The word 'athletics' is derived from the Greek verb 'to struggle for a prize'. After reading this book, no one will see the Olympics as a graceful display of Greek beauty again, but as war by other means. Nigel Spivey paints a portrait of the Greek Olympics as they really were - fierce contests between bitter rivals, in which victors won kudos and rewards, and losers faced scorn and even assault. Victory was almost worth dying for, and a (...) number of athletes did just that. Many more resorted to cheating and bribery. Contested always bitterly and often bloodily, the ancient Olympics were not an idealistic celebration of unity, but a clash of military powers in an arena not far removed from the battlefield. (shrink)

The inspiration for this paper came rather unexpectedly. In February 2006, I made the long trip from my home in Sioux City, Iowa, to Torino, Italy in order to witness the Olympic Winter Games. Barely a month later, I found myself in California at the newly-renovated Getty Villa, home to one of the world's great collections of Greco-Roman antiquities. At the Villa I attended a talk about a Roman mosaic depicting a boxing scene from Virgil'sAeneid.The tiny tiles showed not only (...) two boxers, but a wobbly looking ox. ‘What is wrong with this ox?’ asked the docent. ‘Why is he there at the match?’ The answer, of course, is that he is the prize. And the reason he is wobbly is because the victor has just sacrificed this prize to the gods in thanksgiving, by punching him between the eyes. A light went on in my head; I turned to my husband and whispered, ‘Just like Joey Cheek in Torino.’ My husband smiled indulgently, but my mind was already racing. I realized that by donating his victory bonus to charity, Cheek had tapped into one of the oldest and most venerable traditions in sport: individual sacrifice for the benefit of the larger community. It is a tradition that derives from the religious function of the ancient Olympic Games and it deserves to be revived the modern world. (shrink)

This book is a collection of 26 previously published essays on ‘Olympic philosophy,’ both ancient and modern. Because the essays were published over the past 20 years in various journals and books,...

The Olympic Games are a sporting event guided by philosophy. The modern Olympic Charter calls this philosophy “Olympism” and boldly states its goal as nothing less than “the harmonious development of humankind” and the promotion of “a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” The ideas and ideals behind Olympism, however, are ancient—tracing their roots to archaic and classical Greece, just like the Games do. This collection of essays explores the ancient Hellenic roots of Olympic philosophy (...) and explain their application to modern sport. It examines the philosophical heritage of the Games, the ethics implied by Olympic values of sport, the educational goals of sport, the relations between justice and fair play, the political ideals of peace and world community, and modern challenge of multiculturalism as expressed in the philosophical contrasts between East and West. To understand the beauty, challenges, politics, and potential of the Olympic Games, we must first understand Olympic philosophy. (shrink)

The ancient world witnessed a meaningful transition in the conception of human thought and belief. What some have called the “discovery” of the mind can also be understood as a release from dependence on oracular wisdom and mythological explanation, made possible by the invention of more reliable and democratic methods for discovering and explaining truths. During roughly the same epoch, Hellenic sport distinguished itself by developing objective mechanisms for selecting single winners from varied pools of contestants. Is there a (...) connection? Following the general thesis that sport is an expression of thehuman desire to know, this paper will explore the epistemological nature of the earliest forms Hellenic athletics. I begin by interpreting the funeral games depicted in Homer’s Iliad as an unbiased, publicly monitored means for settling questions of social honor. I then consider the ancient Olympic games, arguing that their religious foundations motivated a new focus on objective and reliable methods for selecting single winners who could be symbolically sacrificed to the god. In both manifestations, athletic games are used to objectively answer important questions about merit. Eventually, competitive methods of truth‐seeking would become commonplace in Western thought. By examining early the origins of Greek sport in this light, however, Olympia may be identified as a key source of epistemological testing methods, and sport itself may be characterized fundamentally as a search for knowledge. (shrink)

The ancient world witnessed a meaningful transition in the conception of human thought and belief. What some have called the “discovery” of the mind can also be understood as a release from dependence on oracular wisdom and mythological explanation, made possible by the invention of more reliable and democratic methods for discovering and explaining truths. During roughly the same epoch, Hellenic sport distinguished itself by developing objective mechanisms for selecting single winners from varied pools of contestants. Is there a (...) connection? Following the general thesis that sport is an expression of thehuman desire to know, this paper will explore the epistemological nature of the earliest forms Hellenic athletics. I begin by interpreting the funeral games depicted in Homer’s Iliad as an unbiased, publicly monitored means for settling questions of social honor. I then consider the ancient Olympic games, arguing that their religious foundations motivated a new focus on objective and reliable methods for selecting single winners who could be symbolically sacrificed to the god. In both manifestations, athletic games are used to objectively answer important questions about merit. Eventually, competitive methods of truth‐seeking would become commonplace in Western thought. By examining early the origins of Greek sport in this light, however, Olympia may be identified as a key source of epistemological testing methods, and sport itself may be characterized fundamentally as a search for knowledge. (shrink)

