No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The hermeneutics of sport: limits and conditions of possibility of our understandings of sport
Abstract
In this paper, linguistic-analytic philosophy has been identified as the dominant methodology in the philosophy of sport. The hermeneutics of sport is contrasted with linguistic-analytic philosophy by analyzing Heidegger’s view of Truth. In doing so, two views of philosophy are compared: ontology or description. Sport hermeneutics’ task has to do with description. Hermeneutical explanations of sport attempt to describe the facticity of sport. Such a facticity is formed by three moments: embodiment, capabilities, and tradition. They are not components of sport that can be identified as essential components but rather, they are identifiable only for analytic purposes. These three above-mentioned elements cannot be identified as elements, because they are intrinsically intertwined forming a unitary network of meaning. The task of sport hermeneutics is to describe the different relationships that compose such a network of meaning. In doing so, sport is a humane activity linked to the constitutive human task of making sense of reality by projecting meaning into it.
... In this regard, what we need to focus on is how to achieve a new balance in the "sporting hermeneutic circle" (F. Frias, 2016) composed of maintaining competitive levels among athletes, ensuring the fascination and trust of the public towards the game itself, and respecting the given rules. Since the first two show themselves to be inherently susceptible to and mouldable by technological mediation and enhancements in terms of overall level of sports performance (George Best was one of the most talented footballers in history, but if he were playing today, with the average level of physicality that players and audiences have become accustomed to, he might not have the same opportunity to showcase his skills), our focus must remain on adjusting and setting rules and limits to ensure fairness and transparency. ...
2024 McNamee Essay Prize - Commendation Winner
This paper explores the evolving relationship between technological advancements and sports, focusing on the controversial topic of genetic modification in athletes.
Drawing parallels from various forms of technological enhancement in sports, such as robot combat and SlamBall, the paper questions whether genetic modification undermines the core values of sportsmanship, including talent, fairness, and competition.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) currently prohibits genetic modifications, citing concerns about the dehumanization of athletic performance. However, this paper argues that genetic enhancement, like other performance aids, can democratize sports by leveling the natural genetic playing field and enabling athletes to better showcase their true talents.
Through comparisons between naturally gifted athletes and those benefiting from genetic or technological enhancements, the paper challenges the notion that enhancements distort the essence of sports. Instead, it proposes that the ethical framework of sports should adapt to embrace genetic technologies while maintaining fairness and transparency.
By fostering an open dialogue on these technologies, this paper contends that the true spirit of sportsmanship — rooted in effort, excellence, and fairness — can be preserved and even enhanced.
... Dentro de las diferen-tes corrientes filosóficas que han tratado de explicar uno de los grandes pilares de la filosofía como es la ética, se elige la corriente fenomenológica hermenéutica contemporánea que incluye autores como Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur o Jean-Paul Sartre. Esta primera elección recae en una perspectiva constructivista del conocimiento, basándonos en toda la contribución que aporta la hermenéutica a la filosofía del deporte (López-Frías, 2011;López-Frías & Edgar, 2016;López-Frías & Gimeno, 2015, 2016a, 2016b) y, con esta, al fenómeno de los esports, entendido como una rama postmoderna del espectáculo deportivo-competitivo. Otro motivo para realizar esta elección recae en la escasa cimentación académica que existe específicamente para este objeto de estudio, por lo que este enfoque nos ayuda a interpretar el fenómeno per se. ...
Los deportes electrónicos, también conocidos como esports, son un rompedor fenómeno basado en competiciones deportivas en las que el ser humano desarrolla y entrena capacidades mentales y físicas bajo el uso de videojuegos competitivos. Su especial acercamiento a las nuevas generaciones ha creado cierta preocupación social sobre la educación, concretamente ética, que ofrece esta manifestación a los más jóvenes. Apoyados en la corriente hermenéutica, nuestro objetivo es analizar, desde un prisma ético, el fenómeno de los esports y como pueden contribuir, están contribuyendo o podrían contribuir a que sus practicantes tengan una vida plena. Entre los elementos analizados encontramos el proceso de virtualización, la corporalidad, la libertad, la virtud, el autoconocimiento o la violencia. Tras el análisis, se puede concluir que esta preocupación y crítica socialmente asentada no está fundamentada pues los deportes electrónicos pueden contribuir a un desarrollo ético del individuo y, con éste, a su educación. De esta forma, el desarrollo ético del sujeto contribuye al desarrollo ético de la sociedad. Algunos aspectos desarrollados pueden las concepciones de corporalidad, género y feminismo, la democratización de la competición humana, la disonancia entre la realidad y la virtualidad, la concepción de la agresividad, la violencia y la catarsis, la idea de libertad como existencia auténtica o las implicaciones del juego y del deporte en la humanidad.
