A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPORT
We are delighted to have co-edited this Handbook of the Philosophy of Sport, the publication of which coincides with a half-century or so of philosophical scholarship devoted to sport. We have enlisted an international team of leading scholars to address the main philosophical issues and concerns of the subject. We have tried to be as comprehensive as possible in our coverage of the relevant topics. Each chapter features an original contribution that summarizes and critically analyzes the best philosophical work to date relevant to the topic. Our intent throughout was to produce a major reference work for scholars interested in the philosophy of sport. We also sought to highlight the important normative and practical connections of these topics to issues that presently beset the world of sport, to assist serious observers and students of sport interested in the often outsized role it plays in their lives both on and off the field. By presenting a comprehensive picture of the intellectual development of sport philosophy to the present, we further intended the Handbook to serve as a guide for possible future theoretical advances in each of these topical areas. These are, admittedly, ambitious goals and, as such, hard to fulfil. So there will be inevitable gaps in our coverage and, no doubt, areas where readers will have wished for a different treatment of some of the topics discussed. Nevertheless, we believe that we have achieved our main goals, and that this compendium of work will prove useful to scholars, students, and interested parties alike, no matter their particular philosophical tastes or interests.
In the remaining part of this introductory essay, we take a look back at the major events that led to the development of the philosophy of sport as an intellectual field of study from its inception in North America to its present international standing across Europe and the rest of the world.
A brief history of the philosophy of sport in North America
The philosophy of sport, like its close academic cousins the history and sociology of sport, is a recent addition to the academic world. It established itself first in North America, but spread soon after to Europe and much of the rest of the world. It was in the middle to late 1960s that it experienced its first growing pains in the United States, fuelled by a booming economy that greatly expanded both the size and number of colleges and universities, and more importantly – for our purposes – the scope of their curricula. Perhaps even more important in this regard was the overheated, anti-authoritarian social and political climate of the 1960s, which prompted a large number of Americans, especially those under the age of 30, to challenge the old orthodoxies and traditions both in and outside the academy. If ever there was a time ripe for great political and intellectual change, this was it. It played a significant part in the development of new academic disciplines like sport studies and its various cognates, and new subdisciplines like the philosophy of sport, which began to regularly show up in college and university curricula across the country and in Canada.
The birth of the philosophy of sport was not an “immaculate” theoretical conception; a new subject that sprung up suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere. It developed out of, and in many respects was a critical response to, what used to be called the philosophy of physical education, which considered itself a subdiscipline of the philosophy of education rather than of philosophy in general. The main aim of the philosophy of physical education in the UK and USA was to bolster the educational credentials of physical activity in all its various forms, ranging from rudimentary human movement and spontaneous play to highly organized games and sports. This task was often carried out with a sense of urgency by philosophers of physical education because many leading educational theorists of the time (pre-1960s) were persuaded that physical education was not an appropriate educational subject because it lacked the requisite intellectual and cognitive content. Put bluntly, the prevailing view was that physical education was an affair of the body rather than of the mind, and thus should be denied educational franchise. It is little wonder, therefore, that philosophers of physical education did everything they could to undermine the crude mind–body dualism that informed such jaundiced views of their subject.
By the mid to late 1960s in the USA, however, the philosophy of sport had eclipsed the philosophy of physical education, and had supplanted it as a central academic subject and focus of scholarly inquiry. This important intellectual shift was owed in part to the explosion of interest in sport itself in the middle of this decade in both the USA and the larger world – a trend that shows no sign of abating even today, let alone of being reversed. Moreover, this upsurge of philosophical interest in sport was also due to two other important developments in the USA. The first had to do with the publication of three path-breaking books that helped put the study of sport on the philosophical map. The second had to do with the establishment of a liberal arts model of physical education in a small, relatively obscure northeastern university, which remarkably showcased the philosophy of sport as its core curricular offering, and which set in motion a dialogue about the philosophical significance of sport that eventually spilled over into the larger scholarly community.
With regard to the first development, two of the landmark philosophy of sport texts were authored by physical education professors from the University of Southern California: Howard Slusher’s Man, Sport, and Existence (1967), and Eleanor Metheny’s Movement and Meaning (1968). Slusher’s book was an existential take on the significance and meaning of athletic engagement. Metheny’s pioneering work was a more ambitious and original contribution, which featured a full-blown philosophical theory of human movement and sport. The back-to-back publication of these scholarly treatises helped propel this new philosophical study of sport forward, and played a central role in bringing to an end the dominance that the philosophy of physical education previously enjoyed in higher educational and scholarly circles.
