ABSTRACT There has been extensive debate among various disciplines about the nature and value of play. From these discussions it seems clear that play is a phenomenon with more than just one dimension: as a specific type of activity, as a form or structure, as an ontologically distinctive phenomenon, as a type of experience, or as a stance or an attitude towards a particular activity. This article focuses on the importance of the playful attitude in sport. It begins by attempting (...) to describe the underpinning features of a playful attitude, and its relation to Suits’ lusory attitude and the concept of gamification. Finally, it considers and critically evaluates the relationship between play and sport and the importance of the playful attitude in sporting activities. The purpose of this paper is a far deeper analysis of the playful attitude and its relationship to sport than has been previously provided, and a more precise definition as to what the playful attitude is. This will ultimately help to answer questions about the value of sport and how sport ought to be played. (shrink)

In the vast majority of sports in the West, women are marginalized and disadvantaged in their plight to have their achievements recognised as equally valuable. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate not only why women and men are considered unequal as athletes but also to illuminate sport’s potential as a less explored terrain upon which to tackle sexism. It examines the reasons for the continued under-representation of women in sports and the trivialization of women's sports. It will first (...) explore age-old myths about women which continue to inform our ideas about them today as well as our conception of them as lesser athletes than men. Overthrowing extremely durable ideas of what women are and should be has proven difficult, hence feminist scholars are still striving to debunk the numerous alienating and oppressive myths surrounding ‘feminine nature.’ In recognition of this, the dissertation then goes on to explore the constructed juxtaposition of ‘femininity’ and ‘athleticism’. This is built upon by discussing how aestheticization and stereotyping of the feminine image conditions our perception of athletic ideals, ultimately contributing to sexist oppression within sport. Finally, I propose that the application of virtue ethics is key to the overthrowal of boundaries placed upon women in sport. Up until now, sport is a topic that has been under-researched by feminist scholars in philosophy. However, sport demands the use of the body and the mind simultaneously, so it is a sphere with the potential to offer unique insights into the hurdles that women face in their quest to be recognized as men’s physical and psychological equals. Critically, this dissertation focuses on the intersection of feminist philosophy and philosophy of sport, examining themes such as gendered myths, preservationism, femininity, aesthetics, implicit bias and stereotypes. (shrink)

Some philosophers object to moral error theory by arguing that there a parity between moral and epistemic normativity. They maintain that moral and epistemic error theory stand or fall together, that epistemic error theory falls, and that moral error theory thus falls too. This paper offers a response to this objection on behalf of moral error theorists. I defend the view that moral and epistemic error theory do not stand or fall together by arguing that moral error theory can be (...) sustained alongside epistemic expressivism. This unusual combination of theories can be underpinned by differences in the foundational norms that guide moral and epistemic inquiry. I conclude that the problem of epistemic normativity fails to show that it is compulsory for us to reject moral error theory. (shrink)

Expressivism is a blossoming meta-semantic framework sometimes relying on what Carter and Chrisman call “the core expressivist maneuver.” That is, instead of asking about the nature of a certain kind of value, we should be asking about the nature of the value judgment in question. According to expressivists, this question substitution opens theoretical space for the elegant, economical, and explanatorily powerful expressivist treatment of the relevant domain. I argue, however, that experimental work in cognitive psychology can shed light on how (...) the core expressivist maneuver operates at the cognitive level and that this: raises worries about the aptness of the expressivist question substitution and supports an evolutionary debunking argument against expressivism. Since evolutionary debunking arguments are usually run in favor of expressivism, this creates an obvious puzzle for expressivists. I wrap up by briefly responding to the objection that the debunking argument against expressivism overgeneralizes and, therefore, should be rejected. (shrink)

I argue that, at least on the assumption that if there are epistemic facts they are irreducible, the evolutionary debunking maneuver is prima facie self-debunking because it seems to debunk a certain class of facts, namely, epistemic facts that prima facie it needs to rely on in order to launch its debunking arguments. I then appeal to two recent reconstructions of the evolutionary debunking maneuver (Kahane (2011), Griffiths and Wilkins (2015)) and find them wanting. Along the way I set aside (...) two ways (one envisaged, the other by Sterpetti (2015)) to avoid the self-debunking problem that I find unpromising. I conclude that the evolutionary debunking maneuver needs to clarify the meta-epistemological commitments upon which it is supposed to operate. (shrink)