... Osterhoudt's multi-meaningfulness and a constant drift in mind-body duality have a place in a number of philosophical views (e.g., Frias and Monfort 2016;Hyland 1984;Morgan 1976Morgan , 1977. But more than criticism directed at Paddick's views, a very essential consequence follows from this discussion, from my point of view. ...
Every cultural phenomenon is multifaceted and only with great difficulty can it fit into the framework of one general concept. The term 'sport' is such a broad concept, because the great wealth of meanings it has absorbed makes definition quite difficult. A list of only its main connections include: human play and pastime accompanied by physical activity, fair-play competition, and moral norms of honest behaviour in resolving conflicts. Attempts to suggest a definition of sport encounter several logical difficulties, the main one of which seems to me to be the binding of this category to physical activity as a basic and even exclusive property. In trying to comprehend sport, I attempt in this article to transfer the centre of gravity in reasoning from physical activity (a concept that I try to consider more accurately) to three other properties that are necessary and which taken together are sufficient for understanding sport as a category. These are: unproductiveness (as opposed to playing performances in arts), attachment to competitive game as a special form of human play, and the public and widely accepted official status and functioning of such game. Based on these considerations , I propose a new definition of sport.
... Anti-essentialists (e.g., Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Adorno, Sartre, and Heidegger) challenge essentialism (Lopez Frias & Monfort, 2016), believing that searching for crucial definitions is unproductive; rather, there is value in interpreting people's existential situation. Because existence is complex, anti-essentialists reject capturing reality through definitions (de Muckadell, 2014). ...
We provide a critical approach to current colloquial and scholarly understandings of leisure focusing on instrumental understandings of leisure in modern, liberal-democratic society since these instrumental understandings (e.g., diversion, distinction, consumerism, and restoration for work) create confusion about the meaning of leisure. We identify that (a) emphasis on instrumental thinking prevailing in modern society moves people away from embracing leisure as an end with its inherent experiences of meaning and flourishing, and (b) to bring these elements back into leisure, we draw on post-modern, neo-Aristotelian philosophical approaches. We reject the notion of leisure as time or activity and adopt a normative approach identifying leisure as an ethical state of being characterized by authenticity, meaning, and liquidity involving learning as it intertwines with positivity. We provide an account of leisure that builds upon the idea that the good life exists through flourishing, and identify how leisure experiences promote flourishing.
As a 52-year-old academic and mother of three, this research explores the ethics of the question ‘do I have time to go skateboarding?’ Using the themes of time, injury, ageing and learning, it explores the question in relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. The approach employs autoethnographic and sensory methods to document the authors own experience of learning to skateboard in her late forties and uses learning to skateboard as a vehicle from which to consider time and productivity. Embracing Beauvoir’s ethics of transcendence in navigating the psychological burden of ageing and informing the ongoing methodological approach required for making time to play, the author subverts ideas of progression and knowledge acquisition from childhood to adulthood and explores instead the converse transition from adult to child. The article draws conclusions about the value of lifelong learning and what expanded ideas about productivity mean for our ethical positioning in the world. How being in the skatepark together requires an ethical contract between skateboarders, an unambiguous ethics of being together where adhering to a system of unwritten rules means that everyone has enough space to stay safe. Risk and the time implications of injury are explored throughout in terms of the choices we make at different stages of our lives as we navigate a balance between personal desire and social good.
