the Ship of Theseus Problem and the issue of mereological essentialism. The author shows by his use of formal techniques that classical philosophical problems are amenable to rigorous treatment, and the book represents a synthesis of issues and methods from the analytical tradition and from the older continental realist tradition of Brentano and the early Husserl. (shrink)

For most of the history of metaphysics, the subject has been dominated by the concept of substance. There is an everyday commonsense notion of substance which is perfectly harmless and which I shall defend against attempts to remove it or revise it away. But I deny that substance has to be construed as a primitive even in everyday terms. Borrowing Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, I press the legitimate claims of revisionary metaphysics and argue that there is no (...) place for a fundamental concept of substance within it, although aspects of the concept are likely to find their place therein. (shrink)

A way of reading the Tractatus has been proposed which, according to its advocates, is importantly novel and essentially distinct from anything to be found in the work of such previously influential students of the book as Anscombe, Stenius, Hacker or Pears. The point of difference is differently described, but the currently most used description seems to be Goldfarb’s term ‘resolution’ – hence one speaks of ‘the resolute reading’. I’ll shortly ask what resolution is. For now, it is enough that (...) it aims to give full weight to the penultimate section of the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein declares his propositions to be nonsense, where giving full weight to that declaration involves not hearing it as allowing that those ‘nonsensical’ propositions might have another kind of ‘sense’. In that same section Wittgenstein explains that these nonsense propositions, while devoid of meaning, have a use: to make the kind of use of them that their author intends – and so to understand him – requires recognizing that they are nonsense; and through that recognition one ‘surmounts’ these propositions, and is led ‘to see the world aright’. So there is a point to all this nonsense. What point? (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the idea that the world is the totality of facts, not of things – with what is involved in thinking of the world in that way, and why one might do so. It approaches this issue through a comparison between Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the identity theory of truth proposed by Hornsby and McDowell. The paper's positive conclusion is that there is a genuine affinity between these two. A negative contention is that the modern identity theory (...) is vulnerable to a complaint of idealism that the Tractatus can deflect. (shrink)

Traditional views of rationality posit general-purpose decision mechanisms based on logic or optimization. The study of ecological rationality focuses on uncovering the “adaptive toolbox” of domain-specific simple heuristics that real, computationally bounded minds employ, and explaining how these heuristics produce accurate decisions by exploiting the structures of information in the environments in which they are applied. Knowing when and how people use particular heuristics can facilitate the shaping of environments to engender better decisions.

Introduction Max Horkheimer was born on February in Stuttgart. By the time he died, on 7 July in Nuremberg, he had played a decisive role in launching and ...

Wittgenstein presents in the Tractatus a variable purporting to capture the general form of proposition. One understanding of what Wittgenstein is doing there, an understanding in line with the ‘new’ reading of his work championed by Diamond, Conant and others, sees it as a deflationary or even an implosive move—a move by which a concept sometimes put by philosophers to distinctively metaphysical use is replaced, in a perspicuous notation, by an innocent device of generalization, thereby dispersing the clouds of philosophy (...) that formerly surrounded the concept. By asking how Wittgenstein supposed his variable to work, and what work he imagined it was fit for, the paper questions the adequacy of that understanding. (shrink)

While theories of rationality and decision making typically adopt either a single-powertool perspective or a bag-of-tricks mentality, the research program of ecological rationality bridges these with a theoretically-driven account of when different heuristic decision mechanisms will work well. Here we described two ways to study how heuristics match their ecological setting: The bottom-up approach starts with psychologically plausible building blocks that are combined to create simple heuristics that fit specific environments. The top-down approach starts from the statistical problem facing the (...) organism and a set of principles, such as the bias– variance tradeoff, that can explain when and why heuristics work in uncertain environments, and then shows how effective heuristics can be built by biasing and simplifying more complex models. We conclude with challenges these approaches face in developing a psychologically realistic perspective on human rationality. (shrink)

This book with an introduction by Witold Marciszewski, views the history of philosophy and logic from 1837 to 1939 from the perspective of the cradle of modern exact philosophy - Central Europe. In a series of case studies, it illuminates the developments in this region, most notably in Austria and Poland, examining thinkers such as Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Lesniewski, and Tarski, as well as the logicians like Frege and Russell with whom they bore a close resemblance. The book (...) challenges established views about the history of philosophy and logic in Europe, and shows the vitality of the Central European tradition. (shrink)

