In his article, ‘Recovering Humanity: Movement, Sport, and Nature’, Doug Anderson addresses the place of endurance sport, or more generally sport at large, as a potential catalyst for the good life. Anderson contrasts transcendental themes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson with the pragmatic claims of William James and John Dewey, who focus on human possibility and growth. Our aim is to pursue the pragmatic line of thought championed by James and Dewey as a contrasting but not mutually (...) exclusive motive to Anderson’s analysis. We contend that movement can provide humanizing possibilities even more pronounced for those subscribing to pragmatic themes (i.e., growth and the strenuous mood). We will use running and cycling to demonstrate how the strenuous mood enhances the possibility for this humanizing condition. Specifically, we argue that moving in a committed fashion allows us to deepen our relationship with the respective practice and thus opens the possibilities for ‘recovering our humanity’. (shrink)

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)

In his recent work, ‘Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor’, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the ‘cornerstone of aesthetic theory’. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend the (...) usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi’s distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Two‐Wheeled Sensations The “Bicycling Method” Lessons from the Saddle Finding the Words Notes.

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on (...) the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 75-77.

To date, scholars have side-stepped examining the applicability of the Anti-Blowout thesis in parallel sports. This essay is an attempt to test this construct in the context of endurance footraces....

Philosophic inquiry into the mental states of elite athletes during skilled motor performance continues to grow. In contrast to the bulk of these works that focus almost exclusively on skillful performance, this paper examines athletic motor behavior from a point of inexactness – or even failure – in athletic performance. Utilizing the works of Michael Polanyi, who believed that both ideas of achievement and failure were equally necessary to understand the behavior of living things and their physical actions, I examine (...) the notion of failure as a framework to scrutinize the cognitive processes occurring during the development and performance of skilled motor behavior. After reviewing Polanyi’s conceptions of personal knowing to locate the source of inaccuracy in human activity, I present Polanyi’s distinction between two kinds of mistakes and apply each to inaccurate sport performance. I then suggest that mistakes in sport should be re-conceptualized beyond their current negative connotations. Instead, conceptions of mistakes should also include respect for ‘man’s most distinguished act’ – that being the production of knowledge. From this expanded perspective, the value of inexact motor performance can be found in addition to notions of uncertainty and skill development in what Polanyi calls ‘metaphysical implication of a groping for reality’. In some final thoughts, I will suggest future implications of the value of the inexact on broader sport issues. (shrink)

In his recent work, ‘Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor’, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the ‘cornerstone of aesthetic theory’. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend the (...) usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi’s distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art. (shrink)

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

Within the context of sports, the term 'miracle' is regularly associated with game-winning shots, holes-in-one, completed Hail Marys and other improbable outcomes. These conceptions of miracles largely focus on the success of specific sport actions at specific times when such success is deemed highly improbable. While prominent in the popular sports literature, most scholars agree that this perspective on miracles is very simple and highly unsophisticated. Events portrayed as simply 'beating the odds' would represent pale versions of miracles at best. (...) Some conceptions of miracles, however, include characteristics that reach beyond improbable outcomes. From more sophisticated perspectives, miracles are often viewed as divine action guiding the ordinary course of human experience. To be considered 'miraculous', improbable outcomes in sport would need to be perceived as interactions between the supernatural (God or other divine entity) and the natural (physical world). In addition, miraculous occurrences would have to be a part of a divine master-plan. Scholars argue that without such connections, miracles would yield no direction or meaning to the evolving world. The differences between these two perceptions raises several questions: Why do some view these extraordinary athletic performances from spiritually sophisticated perspectives while others have not the 'ears to hear' or the 'eyes to see' the divine possibilities in these experiences? Why are common uses and perceptions of miracles in sport simplistic and thin? What is a sophisticated view of miracles? What human abilities and processes are needed for one to achieve a sophisticated perspective? And, finally, what is the purpose of the true or sophisticated miracle in sport? In this paper, I will examine the notion of the miracle in sport. At its core, this paper describes how an athlete intellectually and spiritually moves from the unsophisticated to the sophisticated conception of a miracle. Through the writings of James, Lewis, Polanyi and others, I will show how human intellectual operations allow one to have 'ears to hear' and 'eyes to see' the spiritually miraculous in sport. I will begin by presenting an unsophisticated version of miracles in sport. After critically examining several types of miracles, I will present a more sophisticated definition. I will then explore the human processes necessary to view miraculous experiences in sport as interactions between the natural and the supernatural rather than interpreting these experiences simply as improbable outcomes. Finally, I will show how miracles present opportunities for spiritual conversion and have a use and place in the divine's master plan. (shrink)