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) contributed major philosophical works on time, consciousness, evolution, and morality. His thinking remains central to debates on fundamental issues within philosophy and social science, particular around “process ontology.” Bergson’s work was of enormous influence to early-twentieth-century social science, and has seen a resurgence in the twenty-first century. This is in part due to the reception of Gilles Deleuze’s work, which engaged extensively with Bergson. In this entry, we focus on Bergson’s treatment of the relationship between “the possible” and “the real.” Bergson inverts the Platonic organization of these terms, where the real is constituted by the selection of ideal forms of possible. Bergson argues that this makes it impossible to understand how “unforseeable novelty” might emerge in the world. The possible is instead a “mirage” retrospectively posited as prior to the real. This treatment is part of a broader project of overcoming metaphysical mistakes which consist in seeing one philosophical term as adding fullness and positivity to another. In its place, Bersgson offers an account of life as dynamic, autopoietic emergence. In the final part of the entry we describe how an engagement with Bergson can afford social science approaches to memory, imagination, and lived experience as emergent patternings of life responding to life.
This entry provides a selective overview of sport studies that involve notions of the possible and demonstrates its developmental, experiential, and performative potentials. First, the entry outlines different perspectives on sport performance in competitive interaction sports that exhibits the importance of engaging with the possible during the game. It continues with a brief review of existential perspectives that see athletes as possible selves. Last but not least, it highlights sport coaching frameworks that may be used to help athletes engage with the possible. The entry is finalized with a call for more empirical research on the possible in sport.
In this article, we scrutinize views that justify exclusionary policies regarding transgender athletes based primarily on physiological criteria. We introduce and examine some elements that deserve more in-depth investigation in the discussion on how to assess the inclusion of transgender athletes in competitive sport, namely lived body and embodied experience. These phenomenological notions have played, especially since the publication of Iris Marion Young’s essay ‘Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment, motility, and spatiality,’ a key role in the philosophical literature on the inclusion of women in sport. However, they have not yet been fully incorporated into the debate on transgender athletes. Subsequently, we explore interrelated aspects of transgender athletes’ embodied experience that must be taken into account when assessing issues related to their participation in competitive sport, for they might confer some transgender athletes an embodied advantage or, possibly, disadvantage when compared to their cisgender counterparts. We contend that analyses of the inclusion or exclusion of transgender athletes must go beyond their current reliance on physiological criteria and incorporate the phenomenological notion of embodied advantage.
Sport hermeneutics is an emerging research topic within the philosophy of sport. From this perspective, this article aims to analyze Heidegger’s concepts of “Mitsein,” or “being-with”, and “aletheia,” or “truth as unveiling” applied to sport. To do this, firstly, a framework from which to understand Heidegger’s key concepts in his existential analytic in Being and Time is provided. Secondly, the concepts of “Mitsein” and “aletheia” are explained and, then, applied to sport. With regard to this, it is worth noting that the daily coexistence with others, even within sport, moves between two poles, the “substitutive-dominant”, which is an inauthentic way of being but common, and the “anticipatory-liberator”, which is an authentic way of being though uncommon. To conclude, it is argued that sport hermeneutics must promote a second-order reflection on the sporting practice by which the athlete can find the true meaning to his or her existence, exceeding the immanent character of sport on which first-order reflection focuses. © 2018, Universidad Catolica San Antonio Murcia. All rights reserved.
The focus of this article is the relation between life, sport, and disciplined movement. How do these enhance life? This means looking at sports in terms of the qualitative experiences they afford and considering the role of disciplined movement. Phenomenological description helps explore the normative paths that heighten said experiences. At their best, such paths result in skillful strivings to excel within communitarian frameworks, of which the Japanese practices of self-cultivation are exemplary. Sheets-Johnstone’s forays into kinesthesia, Ortega y Gasset’s meditations, and Husserl’s historical lifeworld ( lebenswelt) animate this account. The aim is to show how sports and movement, in bridling an exuberant temperament, cultivate our abilities, creativity, and excellence, ultimately encouraging stimulating lives.