The Olympic movement sometimes claims that sport has nothing to do with politics, yet its goal of promoting peace is explicitly political. The Olympics' association with peace, furthermore, is inherited from the ancient version of the festival which took place in a very distant time and place. This essay examines the ancient political heritage of the Olympic Games and questions its relevance to such modern Olympic challenges as globalisation, cultural hegemony, social discrimination and environmental degradation. It suggests (...) that these challenges are not so different from those addressed in the ancient Olympic Games, and argues that a better understanding of the ancient games' political achievements may increase the modern Olympic movement's chances of realising their own political goals. After all, the basic structures of sport, which underpin the political achievements of the Olympic Games, have changed little over the last 2,500 years. (shrink)

Diogenes’s exchange with Cicermos the Olympic pankratist is unusual in that it is both a dialectical exchange and is successful in changing Cicermos’s mind. Most Cynic rhetoric is physical or gestural and more often alienates than convinces. The puzzling difference is explained by the rhetorical choices Diogenes makes with his uniquely receptive audience.

`From Aristotle to Us', the conference held at La Trobe University in May 2007, names a powerful and highly influential Romantic trajectory, one which posits a particular conception of the ancients, a particular conception of the moderns, and a complex conception of the relationship between the two. Using the modern Olympic Revival as a case study and a case in point, this article argues that such `exercises' in Greek appropriation always operate with largely unstated assumptions about the nature of the (...) present's relation to the past, and the enormously complex quality of the Greek past. In becoming self-critical about such appropriations of the Classical legacy, contemporary critics are forced to contend with the spectre of religion, a topic that `Greek exercises' almost inevitably carve in high relief. The article concludes with an historiographic meditation on varying images of `paganism' in contemporary culture, images that link the Greeks to athletics to such modern and post-modern `revivals'. (shrink)

This paper is based on the work of Pierre de Coubertin and his view of Olympism. It deals with Coubertin's distinction between two kinds of sport: Olympic sport and world championship sport. I shall examine these two possibilities with respect both to education through sport and to how one lives one's life, and I shall show the necessity of choosing between them, with reference to Coubertin's closing remarks in his speech at the 1925 Olympic Congress in Prague: ?Fair or temple (...) ? sportsmen must make their choice; they cannot expect to frequent both one and the other ? let them choose!? (Coubertin 2000f, 559). I shall address the topic of the choice between these two kinds of sport through the two metaphors in the above quotation: ?fair?, in the sense of a market, or in ancient Greek agora; and ?temple?. Since this is also a choice of the way one lives one's life, the ideas will be worked out from within the philosophy of existence, particularly from the work of Jan Pato?ka, who develops the idea of different ?movements of human existence? in connection with different overall life directions that one might follow. The notion of ?fair? (or agora) is characterised by a human being's following of the prevailing patterns, norms and aims prescribed by society, without much reflection upon his or her individual aims and attitudes. It is described in Heideggerian terms as inauthenticity and in Pato?ka's idea of the second life movement, which is characterised by work, struggle, competition, comparisons, endless striving and self-assertion. Within sport, this is represented by wanting to win at all costs, lack of respect, self-promotion and striving for rewards. The notion of ?temple? is contrasted with the above mentioned character of the fair and is related to a certain clarity about one's existence and striving, one's doing and thinking, as described in Pato?ka's third movement of existence. Within the context of sport this is instantiated as a kind of self-development based on self-understanding and critical reflection, and it is illustrated by Olympism and Olympic sport. (shrink)

This engaging and informative text will hold the attention of students and scholars as they take a journey through time to understand the role that history and philosophy have played in shaping the course of sport and physical education in Western and selected non-Western civilizations. Using appropriate theoretical and interpretive frameworks, students will investigate topics such as the historical relationship between mind and body; what philosophers and intellectuals have said about the body as a source of knowledge; educational philosophy and (...) the value of physical education and/or sport; philosophical positions that have impacted the historical development of sport and physical education; the history of women in sport and physical education; the role and scope of sport and physical education in Ancient Greece and Rome; the Ancient Olympic Games; the relationship between sport and religion in ancient and modern times; the theoretical and professional development of physical education; the rise of sport in modern America; the history and politics of the modern Olympic Games; and the contributions of men, women, and social movements to the development of sport and physical education from ancient times to the modern era. (shrink)

