The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Sport

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2017

Programme and Book Abstract of the "The 21st Annual Conference of the British Philosophy of Sports Association", which will take place March 21-23, 2024 at the Robert Gordon University of Aberdeen

Wood in Sport Equipment – Heritage, Present, Perspective, 2022

Very often, the reaction to the many scandals that periodically rock the world of sport is simply to make urgent demands to develop a healthy sports culture. If this is the aim, I shall try to outline what the sphere of ethics and philosophy might contribute to the debate.

Ido Movement for Culture. Journal of Martial Arts Anthropology, 2018

Background. Attitudes of Church teaching, essentially, are not contrary to the efforts of man to strive for a healthy and fruitful life (in every aspect), where sport takes an important place in the context of his health – like physical health is not complete without “a healthy soul” and “a healthy mind”. And right there, in the work of man’s efforts to be “completely healthy”, faith (religion, beliefs, commitment etc.) plays a special role in the so-called “Gymnastics of the soul”. As knowledge and learning, intellectual development has a duty to uphold the “Gymnastics of the mind”. Method. A broad discourse analysis is used, including literature. This study uses a theoretical perspective based on philosophy, the philosophy of sport and theological aspects of human anthropology. Results. The aim of this work is contained in the philosophical-critical analysis of the basic correlative connection between authentic and confirmed sports values compared to the quintessential items of Ch...