Skillful Striving investigates the nature of the cultivation of excellence, the conditions that render it possible, and its potential for inspiration from the perspective of enactive wisdom—one that by enacting lays down a way or path. Performative endeavors whose telos centrally involves physical performance—sports, martial and performing arts, crafts–—are the focus of this inquiry. These are privileged ways for a holistic cultivation of our talents and limitations. The main philosophical thrust can be summarized as a “thick holism” where naturalism and normativity combine. Skillful Striving is concerned with an integrative bodymind and its ways of knowing and experiencing that issue forth from active engagements with the world, and whose goal is defined by certain standards of qualitative performance that ultimately aim at excellence. The process of cultivation relies on a rich epistemic landscape where skills are coupled to virtues in pragmatic contexts. These contexts are ecologically broad in the sense that our environment, broadly construed, constitutes these. Ultimately, this process results in admirable performances by, and exemplary character for, the enactors. Endowed with unique gifts, it is argued that they should become exemplary in the full sense of their lives. Laudable character is built on discipline, responsibility, and a social framework that provides personal paradigms and standards of excellence. A key element is that this cultivation happens in and through our moving and acting as holistic, integrative bodyminds. Eastern ways or paths, and especially Japanese do, are modes of self-cultivation that are prominent in this regard. They enable working within the framework of this bodymind where its unity is gradually achieved through performance. Importantly for this study, these active endeavors are performer-centered yet deeply communitarian practices. In the end, Skillful Striving is an exploration of how we may flourish as members of practice communities that encourage open, responsible exploration, and the cultivation of our abilities as lifelong quests for human excellence.
In this paper, we make a hermeneutical analysis of internalism, the dominant tradition in the philosophy of sports. In order to accomplish this, we identify the prejudices that guide the internalist view of sports, namely the Platonic-Analytic prejudice introduced by Suits, one of the forefathers of internalism. Then, we critically analyze four consequences of following such a prejudice: a) its reductive nature, b) the production of a unrealistic view of sports, c) the vagueness of the idea of excellence; and d) the leap from the descriptive analysis of the sporting phenomenon to the setting of normative requirements for the practice of sports.
This paper argues for the way in which the hermeneutics of human action (in particular the technical dimension of action) and the capabilities approach are to be coordinated in judgements regarding the happy life or well-being. To ensure that this hypothesis is not only philosophically plausible but practically reasonable, I apply it throughout to practical examples, namely practices related to the arrangement of space. I argue that judgement regarding happiness or well-being requires two distinct forms of reflection: (1) a hermeneutics (here derived from Ricœur) that can do justice to the thickness (in Geertz's sense) of human living and (2) a thin standard (in Walzer's sense) of universal human functional capabilities, by which to point out which insufficient conditions for action undermine human well-being (here presented according to Nussbaum's version of the capabilities approach). These two forms of reflection, it will be argued, are theoretically compatible, yet remain - in practice - in tension. Recognition of this tension has to accompany responsible judgement.
Heidegger is often attacked for his failure to offer a thematic account of the body in his Being and Time (Aho, 2005). The general misunderstanding of Heidegger's negation of body arises from the different meanings associated with the term 'body'. Body can be understood from two perspectives: body in terms of corpse and body in terms of lived-body. Doctors study body as corpse or object because that is required in their training and education. Heidegger's Being in his Being and Time ruled out all dichotomy of the body. The aim of this paper is to understand the Heideggerian perspective on Dasein as not a negation of bodilyness but a phenomenological understanding of Dasein body, and as such to highlight the dimension of lived-body in Heidegger's Being and Time. The paper will re-examine how Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein contributed to the phenomenology of lived-body in terms of his analysis of habitual body.
According to a view defended by Hubert Dreyfus and others, elite athletes are totally absorbed while they are performing, and they act non-deliberately without any representational or conceptual thinking. By using both conceptual clarification and phenomenological description the article criticizes this view and maintains that various forms of conscious thinking and acting plays an important role before, during and after competitive events. The article describes in phenomenological detail how elite athletes use consciousness in their actions in sport; as planning, attention, thinking, decision, and monitoring of performance. Elite athletes do not act as zombies. It is concluded that qualia and phenomenal consciousness are important phenomena in elite sport.
In the Concept of Mind from 1949 Gilbert Ryle (1949/1963) distinguished between
knowing how and knowing that. What was Ryle’s basic idea and how is the discussion
going on in philosophy today? How can sport philosophy use the idea of knowing
how? My goal in this paper is first to bring Ryle and the post-Rylean discussion
to light and then show how phenomenology can give some input to the discussion.
