ABSTRACT The article begins by identifying a set of hitherto undisclosed contradictions of meaning and value attributed to a basic structure of our existence—competition. It seeks to resolve these contradictions by showing that there are two basic forms of competition not previously distinguished: (1) the dominant model of competition in which pay‐offs extrinsic to the activity itself are conferred on one party at the expense of others; and (2) the submerged, spontaneous form of competition in which no structure of extrinsic (...) and exclusionary pay‐offs is imposed on the action. Illustrating in terms of a paradigm example, ice‐hockey, the analysis shows that the well‐known and systematic pathologies of competitive conflict—violence, cheating, authoritarianism, sexism, drug‐taking and so on—are a law‐like consequence of the dominant structure of competition and not a problem of competition as such. (shrink)

Designed for both undergraduate and graduate courses, Philosophic Inquiry in Sport is a combination of 56 classic and contemporary essays that strike a balance between analytical, existential, and phenomenological perspectives.

As described in Benjamin Hale’s Introduction to “Philosophy Looks at Chess”: -/- “Deb Vossen asks whether chess can rightly be considered a game in the first place. She concludes, much to the surprise of many readers, that chess is not a game. Her evocative claim turns on a distinction between a game and the idea of a game, which evolved out of Bernard Suits’s phenomenally underappreciated work The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. She advances this position by way of a (...) technical argument that employs Suits’s discussion of “prelusory” goals and “lusory” attitudes. The word “lusory” generally means sporty or playful; and in Suits’s sense, it means that when we engage in the play of chess, we must enter the lusory attitude. She uses the notion of a prelusory goal to argue that such goals exist in a game (in this case, a game of chess) but not at all in the idea of the game (in the idea of chess).”. (shrink)