Hope is necessary for kinesiology. Hope is profoundly human, because it is a fact of our nature. Human life is organic. We hope because we are by nature oriented to the future. Motion, growth, development and temporality are at the core of our lives. The great Thomistic philosopher Josef Pieper puts it this way: ‘man finds himself, even until the moment of death, in the status viatoris, in the state of being on the way’. Hope, therefore, is a longing for (...) and expectation of fulfillment. An anticipation that the good will triumph in the end. What implications does this have for kinesiology? As I have often said before, kinesiology is a human discipline. The nature of man cannot help but impact our field. More pertinent for our present purposes however is this; the future of kinesiology is not about organization or rational planning. Nor, at the end of the day, is it merely about promoting health, or physical activity, or even play. Decontextualized from a larger vision of nature, purpose and end of human life, even play becomes mere therapy. Such an isolated vision of the future of kinesiology is emaciated. It is born of hopelessness. That is, either the presumption that ‘health’ is all we need, or the despair that ‘health’ is all there is. (shrink)

While sport is often pursued more for reasons of meaning than morality, philosophers have had far less to say about the former. How are the ends of sport related to meaning and morality? I address the question through the case study of boxing. One reason for this approach is that the moral status of boxing is contested, which makes it an interesting candidate for immoral, meaningful activity. Drawing on Wolf’s hybrid account of meaning in life, I argue that boxing can (...) be a meaningful pursuit insofar as it fosters positive self-transformation and interpersonal connection. I then consider a structural obstacle facing the pursuit of meaning in competitive sport and look at the instructive case study of Tyson Fury. I make use of Setiya’s distinction between telic and atelic ends in order to diagnose the problem. Finally, I address the likely objection that the goals of boxing are either absurd or immoral and, therefore, unsuited to the pursuit of a meaningful life. (shrink)

There are many ways that we can watch sport but not all of them are philosophically interesting. One can watch it enthusiastically, casually, fanatically or drunkenly. One might watch only because one has bet on the outcome. Some watch a friend or relative compete and have a narrow focus on one individual's performance. A coach or scout on the lookout for new talent may have completely different interests to a supporter of a team. But what of the ways of watching (...) sport that are of philosophical interest? (shrink)

An attempt is made to articulate what is seen as a ?thin? interpretation of justice in sport and how this is understood in terms of ?thick? interpretations in various sociocultural settings. In this way, it is argued, sport can be better understood as a dynamic social practice. First, a thin interpretation of justice is formulated. Sport's structural goal is to measure, compare and rank competitors according to their performances. The rule systems of sport are based on more general norms that (...) describe how this goal can be reached in reliable and valid ways. A thin interpretation consists of norms for equal opportunity to perform and meritocratic norms that describe what inequalities are to be measured in sport and how they are to be rewarded. Secondly, various socio-cultural understandings of the thin interpretation are discussed. Five ideal-typical thick interpretations are given: the purist, the cynic, the rationalist, the supporter and the consumer. These positions represent different and to a certain extent contradictory interpretations of the thin justice scheme. Some positions even seem to reject it. This scheme indicates potentially radical changes in sport as we know it. (shrink)

This book symposium on Jason Holt’s Kinetic Beauty: The Philosophical Aesthetics of Sport includes commentaries from Stephen Mumford, John E. MacKinnon and Andrew Edgar with replies from Holt.

In the economic literature on the firm, especially in the transaction-cost tradition, a sharp distinction is drawn between so-called “market transactions” and “administered transactions.” This distinction is of enormous importance for business ethics, since market transactions are governed by the competitive logic of the market, whereas administered transactions are subject to the cooperative norms that govern collective action in a bureaucracy. The widespread failure to distinguish between these two types of transactions, and thus to distinguish between adversarial and non-adversarial relations, (...) has led many business ethicists to develop a “uniform” moral code. Yet in market transactions, the checks and balances built into the system of commercial exchange are such as to permit more instrumental forms of behavior. In administered transactions, by contrast, these checks and balances are absent, and thus the institutional context calls for much greater exercise of moral restraint. In this paper, I begin the task of developing an adversarial ethic for business. According to this view, the competitive environment licenses a greater range of “self-interested” behavior, but also imposes its own constraints on the strategies that firms may adopt in the pursuit of their interests. (shrink)

In the economic literature on the firm, especially in the transaction–cost tradition, a sharp distinction is drawn between so-called “market transactions” and “administered transactions.” This distinction is of enormous importance for business ethics, since market transactions are governed by the competitive logic of the market, whereas administered transactions are subject to the cooperative norms that govern collective action in a bureaucracy. The widespread failure to distinguish between these two types of transactions, and thus to distinguish between adversarial and non-adversarial relations, (...) has led many business ethicists to develop a “uniform” moral code. Yet in market transactions, the checks and balances built into the system of commercial exchange are such as to permit more instrumental forms of behavior. In administered transactions, by contrast, these checks and balances are absent, and thus the institutional context calls for much greater exercise of moral restraint. In this paper, I begin the task of developing an adversarial ethic for business. According to this view, the competitive environment licenses a greater range of “self-interested” behavior, but also imposes its own constraints on the strategies that firms may adopt in the pursuit of their interests. (shrink)

This paper explores what it means to fail in an ultramarathon—be marked DNF, or Did Not Finish—through hermeneutic phenomenology. In today’s popular culture, failure holds a paradoxical position: P...

ABSTRACTIn this article, I consider Bernard Suits’ Utopia where the denizens supposedly fill their days playing Utopian sports, with regard to the relevance of the thought experiment for understand...

A familiar debate in the philosophy of sport concerns the question of whether fans should seek to be partisans (those who support particular teams or individuals) or whether they should instead adopt the impartial attitude of the purist. More recently, Kyle Fruh et al. have argued in defense of fair-weather fandom, which they understand as a form of fandom that involves adopting temporary allegiances in response to non-sporting considerations. This paper will add a new form of fandom to this discussion: (...) the foul-weather fan. While fair-weather fans adopt temporary allegiances or strengthen existing allegiances for teams when things are going well, foul-weather fans do so when things are going badly. We will argue that foul-weather fandom can be both instrumentally valuable, as it helps to protect valuable sporting institutions, and non-instrumentally valuable, as these fans display concern, empathy, or support for sporting individuals or teams that are going through tough times. We finish by discussing how a specific form of foul-weather fandom may be associated with a distinctive moral danger in putting people in positions where they may become complicit in a club’s immorality. (shrink)