Man: The Profound Change

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2017

Ukrainian Policymaker, 2023

We should not ignore the threats and challenges that sport is particularly facing today, such as: doping, racism, violence in sport, political interference in sport, corruption and other "diseases" of modern society, to which sport is exposed and where there is constant fight with the aim of turning sport to its own goals based on humane values. Sport connects people, crosses the boundaries of language, religion and nation and often serves as a platform for social change and political statement. Also, sporting successes can be a source of inspiration and motivation, showing the strength of the human spirit in facing challenges. Bearing in mind that the subject of this research is the impact of sport on social and cultural changes, the goal of the research was defined, which refers to determining the social and cultural significance of sport. In this paper, it was critically studied how sport reflects the culture and traditions of different countries, how it contributes to social movements and changes, and how sports successes can serve as motivation for overcoming life's challenges. Through examples from different parts of the world, the complex relationship between sport and life and how it shapes and empowers individuals and communities is looked at.

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2001

Sport is a form of game. In games we waste time, energy, and ingenuity on pointless and childish tasks. Even the most performance-oriented game remains unproductive. It is all show, a display of excellence for the sake of excellence in activities that are completely irrelevant to life. That which is not, or is no longer, important for "real" life is precisely that which is boisterously celebrated: physical power, skill. Some suspect that there is something wrong with people who are fascinated with this sort of thing. Perhaps it is a form of psychological immaturity, obsessive behavior, or an infantile compulsion for order? Alternatively, is it a form of mass hysteria urged upon us and manipulated by entertainment giants? However, none of these reductionist explanations makes the extraordinary attraction of sports in modernity understandable. This attraction points rather to elements that aptly appeal to modern persons, not in their aberrations, regressions, and infantilisms, but to the very basis of their scale of values and to the heart of their culture. However, how can we be appealed to by that which seems irrelevant to life and apparently is without any meaningful purpose? Precisely because the game is outside of life, and is eminently not real, it can be a symbol. Because it is nothing, it can mean everything. The way that modern Western persons experience relationships to themselves, to their fellow persons, to nature, and to society is pregnantly staged in their games. We catch the modern person in an unguarded moment, a moment of spontaneous fervor, when engaged in activities that are not in service of urgently vital interests. Sports could be compared to that other unguarded moment when the censor and the demands of reality are weakened: the dream. The game is a lived phantasm. 1 Moreover, there is a second reason why sports can so accurately stage modernity. Being separate from life, the game is not affected by life's ambiguities either. In daily life every meaning is ambiguous, every value stained, every task a risk, every victory an injustice, every law an oppression. Not so in a game. The rules of the game separate it from this dark everyday ambiguity. Amidst the confusion of life, it offers what Huizinga calls a 'limited perfection'. 2 All ambiguity is cleared away. The game is ruled by the clarity and univocality of a closed formalism. The rules are logically exhaustive. Every case is solvable. One could object that real games are never completely separated from life. Actors are real human beings with their own idiosyncrasies, their own

Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research, 2018

Journal of Advances in Sports and Physical Education

Changes in politics, the economy and the social sphere directly or indirectly affect the social value system. The change of society values is mainly attributed to changes in value structures at work. The Protestant work ethic, which places the meaning of life at work, sees moral value as an end in itself, and puts the fulfilment of duty above the enjoyment of existence, gradually loses its relevance. To the same extent that work loses its function and value, sport experiences a fundamental revaluation. Sport becomes an integral part of every person's role. With the sportization of living conditions, sport becomes a social model. The ultimate goal of this research is to examine the causes of changes in society values and their effects on sports / mass sports. The method adopted for the study was a literature review. On the occasion of the present study, it is found that the changing value of sports in society has created new "directorial forms" in sports. So, for example, in leisure time modern sports also serve as a presentation of the independent lifestyle. This impulse finds its expression through an additional gain of aesthetic dimension, which is externally observed in athletic shoes, sports sweaters, sports bags, sports accessories, etc. The expression of individualized values in sports is closely related to the reduction of access routes for sports. This is not only due to the growing number of opportunistic and active athletes, but also to the development of new sport types. New sports such as Windsurfing, paragliding, free climbing or Bungee jumping are in line with the new orientations of values and try to match individualized hedonistic desires in sports. Sport types are multiplying, and leading the sports system, as already described, to an unprecedented complexity. The overall sports system basically becomes more open. This creates completely new access to sports. Sports forms are multiplying and leading the sports system, as already described, to an unprecedented complexity. The overall sports system basically becomes more open. This creates completely new access to sports. The initial selectivity of sports is increasingly losing its importance, so new groups of people such as the elderly, overweight, women or the disabled have more access to leisure sports and widespread sports. Due to the qualitative changes in sports socialization, strong new sport roles have become possible. With the isolation and selection of certain incentives, sport is now more easily accessible. The motivation that previously prevailed in leisure sports and in widespread sports is losing its charm, so some writers talk about the unathleticism of sports or the non-athletic sports. Instead, in sports / mass sports, one seeks pleasure, spontaneity and social contacts.