Interpersonal aggregation involves the combining and weighing of benefits and losses to multiple individuals in the course of determining what ought to be done. Most consequentialists embrace thoroughgoing interpersonal aggregation, the view that any large benefit to each of a few people can be morally outweighed by allocating any smaller benefit to each of many others, so long as this second group is sufficiently large. This would permit letting one person die in order to cure some number of mild headaches (...) instead. Most non-consequentialists reject thoroughgoing interpersonal aggregation despite also believing it is permissible to let one person die in order to prevent many cases of paraplegia instead. Non-consequentialists defend this asymmetry largely on the basis of intuition, and some rely on the notion of relevance to formalize the grounding intuitions. This article seeks to clarify and strengthen the non-consequentialist notion of relevance by engaging with three objections to it. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend the position that aesthetics and ethics in sport are not two separate domains or aspects. In sport, the aesthetic and the ethical both arise from sport’s attractiveness or from the pleasure sport offers to its activists and consumers. To think about sport philosophically, we should find a link and a principle beyond this division as a source of both the aesthetic and the ethical in sport. The philosophy and philosophical sociology of Jean-Marie (...) Guyau is presented as a response to this problem. Two points of fundamental importance are considered critically here: his criticism of any reductionism, and life or the idea of life as key principle of a philosophical system which puts ethics and aesthetics together. (shrink)

Over every and each sport event, a dark veil spreads and obfuscates the celebration: doping. Although anti-doping policies have been widely applied, controlling and diminishing this phenomenon has not been achieved yet and the use of doping is commonplace. In this article, I propose the concept of narcissistic civilization as a tool to interpret this phenomenon. I seek for a parallel reading between the Freudian idea of narcissism and its extension to social narcissism by Fromm, together with Heidegger’s analysis of (...) technology, keeping in mind that doping is a technological application. In this way I point out that both theories share a common view in that humans tend to fail in the distinction between the external reality as an object and their own self as the interpreter, that is between the ¨I¨ and the ¨not I¨. By making this fusion of the two theories that originate from different intellectual traditions, I aspire to provide an interpretation tool for the broad use of doping: I conclude that doping can be understood with the assumption of a narcissistic civilization, focused on technology, that calls for the use of PEDs. (shrink)

Moral error theorists often respond to the epistemic companions in guilt strategy by adopting the Disparity Response: reject the putative parity between moral and epistemic reasons and claim that though the former are irreducibly normative, the latter aren’t. I argue such a response fails. Expanding on Das’ Australas J Philos 95:58–69, work I present a master argument against Disparity Responses: the arguments moral error theorists use to advance their conceptual claim apply in the epistemic domain also. This prohibits the error (...) theorist from adopting epistemic reductionism. I use Jonas Olson’s work as exemplary of moral error theory. I demonstrate that Olson’s argument that the rhetorical authority of moral claims is best explained by the error theorist’s conceptual claim applies equally in the epistemic case. Olson attempts to avoid this by claiming that epistemic claims are reducible to claims about whether our doxastic attitudes live up to their functions. There are two problems with Olson’s argument. Firstly, functional reasons are a species of a common genus – standards reasons – and since Olson’s authority argument against moral reductionism applies to standards reasons, it applies to functional reasons. Secondly, Olson’s claim that we cannot also cast moral reasons as functional is under-supported. I suggest that there is plausible evidence that we can and undermine his arguments against this claim. I do not argue that the epistemic companions in guilt strategy demonstrates the falsity of moral error theory. Rather, I argue that the Disparity Response to the epistemic companions in guilt strategy fails. (shrink)

:In this essay I identify two burdens for eliminativist accounts of moral responsibility. I first examine an underappreciated logical gap between two features of eliminativism, the gap between descriptive skepticism and full-blown prescriptive eliminativism. Using Ishtiyaque Haji’s luck-based skepticism as an instructive example, I argue that in order to move successfully from descriptive skepticism to prescriptive eliminativism one must first provide a comparative defense of the conflicting principles that motivate the former. In other words, one must fix the skeptical spotlight. (...) I then present and assess a second burden for eliminativists, they must meet what I call the motivational challenge. In order to meet this second burden, eliminativists must motivate their prescriptive account over preservationist competitors, and I assess two potential strategies for doing so. The first is to offer arguments that appeal to the gains and losses of abandoning our responsibility-related attitudes and practices, and the second is to offer direct arguments that we cannot retain these attitudes and practices. I conclude that the adequacy of either strategy remains at best an open question, but that making these burdens explicit might better position eliminativists to meet their competitors on more equal ground. (shrink)