Notwithstanding these seminal texts, it was the publication of the third book of this period, Paul Weiss’s Sport: A philosophic inquiry (1969), which made the greatest contribution to the legitimation of sport philosophy, especially in the philosophy community, where it had started to gain some attention, not all of which was positive. The distinguished English analytical philosopher, Lord Anthony Quinton (1969) wrote a very critical review essay “Locker Room Metaphysics” in the NewYork Review of Books. He was particularly dismissive of Slusher’s book, although this appears in part because of his antagonistic posture towards continental philosophy (McNamee, 2012).
The reason why Weiss’s book created such a fuss in philosophical circles was not so much owing to the intellectual merits of the book itself, but rather to Weiss’s commanding stature in philosophy and the larger intellectual world. Weiss was widely esteemed as one of America’s premier philosophers, and one of its most celebrated spokespersons outside of the academic philosophical community. It was hardly lost on humanists in academe at the time that if a world-famous philosopher like Weiss had thought sport worthy of a book-length study, perhaps they should take a more serious look at this topic themselves.
To be sure, Weiss was not the only major philosopher to ever write about sport. On the contrary, such philosophical giants as Plato and Aristotle wrote approvingly and even at times enthusiastically, of play, athletics and gymnastics, as did such philosophical luminaries as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose respective conceptions of play figured not insignificantly in their own world views. The famous twentieth-century Austrian analytical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein should also be included in this august group, because he used the notion of a game, specifically a language game, to explicate some of his most original philosophical views (see Midgley, 1974). Though none of these philosophers ever produced a systematic work of the kind that Weiss did, nor even a systematic essay devoted to sport (with the possible exception of Sartre’s treatment of play and skiing in the last sections of his tome Being and Nothingness), which meant the interested reader had to comb carefully through their writings to find scattered references to play and sport, what they did write about sport was not insignificant. Despite this fact, most contemporary philosophers simply ignored sport, presupposing or assuming that it was too trivial a human affair to merit serious philosophical attention and analysis. It took someone with the intellectual stature of Paul Weiss, therefore, to jolt the philosophy community out of its complacency and give sport the philosophical kudos it needed if it were ever to rival the stature of other philosophical subdisciplines such as the philosophy of science, religion, history, law, and politics.
The second part of the story of the philosophy of sport’s rise to academic respectability, as noted, had specifically to do with its institutionalization in the academy. By the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, departments of physical education in colleges and universities in the USA and Canada had begun to give serious attention to the study of sport, and as a result initiated wholesale changes in their curricula to accommodate this new interest. Most noteworthy in this regard was the State University of NewYork at Brockport, where the charge to change the disciplinary focus of the physical education department came from the President, Albert Brown.1 Brown proposed that a new physical education “major” (i. e. undergraduate or Bachelor degree program) be developed at Brockport with one novel and important twist: that it be based on a liberal arts model rather than the more prevalent and traditional educational and professional model. He subsequently hired Warren Fraleigh in 1970 from San Jose State University to be Dean of the College of Physical Education and Recreation, and to carry out his programme to transform the physical education curriculum. The following year was a remarkable one for the nascent discipline. Fraleigh hired six specialists in the philosophy of sport, and, in addition, scholars in related fields like sport sociology, and installed the philosophy of sport as one of the core subjects of the new curriculum. The clustering together of such like-minded and academically trained sport philosophers was an innovation – unlikely to be repeated in scale and significance – that, unsurprisingly, created quite a stir in both Fraleigh’s own institution and in physical education departments across the USA and Canada.
Brockport was already the home of the Center for Philosophic Exchange, directed by Howard Kiefer. Its main aim was to encourage philosophical inquiry into pressing social and public issues and to disseminate the results of that inquiry to the greater academic and public community. To meets its charge, the Center annually hosted two renowned philosophers to speak to some important and timely issue. These sessions were conducted according to a question-and-answer format. They were videotaped and loaned out at no cost to interested educational institutions and public organizations. In addition, the two invited philosophers also presented formal papers to a public audience, which were subsequently published in the journal, Philosophical Exchange. In 1971, Fraleigh contacted Kiefer to see if the Center would be interested in bringing Paul Weiss to campus to give a paper on sport along with Richard Schacht, then an up-and-coming philosopher from the University of Illinois, to give a critical response to Weiss’s paper. Fraleigh’s plan was to have the Weiss–Schacht exchange front a larger symposium that his department would sponsor devoted to the philosophy of sport. Kiefer gave his support, and, in 1972, Brockport hosted the first ever philosophy conference dedicated to the philosophical study of sport in North America, and, to the best of our knowledge, likely the first sport philosophy conference of its kind ever held.
