Volume 52, Issue 8, July 2020, Page 805-810.

This article addresses the moral and legal difficulties sport governing bodies encounter as human rights promoters. The case presented here is the 2023 decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to allow athletes from Russia and Belarus to compete in international sport under neutral colours, after recommending complete exclusion a year before due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While IOC’s change of mind was influenced by UN experts on human rights, claiming that the ban discriminated against Russian athletes, the (...) same experts fail to take into account competing human rights elements that could favour the ban. To that end, this article discusses the complexities of prioritizing human rights in an Olympic context and, deriving from that, demonstrates the existence of moral and legal support for upholding the exclusion of Russia. Finally, the analysis of how to prioritize morally and legally between competing human rights offers deliberative material to other sport governing bodies which could be used to carve out preventive measures prior to their next encounter with a similar situation. (shrink)

In this essay I attempt to show the limitations of analytic thinking and the kinds of dead ends into which such analyses may lead us in the philosophy of sport. As an alternative, I argue for a philosophy of complementation and compatibility in the face of what appear to be exclusive alternatives. This is a position that is sceptical of bifurcations and other simplified portrayals of reality but does not dismiss them entirely. A philosophy of complementation traffics in the realm (...) of ambiguities, paradoxes, differences by degree, tendencies, mixtures, polarities, tensions, complexes, transitions and all other forms of messiness. I note that this position has been generated, in part, by work conducted in the empirical sciences and that complementation provides a paradigm that is useful across the academic disciplines. To show the ways in which analytic thinking leads to dead ends, I analyse the epistemological debate over ?broad internalism? engaged in by Russell (1999, 2004), Dixon (2003), Simon (2000, 2004) and Morgan (2004). Evidence for the claim that they reached a mostly unhelpful stalemate is based on the fact that they did not provide any third option and moreover that the analytic tools and ground rules they employ prevent its discovery. I suggest that all four authors are comfortable with the analytic tendency to bifurcate reality and require choices among exclusionary alternatives. I also claim that they treat reason as if it were generated by a ?mind from nowhere?. Philosophical anthropology, I suggest, provides much-needed somatic grounding that would reign in excessively optimistic views of reason (Dixon, Simon and Russell) or excessively plastic interpretations of mind (Morgan). It can also provide evidence that could help us understand why hominids (even modern ones) are so attracted to dichotomies and why we have so much trouble in reconciling apparent incompatibilities. (shrink)

En este artículo, la filosofía analítico-lingüística es identificada como la metodología predominante en la filosofía del deporte. Según esta propuesta metodológica, la búsqueda de la definición del deporte es la meta principal de la filosofía. La hermenéutica del deporte es opuesta a la de tipo analítico-lingüístico. Analizando el concepto de verdad de Heidegger, se comparan dos concepciones de la tarea de la filosofía: ontología y descrip-ción. La tarea de la hermenéutica del deporte tiene que ver con la descripción. Las expli-caciones (...) hermenéuticas del deporte son un intento de describir la facticidad del deporte, que está compuesta por tres momentos diferentes: corporalidad, capacidades, y tradici. (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)

I began writing this review of John Zilcosky and Marlo Burks’ edited volume, The Allure of Sports in Western Culture, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine commenced. In the wake of the military campa...

A paradoxical attitude exists toward professional philosophy: philosophical inquiry is considered important and complex, but professionals are deemed irrelevant and unnecessary. This paradox doubly affects sport philosophy as evidenced by the field’s marginalization in higher education and sociopolitical discourse. To counter the sport philosophy paradox, I present a pragmatically oriented three-dimensional approach to inquiry that turns the field “inside-out”. A community of engaged, melioratively oriented sport philosophy inquirers in this 3D model collectively conducts theoretical, applied, and instrumental inquiry. Each dimension (...) is outlined in detail from a professional sport philosophy perspective, and implications are considered relative to the field’s future endeavors. (shrink)

Sports occupies an interesting ethical space from a pedagogic point of view, being included in physical education curricula in most Western countries. The approach of physical education as vehicle for ethical education, is too limited when restricted to its minimal functional, constitutive and regulatory goals. The aim of this essay is to argue to what extent the ethical potential of physical education extrapolates them in order to, with Sousa Santos, state against to what we consider a waste of sport’s experience. (...) In order to achieve this, we present data from nineteen exploratory interviews with philosophy, sports and physical education experienced researchers and teachers concerning the ethical potentialities of physical education. The sample includes individuals from six different nationalities, whose work shows concerns with the subject under study. (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...