Companions in guilt arguments respond to moral error theory by pointing out that its philosophical rationale mandates the rejection of all categorical normative reasons, including epistemic reasons. A number of philosophers have recently been engaging in a dialogue about the strength of this argumentative strategy and the significance of the criticisms that has been raised against it. In this paper, I identify a specific argument, which I dub the ‘bullet-biting response’ as a crucial element in some recent attacks on the (...) CGA. I assess five objections to the bullet-biting response and conclude that only the fifth poses a significant problem. Specifically, I argue that the proponent of the bullet-biting response is at a dialectical disadvantage in this particular debate. While this disadvantage is not decisive, it has two implications that raise serious concerns for the bullet-biting response. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe spiralling discourse of sport spectatorship is a compelling development within recent sport philosophy. It is argued that the conceptual foundations of the purist and partisan carry pro...

The moral error theorist claims that moral discourse is irredeemably in error because it is committed to the existence of properties that do not exist. A common response has been to postulate ‘companions in guilt’—forms of discourse that seem safe from error despite sharing the putatively problematic features of moral discourse. The most developed instance of this pairs moral discourse with epistemic discourse. In this paper, I present a new, prudential, companions-in-guilt argument and argue for its superiority over the epistemic (...) alternative. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that evolutionary debunking arguments against morality constitute a type of epistemological objection to our moral beliefs. In particular, the debunking force of such arguments is not supposed to depend on the metaphysical claim that moral facts do not exist. In this paper I argue that this standard epistemological construal of EDAs is highly misleading, if not mistaken. Specifically, I argue that the most widely discussed EDAs all make key and controversial metaphysical claims about the nature of (...) morality or the possibility of moral truth that belie their apparently epistemological character. I show that the debunking force of these EDAs derives largely from metaphysical claims about morality and their implications for the possibility of moral reduction, rather than from epistemological worries associated with the existence of an causal/non-moral explanation of our moral judgments. The paper briefly concludes with a dilemma that I believe confronts all EDAs such as those discussed in this paper: either such arguments are unsound, or else they prove too much, debunking our knowledge of science and the external world, as well as morality. (shrink)

Moral error theories are often rejected by appeal to ‘companions in guilt’ arguments. The most popular form of companions in guilt argument takes epistemic reasons for belief as a ‘companion’ and proceeds by analogy. I show that this strategy fails. I claim that the companions in guilt theorist must understand epistemic reasons as evidential support relations if her argument is to be dialectically effective. I then present a dilemma. Either epistemic reasons are evidential support relations or they are not. If (...) they are not, then the companions in guilt argument fails. If they are, then a reduction of epistemic reasons to evidential support relations becomes available and, consequently, epistemic reasons cease to be a viable ‘companion’ for moral reasons. I recommend this structure of argument over existing strategies within the literature and defend my claims against recent objections from companions in guilt theorists. (shrink)

Sport aesthetics historically has been somewhat marginalized in the philosophy of sport, which is itself a marginalized focus in philosophy—to some degree, not.

In this paper, we claim that, if you justifiably believe that you ought to perform some act, it follows that you ought to perform that act. In the first half, we argue for this claim by reflection on what makes for correct reasoning from beliefs about what you ought to do. In the second half, we consider a number of objections to this argument and its conclusion. In doing so, we arrive at another argument for the view that justified beliefs (...) about what you ought to do must be true, based in part on the idea that the epistemic and practical domains are uniform, in a sense we spell out. We conclude by sketching possible implications of our discussion for the debates over what is wrong with akrasia and pragmatic encroachment on justified belief and knowledge. (shrink)

In philosophical analyses of the value of sport, a relatively unheralded feature is the opportunity that sport offers for admiration. While we readily salute many of the things that people admire (...