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

This is a history of modern linguistics which focuses on the spread and dominance of linguistic theory originating in North America. It concentrates on the theories and influence of Bloomfield and Chomsky, and offers systematic coverage of their enormous contributions to grammatical theory over their lifespan. As well as tracing the intellectual histories of these great figures, and of others in the field, Professor Matthews follows the development and continuity of three dominant grammatical ideas in linguistics. First, the idea that (...) the study of formal relations can and should be separated from that of meaning. Second, that sentences are composed of linear configurations of morphemes. Third, that many aspects of grammar are defined generically. His biographical and theoretical survey will be invaluable to all linguists wishing to trace the origins of their discipline. (shrink)

Volume I. Metaphysics and sport -- volume II. Ethics of sport -- volume III. Sport and the good life -- volume IV. Sport and education.

Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice brings together leading researchers from Canada, the United States, and Europe in an interdisciplinary collection of essays to chart the future of critical inquiry in gender and comedy studies.

In preparation for the treatment of the gravitational field at spatial infinity, this paper deals with the electromagnetic field at spatial infinity. The field equations on this three-dimensional(1+2) manifold can be obtained from an action principle, which in turn lends itself to a Hamiltonian formulation. Quantization is formally straightforward, but some thought is given to the physical interpretation of the results.

This paper treats the formulation of the gravitational field variables and the equations obeyed by them at spatial infinity. The variables consist of a three-dimensional tensor and a scalar, which satisfy separate field equations, which in turn can be obtained from two distinct Lagrangians. Aside from Lorentz rotations, the symmetry operations include an Abelian gauge group and an Abelian Lie group, leading to a number of conservation laws and to differential identities between the field equations.

Levinas ahead of his time--and himself--on politics, postcolonialism and globalization, animals and the environment, and science and technology.

We present evidence from a pre-registered experiment indicating that a philosophical argument––a type of rational appeal––can persuade people to make charitable donations. The rational appeal we used follows Singer’s well-known “shallow pond” argument (1972), while incorporating an evolutionary debunking argument (Paxton, Ungar, & Greene 2012) against favoring nearby victims over distant ones. The effectiveness of this rational appeal did not differ significantly from that of a well-tested emotional appeal involving an image of a single child in need (Small, Loewenstein, and (...) Slovic 2007). This is a surprising result, given evidence that emotions are the primary drivers of moral action, a view that has been very influential in the work of development organizations. We did not find support for our pre-registered hypothesis that combining our rational and emotional appeals would have a significantly stronger effect than either appeal in isolation. However, our finding that both kinds of appeal can increase charitable donations is cause for optimism, especially concerning the potential efficacy of well-designed rational appeals. We consider the significance of these findings for moral psychology, ethics, and the work of organizations aiming to alleviate severe poverty. (shrink)

The study of intellectual humility is still in its early stages and issues of definition and measurement are only now being explored. To inform and guide the process of defining and measuring this important intellectual virtue, we conducted a series of studies into the implicit theory – or ‘folk’ understanding – of an intellectually humble person, a wise person, and an intellectually arrogant person. In Study 1, 350 adults used a free-listing procedure to generate a list of descriptors, one for (...) each person-concept. In Study 2, 335 adults rated the previously generated descriptors by how characteristic each was of the target person-concept. In Study 3, 344 adults sorted the descriptors by similarity for each person-concept. By comparing and contrasting the three person-concepts, a complex portrait of an intellectually humble person emerges with particular epistemic, self-oriented, and other-oriented dimensions. (shrink)

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States increased exponentially, quickly leading to a pandemic in 2020, which created a serious public-health emergency. During the period in which the COVID-1...

The evolution of complex life forms, such as multicellular organisms, is the result of a number of evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs). Several attempts have been made to explain their origins, many of which have been internalist (i.e., based largely on internal properties of these life form's ancestors). Here, we show how an externalist perspective, via the ecological scaffolding model in which properties of complex life forms arise from an external scaffold, can shed new light on the question of ETIs. (...) Ultimately, we anticipate progress in the field will occur by recognizing the importance of both the internalist and externalist modes of explanation for ETIs. We illustrate this by considering an extension of the ecological scaffolding model by niche construction in which particles modify the environment which later becomes the scaffold giving rise to collective-level individuality. (shrink)

This book is the first English-language collection of essays by leading Camus scholars around the world to focus on Albert Camus’ place and status as a philosopher amongst philosophers, engaging with leading Western thinkers, and considering themes of enduring interest.

It is shown in this paper that it is consistent (relative to almost huge cardinals) for various club guessing ideals to be saturated.

Animal Philosophy is the first text to look at the place and treatment of animals in Continental thought.