The article focuses especially on the two main interpretations of knowing how, intellectualism
and anti-intellectualism. In the second part of the article I discuss how
views from phenomenology and philosophy of mind can enrich and widen our
understanding of what knowing how means in relation to sport practices. It is
argued that knowing how is not limited to athletic abilities but includes knowledge
of how the environing world operates in relation to athletic action.
Hermeneutic phenomenology and phenomenology have become increasingly popular as research methodologies, yet confusion still exists about the unique aspects of these two methodologies. This article provides a discussion of the essential similarities and differences between hermeneutic phenomenology and phenomenology from historical and methodological perspectives. Consideration is given to the philosophical bases, assumptions, focus of research and research outcomes that differentiate these approaches.
The last decades have seen a rising philosophical interest in the phenomenology of skill acquisition. One central topic in this work is the relation between the athlete's background capacities and foreground attention as an invariant feature of skilful movements. The purpose of this paper is to examine further this gestalt relation from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological account of embodied learning and a classical notion from philosophy of sport, namely ‘sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome’. In the first part we will explicate how Merleau-Ponty understands embodied learning as a form of gestalt switch that allows the athlete to perceive the world more meaningfully in relation to an ongoing movement project. That is, a skilled athlete perceives more and better opportunities for actions. In the second part, we revisit the classical notion of ‘sweet tension of uncertainty of outcome’ developed by Kretchmar. This phrase is attributed to the indeterminate back and forth rallies between sport contestants, and to persons facing a sport situation that produces an ambiguity as to whether one will succeed in one's task. In the third part, we then juxtapose Merleau-Ponty's notion of embodied learning and the notion of sweet tension from philosophy of sport in order to draw out the relations between the two notions. In addition, in much of the philosophical work on skill acquisition (for instance in Merleau-Ponty and his much-cited commentator, Hubert Dreyfus) the distinction between everyday skills (such as walking and opening doors) and sport skills is collapsed. Our discussion aims to show that by introducing the notion of ‘sweet tension’ to the literature on phenomenology of skill acquisition, we are able to highlight a phenomenological difference between everyday skills and sport skills.
It is sometimes said that Heidegger neglected the ontological significance of the lived body until the Zollikon Seminars, where he elaborates on the bodily aspect of Being-in-the-world as a “bodying forth.” Against such a contention, in this article I argue that, because of the central role that Heidegger grants to mood (disclosive affectivity) as a primordial way of disclosing Being-in-the-world, and because it is impossible to think mood without also thinking the lived body, Heidegger has actually placed the latter at the very center of Dasein’s disclosedness. Heidegger’s account of mood thus entails and highlights, rather than neglects, the ontological significance of the body.
Addressing both collegiate and professional sports, the updated edition of Fair Play: The Ethics of Sport explores the ethical presuppositions of competitive athletics and their connection both to ethical theory and to concrete moral dilemmas that arise in actual athletic competition. This fourth edition has been updated with new examples, including a discussion of Spygate by the New England Patriots and recent discoveries on the use of performance enhancing drugs by top athletes. Two additional authors, Cesar R. Torres and Peter F. Hager, bring to this edition a discussion of the moral issues involved in youth sports and the ethics of being a fan, as well as a fresh perspective on the theories of broad internalism and the quest for excellence. Furthermore, major criticisms of broad internalism by philosophers William J. Morgan and Scott Kretchmar add a new dimension to the discussion on the moral foundations of winning.
First published in 1988 as volume 63 of his Collected Works, Ontology-The Hermeneutics of Facticity is the text of Heidegger’s lecture course at the University of Freiburg during the summer of 1923. In these lectures, Heidegger reviews and makes critical appropriations of the hermeneutic tradition from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine to Schleiermacher and Dilthey in order to reformulate the question of being on the basis of facticity and the everyday world. Specific themes deal with the history of ontology, the development of phenomenology and its relation to Hegelian dialectic, traditional theological and philosophical concepts of man, the present situation of philosophy, and the influences of Aristotle, Luther, Kierkegaard, and Husserl on Heidegger’s thinking. Students of Heidegger will find initial breakthroughs in his unique elaboration of the meaning of human experience and the "question of being," which received mature expression in Being and Time. © 1988 by Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main and 1999 by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.