What is the source of epistemic normativity? In virtue of what do epistemic norms have categorical normative authority? According to epistemic teleologism, epistemic normativity comes from value. Epistemic norms have categorical authority because conforming to them is necessarily good in some relevant sense. In this article, I argue that epistemic teleologism should be rejected. The problem, I argue, is that there is no relevant sense in which it is always good to believe in accordance with epistemic norms, including in cases (...) where the matter at hand is completely trivial. Therefore, if epistemology is normative, its normativity won't come from value. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications that the construction and use of avatars in games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft have for our understanding of personal identity. It asks whether the avatar can meaningfully be experienced as a separate person, existing in parallel to the flesh and blood player. A rehearsal of Cartesian and Lockean accounts of personal identity constructs an understanding of the self that is challenged by the experience of online play. It will be argued that (...) playful engagement in virtual worlds invites the participant to reflect upon the human being as embodied and social; qualities of which are marginalised by Descartes and Locke. The strangeness of this experience of virtual worlds confronts the player with a challenge to construct a coherent narrative of online life, of which treating the avatar as a separate person is a coherent option. This opens up the virtual world as an important space within which personal identity is explored, but one with complex implicati... (shrink)

In this article, I first address the ethical considerations about football and show that a meritocratic-fairness view of sports fails to capture the phenomenon of football. Fairness of result is not at centre stage in football. Football is about the drama, about the tension and the emotions it provokes. This moves us to the realm of aesthetics. I reject the idea of the aesthetics of football as the disinterested aesthetic appreciation, which traditionally has been deemed central to aesthetics. Instead, I (...) argue that we should try and develop an agon aesthetics where our aesthetic appreciation is understood as involving and being embedded in our engagement in the game. The drama of football is staged but not scripted. The aesthetics of competitions like football matches—the agon aesthetics—lies in engaging in the conflict that a competition is, while being aware that the conflict is not over ordinary world or everyday life issues, but unnecessary and invented for the very purpose of having a conflict to enjoy. (shrink)

This work seeks to honor Michael Novak’s contribution to sport ethics by returning to his seminal work, The Joy of Sports. Novak runs an alternate route in developing his ethic, drawing largely on the school of political realism, particularly the work of Reinhold Niebuhr. In so doing, he offers a distinctive lens through which to approach to the myriad ethical issues in sport, including those related to competition, violence, and engagement in foul play. The essay outlines four core dimensions of (...) realism within Novak’s larger corpus in order to elucidate their unfolding within The Joy of Sports. It also contributes to an understanding of how political realism might be appropriated for sport ethics. (shrink)

Terence Cuneo has recently argued that we have to be committed to the existence of epistemic facts insofar as they are indispensable to theorizing. Furthermore, he argues that the epistemic properties of these facts are inextricably ‘ontologically entangled’ with certain moral properties, such that there exist ‘moral-epistemic’ facts. Cuneo, therefore, concludes that moral realism is true. I argue that Cuneo’s appeal to the existence of moral-epistemic facts is problematic, even granting his argument for the existence of indispensable epistemic facts. I (...) conclude, therefore, that Cuneo’s argument fails to justify moral realism. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore the attraction and the beauty of the contemporary athletic body. It will be suggested that a body shaped through muscular bulk and definition has come to be seen as aesthetically normative. This body differs from the body of athletes from the early and mid-twentieth century. It will be argued that the contemporary body is not merely the result of advances in sports science, but rather that it is expressive of certain meanings and values. The visual (...) similarity of the contemporary athletic body and that of the comic book superhero suggests that both bodies carry a similar potential for narrative story-telling, and that their attraction is bound up with this narrative potential. The superhero and athlete live meaningful lives, pursuing clear and morally unambiguous goals. The aesthetic attraction of the body lies in its capacity to facilitate the articulation of a story of a meaningful life, and to do so in the face of the growing anomie and thus meaninglessness of life as experienced in contemporary society. Athleticism offers an illusion of meaning, serving to reproduce dominant justificatory narratives and social stereotypes. Yet, as an illusion of meaning, it may be challenged and negotiated, not least with respect to its bias towards a certain form of the male body. The female athletic body disrupts the illusion, opening up new existential possibilities, new ways of living and being, and thus new, and potentially disruptive, narratives. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