A common argument for the social value of sport is that athletes serve as heroes who inspire people – especially young people – to strive for excellence. This argument has been questioned by sport philosophers at a variety of levels. Not only do athletes seem unsuited to be heroes or role models in the conventional sense, it is unclear more generally what the social and educational value of athletic excellence could be. In this essay, I construct an argument for the (...) social and educational value of sport built upon the relationship between athletes, heroes, and the song culture that celebrated them in ancient Greece. On this model, athletes are neither heroes nor role models in the conventional sense. Rather, athletes, athletics, and the poets who extolled them were part of a cultural conspiracy to celebrate and inspire virtue by connecting a community with its heroic past. Festivals such as the Olympic Games, but also local events such as funeral games, educated and unified communities by cultivating an aesthetic appreciation for virtue and by inspiring youth to strive for it. Ancient athletes were not heroes, rather they re-enacted heroic struggles, thereby experiencing heroic virtues, and inspiring both artists and spectators to bond with the higher ideals implied by their shared belief in divine ancestry. In this way, athletes, athletics, and the media that celebrated them played important social and educational roles. Insofar as modern sport performs a similar service, its association with heroism and with moral education may ultimately be justified. (shrink)

Several aspects of human life are pervaded with images and symbols that often belong to what Jung (1981) called archetypes, characteristics of the mind with a profound influence on most aspects of culture and sport. The rationality introduced into our society, as the fruit of both the positivist concept of progress and the rapid development of technology, has, albeit while driving out excessiveness due to irrational explanations and often knavery, also disregarded the importance of images and symbols in everyday life. (...) Yet a number of these inevitably still exist, since they are archetypal. With this observation as a starting point, the present work has been designed to analyse whether it is still possible to find ancient images and symbols in modern sport activities. The a priori reason for such a question arises from the acceptance that modern and ancient sports are profoundly different. This has been historically proved in terms of organisation and quantification, among other characteristics (Guttmann 1978). The present analysis refers to a limited number of images and symbols concerning ancient and modern sport, which include a primordial Ur-symbol, that of bodily action or of body in movement. Others concern various aspects of the athlete's life, such as expression of religious beliefs, immortality, eternal return and the front. It suggests that many of these images and symbols may still be found in contemporary sports, in open contrast with some of the Olympic principles suggested by De Coubertin and chiefly prevalent in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (shrink)

Can a democratic Global Society become the alternative to Empire and bring order into present international anarchy? One hundred percent sovereignty in nation states gives “security” to each but creates “anarchy” in relations between states. To bring order into international relations some sovereignty has to be surrendered. Empire, which does bring an order of sorts, is imposed from outside, is undemocratic and aggrandising. Global Society can be conceptualised as its alternative. Sharply contrasting Global Society to Empire tends to pose the (...) former as a panacea, but it is important to know its potential faults. Global Society can be envisioned at the constitutive stage and as continuing to exert influence within the institutions it creates. At the difficult constitutive stage, it will be fragile and of unwieldy size and ought only be called into play at critical junctures. The institutions it creates will be a democratic federal regime of regional blocks of states. To resolve issues, Global Society presumes effective consocial dialogue and participation rather than violent contention. Classical and Hellenistic Greece provide examples where vision and honour battled with the ambitions and greed of Empire and remarkably sometimes won. All the Greek city-states were under some sort of regional federal alliance at different times and drew strength from shared religious sanctuaries and their attached Games. The various interchanges between democratic Federalism and Empire in ancient Greece offers a microcosm of today's interregnum between modern and postmodern international relations. For as democratic political theorists at the start of the twenty first century, we do not seem to be able to do without the legitimizing idea of the People, but we do not know what to do with it. —Margaret Canovan, “The People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of Hannah Arendt's ‘Populism’” Lysistrata: Don't you share a cup at common altars, for common gods, like brothers, at the Olympic games, Thermophylai and Delphi? —Aristophanes, Lysistrata. (shrink)