The question of Nietzsche's place in hermeneutics raises many questions: can Nietzsche's thought itself be characterized as "hermeneutical" and to what extent, given that hermeneutics was only developed as such after him? Can and should hermeneutics, which until recently did not take his thought much into account, incorporate Nietzsche's thought as a whole? Whereas a mutual fecundation will always be fruitful, this paper argues that one should resist a simple integration of Nietzsche into hermeneutics in light of their different understandings of truth, interpretation and nihilism. It thus becomes possible to also resist the postmodern and nihilistic understanding of hermeneutics. Aware of their differences, hermeneutics and Nietzsche will perhaps have more to say to one another.
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann is known as a major figure in phenomenological and hermeneutics research: he was Martin Heidegger’s personal assistant for the last ten years of Heidegger’s life, and assistant to Eugen Fink, who in turn was primary assistant to Edmund Husserl. However, his own philosophical commentaries and readings of Heidegger’s work are not familiar to many in the English-speaking world. Von Herrmann’s Hermeneutics and Reflection, translated here from the original German, represents the most fundamental and critical reflection in any language of the concept of phenomenology as it was used by Heidegger and by Husserl. It provides a careful rendition of Husserl’s essential contribution to phenomenology, then draws a clear demarcation between Husserl’s reflective phenomenology and Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. While showing the fullest respect for Husserl’s phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Reflection offers a full-fledged critique of Husserl from the perspective of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology.
Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real. No justifying reason could rediscover itself in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim to reason; only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality. Philosophy which presents reality as such today only veils reality and eternalizes its present condition. Prior to every answer, such a function is already implicit in the question—that question which today is called radical and which is really the least radical of all: the question of being (Sein) itself, as expressly formulated by the new ontological blueprints, and as, despite all contraditions, fundamental to the idealist systems, now allegedly overcome.
Several authors, such as William J. Morgan, John S. Russell and R. Scott Kretchmar, have claimed that the limits between the diverse normative theories of sport need to be revisited. Most of these works are philosophically grounded in Anglo-American philosophical approaches. For instance, William J. Morgan’s proposal is mainly based on Richard Rorty’s philosophy. But he also discusses with some European philosophers like Jürgen Habermas. However, Habermas’ central ideas are rejected by Morgan. The purpose of this paper is to analyse Morgan’s rejection of Habermas’ thought and show that a more appropriate normative of sport that explains better our current sporting world can be achieved by drawing on the German philosopher’s ideas. The plan of this paper is the following. It shall analyse the limits of the distinction between broad internalism and externalism by taking Morgan’s work as its starting point. To do so, firstly, the conventionalist way in which Morgan criticises the limits of interpretivism shall be explained (§2). Secondly, the relationship between Morgan’s proposals and the hermeneutical theories which are at the roots of his proposal shall be brought to light. Thirdly, since Morgan takes Habermas’ hermeneutical ethics to be an example of externalism, the relationship between his theory and Habermas’ ethical account shall be clearly defined. Moreover, Morgan’s proposal shall be criticised in the light of Habermas’ discourse ethics (§3). To conclude, a Habermasian approach in sport ethics shall be described (§4).
The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the normative role of conventions in sports. However, the approach I have in mind does not dispatch the theory of interpretivism. What I offer is a synthesis that aims to show how interpretivism works in concert with - and relies heavily on - conventions. To make this point, I will argue that historical, cultural, and even simple preferential needs and desires help to determine what counts as athletic ‘excellence’ in sports.
My argument will proceed as follows. I will first sketch out the broad internalist case for pitching its normative account of sport in the abstract manner that following Dworkin’s lead in the philosophy of law its adherents insist upon. I will next show that the normative deficiencies in social conventions broad internalists uncover are indeed telling but misplaced since they hold only for what David Lewis famously called ‘coordinating’ conventions. I will then distinguish coordinating conventions from deep ones and make my case not only for the normative salience of deep conventions but for their normative superiority over the abstract normative principles broad internalists champion.
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.
The purpose of this paper is to identify and defend a broad biologically informed internalist position. This internalism is pluralistic because it more explicitly identifies the range of 'best light' sporting practices than previous internalist literature. As such, it may help to solve a long-standing debate between broad internalists or interpretivists, as they are also called, and conventionalists. I present six models of sport that reflect different normative stances on testing and contesting acts. Each one is grounded in what I claim to be an element of our more or less durable, but not metaphysically fixed, human nature. I conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of my models, relationships among and between them, and implications for practice.