It does not typically seem to be worthwhile rewatching a sport match, for example, in a video recording, once the result is known. Sports matches are like detective stories. Once one knows ‘whodunit’, there seems little point in revisiting the tale. By drawing on an argument from musicologist Edward T. Cone, this paper argues that certain sports matches may be revisited with profit. The initial experience of a game may be of a series of events that are often ambiguous or (...) confusing as to their meaning or purpose. The full appreciation of a sport match requires, not just this initial familiarity with the immediately perceived events of the game, but also an awareness of the tactics being deployed by both sides. An understanding of tactics and strategy is akin to the analysis of a piece of music. A further viewing of the game, during which one can appreciate how the tactics inform the events naively experienced in the first viewing, will yield, it will be argued, an aesthetic pleasure. This takes the experience of sport beyond the merely entertaining or exciting. In certain games, the third viewing may also transcend an appreciation of the merely formal qualities of the game, and so offer substantial insights into what it is to be human. (shrink)

En este artículo, defendemos que se ha producido una inversión del platonismo a la base de la filosofía del deporte, similar a la acaecida en el ámbito de la filosofía occidental. Para ello, exponemos a qué nos referimos con el platonismo en la filosofía del deporte. Más adelante, explicamos qué significa invertir el platonismo a raíz tanto de Nietzsche como de Heidegger. Tras ello, identificamos cuáles son los autores que han provocado tal cambio en la filosofía del deporte, a saber: (...) los filósofos dionisíacos. Por último, mostramos cómo con sus propuestas dionisíacas producen un acabamiento de la tradición internalista, para defender que éste es el paso inicial en la tarea de proponer una hermenéutica del deporte. (shrink)

By adopting Habermas’ communicative theory, this paper categorizes players’ actions into four elements. The strategic action involves players manipulating each other within the framework of a gameFootnote1; normative action is manifested in following the rules and the underlying ethos; dramaturgical action emerges through the players’ deliberate presentation of themselves to both participants and spectators; and communicative action reveals the purpose of a game as a way of being. The conceptualization of game actions leads to a qualitative redefinition of the perfect (...) game, which enables a greater understanding of the game, its participants, and human excellence. As such, this paper’s significance lies in the proposal that the Habermasian perfect game is a potential solution to Suits’ puzzle about what type of games can be played in his Utopia. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn philosophical analyses of the value of sport, a relatively unheralded feature is the opportunity that sport offers for admiration. While we readily salute many of the things that people...

There are robust consequences of the fact that football is football and not something else. The aesthetic personality of football does not submit to a template inappropriately borrowed from elsewhere. One consequence is that beauty should not be awarded privileged status. Any just aesthetics of the game must be properly hospitable to the game’s less hygienic and agonistic features, such as stolid defence, scuffling and scavenging, heroic goalkeeping, visible toil and strain, the intrinsic possibility of failure, the visibly strenuous working (...) with materials, one’s exposed vulnerability to conditions, luck, loss of form and the injured or ageing body, and the visible realisation of a plurality of life values in a self-enclosed domain. This gives football a deep affinity with a Modernist aesthetics. However, ‘traditional’ aesthetics might also have a substantive and precious input into the aesthetics of football. Indeed, it might be that beauty is a legitimate aesthetic category and.. (shrink)

This paper explores space as a core source of aesthetic pleasure in various codes of football. The paper begins by applying Kant’s distinction between the agreeable and the pleasurable to sport, arguing that the appreciation of sport entails more than just excitement. Pleasure comes from an appreciation of the rules, strategies and history of the game. The significance of the rules of various codes of football in articulating our experience of space will be taken as fundamental to such appreciation. Drawing (...) on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the ‘topoanalysis’ of Gaston Bachelard, it will be argued that the aesthetic appreciation of football lies, not simply in recognising the complexity and subtlety of the movement of players and ball about the pitch, but more significantly in the creative and poetic imagination that the player embodies, and the striving of the player to create places within the course of play within which they can exercise their own competence as a player, and inhibit the compete.. (shrink)

La filosofía del deporte, al igual que la pedagogía, la historia y otros estudios humanísticos alrededor del fenómeno deportivo, ha permanecido tradicionalmente en un segundo plano en facultades e instituciones educativas, incluso en aquellas cuyo fin es, precisamente, comprender adecuadamente cómo y por qué jugamos del modo que lo hacemos y con qué finalidades (Kretchmar, 2005). En una reciente editorial de la revista Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Michael McNamee (2015) hace un repaso de la actualidad, exponiendo cómo a pesar de (...) que la disciplina no para de crecer y ganar protagonismo, sobre todo en el ámbito editorial, no acaba de hacerse el hueco pertinente en la academia. (shrink)