The article explores Nietzsche’s view that the Greek agonistic impulse in sport led to an ancient culture that prized the dialectics of philosophy and its humane offspring. The Greeks did not invent physical contests, but the Olympics are unique in the ancient world for bringing together once and future enemies under formal terms of contest. What did this signify? And what were its consequences? In Nietzsche’s view, the ancient Greek obsession with agon (contest) led to the (...) greatest civilization of the western world. How so? The paper shows how the Greeks learned to “spiritualize” violence and redirect its otherwise destructive power. This aggressive but rule-bound ethos became the competitive force in Greek culture to which we owe the disciplines of philosophy, drama, history, and science,—because each was conceived as a new arena of intellectual or artistic competition on the model of competitive sport. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient GreeceMindy FenskeBodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece by Debra Hawhee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 226. $40.00, hardcover.In Bodily Arts, Debra Hawhee constructs an often compelling, always interesting case for the conceptual and material linkages between the ancient arts of rhetoric and athletics. In so doing, Hawhee also highlights the integral role (...) of the musical arts to rhetorical and athletic training. Throughout the book, Hawhee weaves together close readings of multiple texts (poetry, oratory, sculpture, painting, architecture) in order to illuminate the intricate “network of overlapping practices” that connect the bodies of rhetoric, athletes, and musicians in Ancient Greece. To this reader, the central strengths of the study are methodological as well as conceptual. In terms of method, Hawhee carefully and with studied finesse integrates close readings of visual, spatial, and verbal texts and practices. In the wrong hands, this type of endeavor can easily appear as the worst kind of pastiche. Not so in this case where Hawhee manages the textual interpretation with deft expertise. Conceptually, the central premise that rhetoric was a practice that was fully embodied and, most importantly, that embodiment was not in a hierarchical relation to reason, rationality, and the mind is provocative. Hawhee argues that the relations of mind-body in Ancient Greek culture were understood as a complex interlocking system that, when trained through physical practices emphasizing rhythm, repetition, and response (to/with an encounter), resulted in the possible transformation of the very nature of the self. [End Page 197]In the process of constructing the argument for the connections between rhetorical and athletic training and performance, Bodily Arts moves through three phases. The Introduction and first three chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for the second phase: the introduction of the concept of phusiopoieses in Chapter 4. Chapters 5–7 then discuss the actual rhetorical and athletic spaces, practices, and bodies of and in phusiopoiesis.The introduction opens with description of a first-century BC bronze statue of an “Antikythera Youth” (3). Hawhee uses the mystery surrounding the identity of the figure (deciphered largely through interpretations of the actions implied by the stature of the statue) to articulate the connections between the body of the rhetor and the body of the athlete as well as to introduce the importance of the body to Greek values of hexis (comportment) and aretē (virtuosity). The Introduction also presents three critical relations that serve both as conceptual departure points as well as hail the multiple audiences of the book: relations of body and mind, learning and performing, and classical studies and rhetorical studies. Hawhee’s perspective is quite straightforwardly that rhetoric is an art that required physical training and physical performance.Chapter 1, “Contesting Virtuosity: Agonism and the Production of Aretē,” connects the values of agon and aretē and argues that the “very logic for linking rhetoric and athletics” lies at the heart of this relation (22). Hawhee argues that agon and aretē are less about ends (victory and virtue) and more centrally concerned with embodied processes. Agon, through Hawhee’s reading of Hesiod’s Work and Days, is articulated as a mode of encounter that produces a particular, and possibly transformative, response. Aretē is the bodily performance of virtuosity. Central to this performance, according to Hawhee’s interpretation of the Olympic ethos through Pindar’s poetry, is the activity of questing. Aretē is demonstrated rather than simply won or attained. Following these definitions of agon and aretē, the chapter moves to illustrating the shared language of rhetoric and athletics in terms of these values. Hawhee argues that this shared vocabulary confirms that sophistic rhetoric was understood and practiced as an embodied and agonistic art “fused and infused” with athletics (43).In Chapter 2, “Sophistic Mētis : An Intelligence of the Body,” Hawhee describes mētis as cunning and somatic becoming that “infuses the arts of rhetoric and athletics with a kind of bodily intelligence... not an explicit set of precepts but rather a tacit style of movement running through most kinds of actions, including thought” (47). Moreover, the movement of mētis [End Page 198] is corporeal. It... (shrink)

Compilation of the most important documents and speeches by Pierre de Coubertin on Olympism and the Olympic Games.

While the Olympics are the most significant record of sports practice since classical antiquity, they remain one of the most significant and universal manifestations of the presence of sport in the...