'Why don’t young athletes in sport just quit?’ Starting with this question and drawing on existential philosophy, phenomenology and hermeneutics, Talent Development, Existential Philosophy and Sport seeks a deeper understanding of the experience of being a talented young sportsperson striving to become an elite athlete.
As an alternative to conventional approaches to talent development governed by a worldview of instrumental rationality, the book introduces key ideas from educational philosophy to describe talent development through the concept of elite-Bildung. It pursues an existential understanding of developing in sport as a process of freedom, self-transcendence, striving for excellence and building up habits.
The book highlights a range of ambiguous and intriguing existential phenomena – most prominently wonder, question, expression, humour and repetition – and reveals an existential layer of meaning within talent development in sport, which can facilitate the process of becoming an elite athlete and give young athletes a number of reasons not to quit.
By deepening our understanding of performance and development in sport, and the process of becoming an elite player, this book is important reading for any serious student or researcher working in the philosophy of sport, sports coaching, sports development, sport psychology or applied sport science.
A number of scholars who are committed to the goal of broadening their understanding of cultures utilize hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, as a theoretical basis for the research methodologies which they employ. From the perspective of hermeneutics, both culture itself and the research processes by which culture is studied are considered to be constituted partially by shared meanings which are associated with interpretive processes involving social interaction. The present discussion focuses upon the nature and goals of hermeneutic cultural research and upon related problems concerning evaluation of the veracity of multiple interpretations of culture. Although hermeneutic cultural research is not free of criticism, studies concerning games and sports which have been carried out within this mode of investigation (two of which are illustrated here) indicate that this research process has good potential for use by scholars who wish to broaden their understanding of these phenomena.
In the struggle to gain an understanding of ourselves, we have developed a variety of explanatory theories, models, and paradigms with methods of questing answers that have been considered appropriate to the theory, model, or paradigm. Behaviorists have sought to determine the nature of relationships by means of a basic cause-effect design. They assume that laws governing behavior exist and are discernible, that cause is fundamentally external in nature, and that empirical methodologies represent the best approach to the explanation of behavior within societies. Advocates of an alternative world view (antipositivism or interpretivism) adhere to the naturalistic conception of a human being as a rule-following agent. They assume that people are conscious social actors capable of controlling their behavior, and that human behavior originates in the individual's interpretation of reality. Their research methods are aimed at exploring the situations of the actor in order to work out how individuals arrived at the interpretations and created the actions they did. Both schools of researchers seem to be tackling the same issues, but those steeped in the behavioral sciences are questing for empirical generalizations while the interpretivists are analyzing conceptual properties and the meaning of each. Yet, it is not a blind allegiance to one specific world view and its concomitant methodologies that is important but an ability to think creatively and to have a sound conceptual base on which to build a world view. Methods are the tools of scholarship and should be adapted according to the nature of the questions, not unquestioningly applied.
The modern Olympic Games have evolved from a late 19th century curiosity into a cultural performance of truly global magnitude. This paper attempts to explain the remarkable popularity of the Olympics on the basis of the cultural performance theory of anthropologist John MacAloon and the more sociopsychological perspective of sociologist John Loy. Specifically, it is argued that the entire Olympic performance, as well as the performances of the athletes themselves, offer individuals the opportunity to address profoundly important existential questions about the nature of their personal and collective selves. In other words, every 2 years the Olympics offer us a mirror, and in it, we look at ourselves.
This paper employs a theoretical framework articulated in an earlier Quest article to understand a particular sporting spectacle; at the same time, it suggests a specific method that might be used to support such a framework. The 1976 and 1984 Olympics—the two most recent games in which the United States participated—are examined in terms of six categories of symbolism: dramatization of recurring life issues, transcendence of human limitations, rebellion against industrialized society, spectatorship as an aesthetic experience, religious overtones, and political dimensions. Hermeneutics is shown to be a most desirable method for this kind of interpretive framework and is discussed in terms of its appropriateness, timeliness, and usefulness as an instrument of social critique.