This paper is a review of work on Newman's objection to epistemic structural realism (ESR). In Section 2, a brief statement of ESR is provided. In Section 3, Newman's objection and its recent variants are outlined. In Section 4, two responses that argue that the objection can be evaded by abandoning the Ramsey-sentence approach to ESR are considered. In Section 5, three responses that have been put forward specifically to rescue the Ramsey-sentence approach to ESR from the modern versions of (...) the objection are discussed. Finally, in Section 6, three responses are considered that are neutral with respect to one's approach to ESR and all argue (in different ways) that the objection can be evaded by introducing the notion that some relations/structures are privileged over others. It is concluded that none of these suggestions is an adequate response to Newman's objection, which therefore remains a serious problem for ESRists. Introduction Epistemic Structural Realism 2.1 Ramsey-sentences and ESR 2.2 WESR and SESR The Objection 3.1 Newman's version 3.2 Demopoulos and Friedman's and Ketland's versions Replies that Abandon the Ramsey-Sentence Approach to ESR 4.1 Redhead's reply 4.2 French and Ladyman's reply Replies Designed to Rescue the Ramsey-Sentence Approach 5.1 Zahar's reply 5.2 Cruse's reply 5.3 Melia and Saatsi's reply Replies that Argue that Some Structures/Relations are Privileged 6.1 A Carnapian reply 6.2 Votsis' reply 6.3 The Merrill/Lewis/Psillos reply Summary CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), we (...) explore fast and frugal heuristics – simple rules in the mind's adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments. In this précis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search. These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data – that is, simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program. Key Words: adaptive toolbox; bounded rationality; decision making; elimination models; environment structure; heuristics; ignorance-based reasoning; limited information search; robustness; satisficing; simplicity. (shrink)

Introduction By the late fifth century BCE Panini had composed the Astadhyayi, consisting of nearly 4000 rules giving a precise and fairly complete ...

In his doctoral dissertation Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles Brentano tried to show that (against criticism of this) one could indeed give a principle defense of Aristotle's table of categories as a coherent system. In later texts Brentano appears sharply critical of Aristotle, mainly in respect to Aristotle's mereology, or theory of part and whole, and to his theory of substance and accident. It is argued that Brentano hadn't observed that Aristotle's belief that there are as many (...) predicative senses of 'be' as there are categories of being is based not on his mereology but on his theory of definition. Overlooking this Brentano was led to far reaching inadequate ontological consequences. (shrink)

Since the advent of modernity and Christianity in Africa, indigenous African holistic healing, and especially its psychological aspect, has been given negative publicity. This article examines ways in which African traditional medicine men made and continue to make a significant contribution to healing in their societies. It argues that due to the numerous challenges in contemporary African societies, there is need for a pragmatic approach, in which all innovations that can alleviate human suffering are taken on board and encouraged as (...) long as they do not compromise people’s health. (shrink)

In clinical ethics, there remains a great deal of uncertainty regarding the appropriateness of attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for certain patients. Although the issue continues to receive ample attention and various frameworks have been proposed for navigating such cases, most discussions draw heavily on the notion of harm as a central consideration. In the following, I use emerging philosophical literature on the notion of harm to argue that the ambiguities and disagreement about harm create important and oft-overlooked challenges for the (...) ethics of CPR. I begin by elucidating the standard account of harm, called the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA). I then show that three challenges to the CCA—preemptive harms, the harm of death, and non-experiential harms—are particularly salient when assessing potential harms for candidates of CPR and likely impact-related decision-making and communication. I extend this argument to explore how the ambiguities of harm might extend to other realms of clinical decision-making, such as the use and limitations of life-sustaining treatments. To address these challenges, I propose two strategies for identifying and minimizing the impact of such uncertainty: first, clinicians and ethicists ought to promote pluralistic conversations that account for different understandings of harm; second, they ought to invoke harm-independent considerations when discussing the ethics of CPR in order to reflect the nuances of such conversations. These strategies, coupled with a richer philosophical understanding of harm, promise to help clinicians and ethicists navigate the prevalent and difficult cases involving patient resuscitation and many other harm-based decisions in the clinical setting. (shrink)

In this paper we articulate and diagnose a previously unrecognized problem for theories of entitlement, what we call the Claims Conundrum. It applies to all entitlements that are originally generated by some claim-generating action, such as laboring, promising, or contract-signing. The Conundrum is spurred by the very plausible thought that a later claim to the object to which one is entitled is a function of whether that original claim-generating action is attributable to one. This is further assumed to depend on (...) one’s being identical to the person who performed the claim-generating action. But the right theory of personal identity for grounding these later claims proves quite elusive. In demonstrating both the Claims Conundrum and diagnosing its source, we begin with its instantiation in John Locke’s theories of personal identity and initial acquisition, and then we gradually expand its net to include both Lockean and non-Lockean theories of both, moving ultimately to show that this is a problem for most entitlements generally. We then diagnose the source of the trouble, showing that a basic assumption about the link between attributability and identity that most people take to be obvious is in fact false, clearing a path for future investigation into this overlooked but serious problem’s resolution. (shrink)

Agricultural Enlightenment explores the economic underpinnings of the Enlightenment to argue the case that the expansion of the so-called knowledge economy in the second half of the eighteenth century powerfully influenced governments and all those who worked in agriculture, or who sought to derive profit from the productive use of the land.

rené descartes famously and explicitly rejects appeals to final causes in natural philosophy, suggesting that such appeals depend on knowledge of God’s inscrutable ends.For since I now know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge. And for this reason alone I consider the whole kind of causes, customarily sought from (...) an end, to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating God’s ends.1This rejection did not go unnoticed nor without controversy. In the Fifth.. (shrink)