Previous research in North America has supported the view that male involvement in committed, romantic relationships is associated with lower testosterone (T) levels. Here, we test the prediction that undergraduate men involved in committed, romantic relationships (paired) will have lower T levels than men not involved in such relationships (unpaired). Further, we also test whether these differences are more apparent in samples collected later, rather than earlier, in the day. For this study, 107 undergraduate men filled out a questionnaire and (...) collected one saliva sample (from which a subject’s T level was measured) at various times across the day. As in previous studies, men involved in committed, romantic relationships had lower salivary T levels, though only during later times of the day. Furthermore, additional analysis of the variation among unpaired subjects indicated that men without prior relationship experience had lower T levels than experienced men. Finally, while paired men as a group had lower T levels than unpaired men, those men at the earliest stage (less than six months) of a current relationship had higher T levels than unpaired men as well as men in longer-term relationships. These results suggest that variation in male testosterone levels may reflect differential behavioral allocation to mating effort. (shrink)

The Continental Ethics Reader is the first comprehensive anthology of classic writings on ethics and moral philosophy from the major figures in Continental thought. The carefully selected readings are divided into five sections: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. All of the authors and their writings are introduced and placed in philosophical context by the editors. The Continental Ethics Reader is an ideal point of entry to the most pressing issues and most important thinkers of the (...) Continental tradition, and provides a thorough and much needed introduction to the field. (shrink)

In this chapter, we explore how themes of existential philosophy have been used to develop a formal orientation of psychotherapy, and we discuss the main principles of existential psychotherapy and their application in practice. We also draw upon case examples to specifically illustrate how the approach of existential psychotherapy is utilized in clinical practice. In the case examples, each patient's identify has been disguised to maintain confidentiality. The new science of meaning, represented by the chapters in this volume, not only (...) offers therapists a deep conceptual framework within which to practice older, more established techniques but should also suggest new approaches. By recognizing the centrality of meaning as sense making and acknowledging the distinction between the what and the why of sense making, therapists should be armed with a variety of epistemic and teleological tools with which to fashion therapy strategies that are unique for each individual. (shrink)

Multimodal neuroimaging provides a rich source of data for identifying brain regions associated with disease progression and aging. However, present studies still typically analyze modalities separately or aggregate voxel-wise measurements and analyses to the structural level, thus reducing statistical power. As a central example, previous works have used two quantitative MRI parameters—R2* and quantitative susceptibility —to study changes in iron associated with aging in healthy and multiple sclerosis subjects, but failed to simultaneously account for both. In this article, we propose (...) a unified framework that combines information from multiple imaging modalities and regularizes estimates for increased interpretability, generalizability, and stability. Our work focuses on joint region detection problems where overlap between effect supports across modalities is encouraged but not strictly enforced. To achieve this, we combine L1, total variation, and L2 group lasso penalties. While the TV penalty encourages geometric regularization by controlling estimate variability and support boundary geometry, the group lasso penalty accounts for similarities in the support between imaging modalities. We address the computational difficulty in this regularization scheme with an alternating direction method of multipliers optimizer. In a neuroimaging application, we compare our method against independent sparse and joint sparse models using a dataset of R2* and QS maps derived from MRI scans of 113 healthy controls: our method produces clinically-interpretable regions where specific iron changes are associated with healthy aging. Together with results across multiple simulation studies, we conclude that our approach identifies regions that are more strongly associated with the variable of interest, more accurate, and more stable with respect to training data variability. This work makes progress toward a stable and interpretable multimodal imaging analysis framework for studying disease-related changes in brain structure and can be extended for classification and disease prediction tasks. (shrink)

Although a large literature demonstrates that object‐extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject‐extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well as how best to explain these effects. An eye‐tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017) demonstrated that readers experience more processing difficulty at the matrix verb for ORCs than for SRCs when the matrix verb immediately follows the relative clause (RC), but the difficulty is eliminated if a (...) prepositional phrase (PP) intervenes. A careful examination of Staub et al.’s materials reveals that the types of PPs used in the experiment were a mixture of locative and temporal PPs. This is important in that locative PPs can modify either a noun phrase or a verb phrase (VP), whereas temporal PPs typically modify VPs, resulting in systematic differences in PP attachment across ORCs versus SRCs. In the current eye‐tracking experiment, we systematically manipulated RC type and PP type in the same sentences used by Staub et al. The manipulation of PP type resulted in a crossover pattern at the matrix verb such that there was a trend for reading times to be longer for ORCs than SRCs when the PP was locative, but reading times were longer for SRCs than ORCs when the PP was temporal. These results provide important information regarding the locus of RC‐processing effects and highlight the importance of carefully considering how intervening material might unintentionally alter the structure or the meaning of a sentence. (shrink)