We may be tempted to compare physicalist attempts to understand consciousness with 18th century attempts to understand electricity. This may make us think that the former too though initially mysterious will ultimately be brought within the physicalist fold. But there’s a crucial disanalogy between the two: ‘What is consciousness?’ can be interpreted as two distinct questions: ‘What causes consciousness?’ And ‘what is it to be conscious?’ ‘What is electricity?’ can only be interpreted as ‘What causes electricity?’, ‘What is it to (...) be electricity?’ being meaningless. Maybe physicalists have gotten so used to explaining phenomena where only the one question is applicable that they, I think erroneously dismiss those who entertain the other question. But the blame is not all one way. Those who entertain the ‘what is it to be conscious?’ question, think that because there is no physicalist answer to that question, therefore there must be a gap in the physicalist answer to the ‘what causes consciousness?’ question, a gap they try, like our friend here, to fill by postulating non-spatial things. Needless to say, these things don’t answer either question. (shrink)

Weather experiences are currently surprisingly under-explored and under-theorised in sociology and sport sociology, despite the importance of weather in both routine, everyday life and in recreational sporting and physical–cultural contexts. To address this lacuna, we examine here the lived experience of weather, including ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, in our specific physical–cultural worlds of distance-running, triathlon and jogging in the United Kingdom. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and the findings from five separate auto/ethnographic projects, we explore the (...) ‘weather-worlds’ and weather work involved in our physical–cultural engagement. In so doing, we address ongoing sport sociological concerns about embodiment and somatic, sensory learning and ways of knowing. We highlight how weather work provides a key example of the phenomenological conceptualisation of the mind–body–world nexus in action, with key findings delineating weather learning across the meteorological seasons that contour our British weather-related training. (shrink)

From the political point of view, European Union (EU) integration implies some kind of unity in the community constituted by EU citizens. Unity is difficult to attain if the diversity of citizens (and their nations) is to be respected. A thick bond that melts members' diversity into a 'European pot' is therefore out of the question. On the other hand, giving up unity altogether makes political integration impossible. Through a meta-theoretical analysis of normative positions, this paper proposes a composed notion (...) of European identity that links without binding. It contains four facets – cultural, political, social, external – with nuances, expressed in three binaries, that cut across all of them – history-project, ethos-achievement, commonness-uncommonness. I will submit that a workable European identity (and the related concepts of unity, polity and citizenship) can be better conceived as analogical – a mid way between blending unity and irreconcilable diversity. (shrink)