2021

The focus of the book Philosophy of Sport. Emergence and Development of a Discipline is on a drawing and critical analysis of the history and development of the philosophy of sport as a separate branch of philosophy, but also the ethics and bioethics of sport as its key subdisciplines. In the first chapter of the book, the author discusses the question of what sport is. He first presents and critically considers the definitions of play, game, and sport as set out by B. H. Suits in his masterpiece Grasshopper. Games, Life and Utopia and some of his articles. Namely, Suits’ definitions and understandings of the “tricky triad” (play, games, sport) are the foundation and starting point of the philosophy of sport, as well as the framework for understanding sports and all its problems and issues. In relation to Suits', the author also considers the definitions of Huizinga, Wittgenstein, Fink, Guttman and Nguyen, and lay the foundations for the philosophy of play and games as separate discipline or area of philosophical consideration. The author concludes that the definition of sport cannot be provided in a logical and unambiguous way. Therefore, he turns to consideration and critical examination of the different characterizations and conceptualizations of sport presented in the literature – testing and contesting, the spirit of sports, the integrity of sports, Olympic sports. The chapter concludes with the author’s evaluation of the literature on the defining sport. In the second chapter, the author gives his definition of the philosophy of sport and a brief overview of all sub-branches developed so far. Then, he presents his own view of the history of the philosophy of sport in three phases. The first is the Ancient Phase or ‘the ancient Mediterranean roots of the discipline’, where he immediately points out that it is incorrect to call ‘ancient competitive games to honour the gods’ – a sport. Namely, sport per se, as well as its name, originate from the 19th century or over 2000 years after the ancient period. As the content relevant to the philosophy of sport in Ancient Greek period, he finds depictions of competitive games in the Iliad and Odyssey. Furthermore, in the works of Plato and Aristotle, he finds numerous passages that speak of the important role of physical exercise and competitive games in honour of the gods, especially in the terms of education. The second phase the author calls the Pre-Disciplinary Phase, which on the one hand, includes the post-ancient history of philosophy as the pool from which sport-philosophy pulls out relevant authors and works for better philosophical consideration and understandings of the sport, and on the other hand, includes the theory of sport in the 19th and 20th Century which is the forerunner of the philosophy of sport as a philosophical discipline. The third is the disciplinary phase that begins in 1972 – the point in time in which the philosophy of sport became a separate and distinct branch of general philosophy. Within the disciplinary phase, the author points out and critically examine the key points of development. At the end of the chapter, he gives a brief overview of the development of sports philosophy outside the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. In the third chapter, the author critically reflects and considers the role of William John Morgan in the development of the discipline. The author identifies Morgan as one who has made key contributions to the development and global spread of the philosophy of sport in several ways. He puts emphasis on Morgan’s consideration of economization and commodification of the modern sport as one of the fundamental reasons for almost all problems of today's sport. The author makes the second emphasis on the possible solutions for sports, which Morgan finds in sport practice communities and the application of J. Habermas’ deliberation process and J.-P. Sartre’s discourse ethics. Finally, the author brings his own addition to the solution for a (more) moral sport – proper upbringing and education. In the fourth chapter, the author critically examines and considers the ethics of sport, a dominant field or subdiscipline of the philosophy of sport from the 1990s. Firstly, he puts careful and detailed attention to the (development of) contours and divisions of the ethics of sport, where he makes a claim that in the ethics of sport there are actually only four fields of consideration: competition, enhancements, gender issues, and social issues in sport. Then he determines the key points in the development of the ethics of sport and puts critical considerations of them. Finally, he elaborates on possible directions for further development. The fifth chapter brings critical discussion over the normative theories of sport and of the internal or intrinsic values of sport. The author provides a critical account of the theories of formalism, conventionalism, and internalism in five variants: W. J. Morgan’s internalism, J. S. Russell’s interpretivism, R. Simon’s broad internalism, S. Kretchmar’s pluralistic internalism, and S. MacRae’s shallow interpretivism. The author points out, and this is mostly unrecognized in the discipline, that W. J. Morgan was in fact the originator of internalism on one hand, and on the other hand, that he got the idea from A. MacIntyre’s book After Virtue. Here, the author presents his critical understandings of the internal values of sport and suggests that they should be called intrinsic because they are not only internal but, moreover, essential. After the critical observation and evaluation of the debate between the proponents of rationally oriented broad internalism whose aim is to rationally extract the essence of sport and use it as normative guidance on the one side, and Morgans emphasis on the view that there is no essence of sport and that we need to historicize and socialize internal values on the other side, the author puts the emphasis on the possible solutions or ways out of the debate. Thus, on the one hand, he presents the (new) model of intrinsic values in sports that he has developed: intersubjective, emotional, spiritual, sensual, cognitive and ethical. On the other hand, he expresses a clear position on the impossibility of formulating intrinsic values of sports except through personalized narratives of sports practitioners. Finally, he presented three directions of possible exits from the current situation. In the sixth chapter, the author focuses on the bioethics of sport subdiscipline. A the beginning, he offers a (new) definition of the bioethics of a sport that would correspond to all present understandings of bioethics. He then presents a brief history (which is indeed very short) and considers the thematic spectrum in two different understandings of the bioethics of sport, which the author calls narrow bioethics of sport and broad bioethics of sport. In a narrow version, the concept of bioethics as the new medical ethics the term bio is reduced to biomedicine and biotechnology. Thus, the thematic scope is pretty narrow, including eight groups of issues: sports medicine, health, doping, genes, biotechnology, gender, Paralympics, and transhumanism. In a broad version, the term bio is understood as bios or life and refers not only to issues of human life but also to non-human and to all the life forms in general. Thematic spectre is thus very wide: human body issues, animal use, environmental issues, danger and threat issues, psychological and socio-political-economic issues, and the issues of ethical committees and codes in sports… Furthermore, the author defines the bioethics of sport as the one that deals with and solves the most difficult cases of sport today, but also as the one that creates and develops scenarios for the future of the sport. In that regard, the author analyzes cases of doping, cyborgization, intersexuality and the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, in his view of the future of sport, he recognizes and elaborates ten scenarios for the future development of sport. In the final, seventh chapter, the author brings the first history of philosophy, ethics and bioethics of sport in Croatia through three aspects: 1) organized classes at universities, 2) published publications with specific topics, and 3) organized conferences and gatherings. At the very end, the author brings several scenarios for possible further development.

2023

The author reflects on half a Century of sports philosophy conferences: from how it all began, the current state, and what is needed in the future of IAPS (International Association for the Philosophy of Sport) and annual gatherings of the global community at annual conferences.