Endurance athletes work at creating habits and lifestyles which correspond to Aristotle’s notion of eudomania. They spend time and energy dedicating themselves to their craft. They relinquish other interests in pursuit of excellence. They fully accept William James’ notion of precipitousness as they create goals and work toward achievement. In this paper, we examine normative issues related to endurance sport participation, the potential dark side of this pursuit of excellence. Our overriding concern is how best to work toward and experience (...) human flourishing while simultaneously remaining attentive to relationships and responsibilities. In terms of potential perils associated with endurance sport, we address questions of autonomy, authenticity and identification. We contend that endurance athletes concerned with these questions benefit from transcendental and pragmatic notions of the good life. (shrink)

My perspective in this paper is to look at sport and other physical activities as a way of exploring and experimenting with the environing world. The human being is basically the homo movens – born...

In 1972 I attended the Pre-Olympic Scientific Congress in Munich. For the first time science and sport were brought together in connection with the Olympic Games. The organizers presented a book Sport in Blickpunkt der Wissenschaften (Sport from a Scientific Point of View) that summarized history and state of the art of the main sport scientific approaches (41). The German philosopher Hans Lenk gave a presentation of a broad array of past and present interpretations of sport from a philosophic viewpoint (...) (49). The congress in Munch and Hans Lenk's presentation of sport as a suitable philosophic topic became decisive for my own lifelong interest in philosophy of sport. Soon after the Munich conference some American philosophers convened to launch the Philosophic Society for the Study of Sport. In 1973 the first issue of Journal of Philosophy of Sport was published (35). In several ways 1972 was a turning point for philosophy of sport as a serious academic discipline and for my own interest in sport philosophy. From here sport philosophy found its way to Norway and through this and along several other roads to other Nordic countries. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMy goal in this article is to give a portrait of how modern sport philosophy, which started in 1972, developed from relatively narrow paradigmatic borders to become a diverse and multi-para...