Physical Education and Sport Through the Centuries, 2018

Summary In this paper we evaluated the basic viewpoints on the mutual relations between contemporary sport and society. Sport is a global social phenomenon which is determined by a variety of different processes, including: the fast development of the industrial society and capital, an increase in leisure time, the development of a liberal democracy and the media. A special feature in these relations is the overall globalization process in today’s world. The basic structure of this paper is made up of two functional parts. In the first part we indicate the dominant theoretical-methodological paradigms in studying sport in social sciences, especially sociology: functionalism, conflict theory in society, interpretive and postmodern theory. In the second part of the paper we analyze the dialectics of contemporary relations between sport and society, where special attention is dedicated to the distribution of social power between sport, capital and the media at the local and global leve...

Journal of Sport Management, 2014

The article in this issue of the Journal of Sport Management titled "Sport Without Management" (SWM) is an ambitious project because it wants to "unsettle the takenfor-granted epistemological and ontological foundations upon which most curricular and research-based activities in contemporary sport management are grounded." The article is, first and foremost, a critique of the ways in which sport management is taught and researched in universities and colleges, especially in the United States. As SWM notes early on, it seeks to problematize the underlying assumptions that guide sport management's commitment to capital, science, and managerialism, and in doing so, re-envisage new pathways forward for sport that are productive not just in economic terms, but in ways that might also bring about "cultural and social transformation." "Sport Without Management" therefore aims to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy that makes the market-sport paradigm front and center. The article wants to show how and why sport came to be so management focused and business centric, and in doing so, how it delivered more problems than benefits, and massively inhibited its "potentialities." According to SWM, these inhibited potentialities are everywhere, and embedded in the fact that sport is principally a commercial activity bundled up as an industry that privileges performance and branding and profits. "Sport Without Management" argues that sport's "marketization" has imposed an ideological straitjacket on its capacity to engage with communities, which has further divided it from its civic and community antecedents. Hence, it comes as no surprise that teams are now referred to as brands, athletes are viewed as commodities, and participants become consumers. And, what is more, this is all highly problematic, especially because the whole marketization process has been driven by a virulent form of neoliberalism. The article's audacious aspirations thread their way through its six theses, with each thesis highlighting a problem with not only the practice of sport, but also sport man-www.JSM-Journal.com ARTICLE

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.

Sport Management Review, 2010

In the world of contemporary sport it is commonly claimed that at its elite end at least, sport's management is complex because the product it delivers to participants and fans is so idiosyncratic. This claim is accompanied by the view that while professional sport is in large part just another form of business, it has a range of special features that demand a customised set of practices to ensure its effective operation. This article aims to reexamine this view in the light of sport's commercial and socio-cultural developments over the last decade. It initially proposes that while both business and sport are concerned with widening market share, building profits, and strengthening brands, the presumption that sport has a monopoly over the delivery of intense emotional experiences, tribal belonging, and strong interpersonal relationships, is difficult to defend. The article concludes that while sport's economic and social progress has created an industry that is built around complex bureaucracies that turn over many thousands of millions of dollars every year, it has also created a more diverse and heterogeneous system of structures and experiences that are difficult to conflate to a handful of neat special features.

Respectus Philologicus

Sport in the Context of Social Sciences. W. J. Cynarski, J. Kosiewicz, K. Obodyński, Eds. 2012. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego. 282 pp. ISBN 978-83-7338-813-0. Sport has been a very important component of human existence for ages. It is a complex and colourful phenomenon which arouses the intense interest of fans all over the world and which can be analysed from different points of view. Sport is definitely something more than pure entertainment. Anyone interested in sport should be­come familiar with the latest fruit of the work of the Polish scientists conducting research on different aspects of sports his­tory and sociology. It is worth emphasizing that in Poland there are numerous scholars who have put sport at the centre of their scientific interests.