In an attempt to better understand the societies they investigate, a growing number of intellectual historians have begun to tum their attention to examining cultural meanings as well as the structures of society. Drawing upon developments in intellectual history, as well as on social science theories that are concemed with hermeneutics (interpretation of texts) and semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), this paper discusses possible future directions for research in the history of sport and physical education. Two of many possible areas of investigation are suggested: (a) the rise of such 19th-century sporting spectacles as the Oxford-Cambridge crew race, the Harvard-Yale football game (the prototype for all similar American contests), and the modem Olympic Games, and (b) the impact of developments in 19th-century biology (the life sciences) on ideas about health, physical education, and athletic sport.
In German discussions over the last twenty years of the difference between what it is to be a body (in German: Leibsein) and what it is to have a body (Körperhaben), many have been concerned to remind us that we owe this conceptual distinction to the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner. He introduces the distinction in an essay from 1925—written in collaboration with the Dutch behavioral researcher Frederick Jacob Buytendijk—“Die Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks. Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom Bewusstsein des anderen Ichs” (“The Interpretation of Mimetic Expressions: A Contribution to Understanding One’s Consciousness of Other Subjects”). Buytendijk later explained that it was Plessner who worked out the philosophical sense of this distinction, while Buytendijk merely helped with the examples illustrating its behavior-theoretical context (Boudier 1993). In contemporary English and French discussions, Plessner and Buytendijk are virtually unknown (Krüger 1998). One rather assumes that the difference between lived body (Leib) and mere (physical) body (Körper) stems from Merleau-Ponty, despite the fact that he (1966, 1976) dutifully makes reference to Buytendijk, Plessner, and Max Scheler in his main works on behavior and perception. But German discussions in the last two decades do not stop short at reminding us of the true source of this distinction; they also purport to give reasons why we cannot follow Plessner, or can follow him only in part, in his use of it.
For example, in his book Leibsein als Aufgabe (Being One’s Body as a Task), Gernot Böhme writes that Plessner only works out this distinction within the framework of an anthropological comparison of animals and humans. This comparison is, however, inconclusive, Böhme claims, because Plessner at once claims that the Leib/Körper (lived body/body) distinction should already manifest itself in higher animals while at the same time maintaining that such animals do not recognize this distinction but live it as a unity. Clearly, Böhme (2003, 25–29) continues, humans develop a reflexive distance to this unity of Leib and Körper, which is why that unity is experienced as a distinction, albeit in an unclear way. A similar view is to be found even earlier, in the writings of Hermann Schmitz. Since the mid-1960s, Schmitz has held that Plessner is missing a positive account of what it is to be one’s body in living it (Leib). Rather, Plessner always characterizes what it is to be one’s body only indirectly, by reference to the phenomenon of having a body (Körper), according to Schmitz. By doing so, Plessner falls back into the tradition of the Philosophy of Reflection, where one might as well endorse something like Fichte’s concept of self-consciousness, which Schmitz (1965) himself does. Similarly, Jürgen Habermas claims, in his series of lectures Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity [1985, 368–69]), that this phenomenological anthropology simply leads us back to a philosophy of the subject rather than conceptualizing the social by means of language. Nevertheless, in his late work (after 2000) Habermas (e.g., 2001) does employ the distinction between being a body (Leibsein) and having a body (Körperhaben)—with a favorable reference to Plessner—so as to put himself in a position to so much as thematize the role of the body in leading a life within the realm of linguistic communication. Finally, to conclude this little survey of the philosophical secondary literature, Bernhard Waldenfels, despite his high estimation of Plessner, nevertheless recommends an incisive critique of him in his multivolume Phenomenologie des Fremden (Phenomenology of the Foreign). For Waldenfels (1999, 164), the body—in the sense of the functioning body (Merleau-Ponty)—is the transitional point, the Umschlagstelle (Husserl), where mind merges into nature and nature merges into mind. The principle error that has plagued nearly all philosophers and sociologists, including Plessner, according to Waldenfels, has been to conceive of the distinction between being one’s body and having a body in terms of the role of some “third”—that is, the role principally occupied by experts and judges. The role of the third, however, leads us into those self-ratifying orders that one knows from Modernity...