The conference was a resounding success, as attested by the large number of philosophers, philosophically trained sport studies scholars, and public parties who both presented papers and attended its several sessions.2 It also proved to be an intellectual success in terms of the lively discussions it sparked among conferees. Of special importance in this regard was the discussion it led to between Fraleigh and Weiss, among others, about forming a philosophical society of sport and starting a philosophy journal devoted to sport. In 1971–72, a steering committee was formed for these very purposes that included, besides Weiss and Fraleigh, Richard Zaner, a philosopher, and Ellen Gerber, a sport philosopher.3 At the 1972 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, held in Boston, Massachusetts, the Philosophic Society for the Study of Sport (PSSS) was formally established. The following year, plans were drawn up to launch a new journal to be called the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, and Robert Osterhoudt, a former sport philosophy professor at Brockport who had just relocated to the University of Minnesota, was appointed its first editor. The first volume of the Journal was published in 1974. In 1999, PSSS formally changed its name to the International Association of the Philosophy of Sport (IAPS) to reflect its growing international membership. Today, IAPS is a strong and vibrant scholarly association that holds its annual conferences all over the world, and its signature publication, the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, remains one of the premier journals in the field.
A brief history of the philosophy of sport in the rest of the world
Having concentrated thus far on the American context for the development and institutionalization of the discipline, it is worth noting that the global development of the philosophy of sport proceeded apace, although somewhat unevenly. In the 1970s, for instance, only Germany (German Society of Sports Science, which contained a philosophy of sport section) had some kind of national organization devoted to the discipline. Important early work had been undertaken by Hans Lenk, himself a well-known philosophical figure in Germany, in the philosophy of sport. His text, Social Philosophy of Athletics, was published in Germany in 1975 and appeared in the English language in 1976. Similarly, in Japan, the Japan Society for the Study of Sport had formed national associations of sport philosophy. The Japan Association subsequently began publishing the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education.
The development of sport philosophy in Japan (Hata and Sekine, 2010) and Britain followed a similar trajectory as it had in the USA with regard to its initial ties to the philosophy of education. Indeed, much of the early philosophical scholarship on sport could be found in journals of the philosophy of education, where philosophers of physical education had found an academic niche. This continued into the 1980s, although in the UK and British Commonwealth countries (notably Australia and Canada), there was something of an interlude as no-vocational degree courses sprang up in human movement studies. Although a short-lived phenomenon, by the end of the 1990s, most of such courses were replaced by degree programs in sports studies or sports science. This period did produce one classic text: Philosophy and Human Movement by the British philosopher David Best. Although not focusing on sports exclusively (it notably included dance), it was deeply critical of early phenomenological work (such as Metheny’s), and initiated a debate regarding sports status as art that ran for decades.
Despite this activity, it was not until early in the next century, 2002 to be precise, that another national association of sport philosophy was established. This was the British Philosophy of Sport Association (BPSA), which was started at a conference organized by Mike McNamee at the University of Gloucestershire. This organization also started publishing a new journal called Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, which in short order became a major international journal publishing philosophical work on sport. In 2003, the BPSA held its first annual meeting and has met annually thereafter. It has drawn presenters from around the world and has created a working group that initiated the European Association for the Philosophy of Sport (EAPS), which coexisted with the BPSA and developed formal links with its official journal (Sport, Ethics and Philosophy) and associated conferences.
Under the leadership of Lev Kreft in Slovenia, the EAPS helped support a number of initiatives that led to the developments of national associations in Slovenia (2010); the Czech Republic (2011), which had strong relations with Polish (Kosiewicz, 2012), and Hungarian scholars, although they have not yet developed into national organizations. Similarly, in the Netherlands, there has long been an interest in scholarship in the field without a leading institution (Hilvoorde et al. 2010). The Scandinavian and Germanic regions have a long tradition of sustained philosophical interest in sports (Brevik, 2010; Pawlenka, 2010), although neither has a developed an independent national association. By contrast, in China, relatively little philosophical reflection on sport has been promoted, although there is current interest in the subject that is beginning to bear fruit (Hsu, 2010).
A final development is worthy of note, in this respect. It concerns the recent development of Asociación Latina de Filosofía del Deporte (ALFiD; Latin Association for Philosophy of Sport), which does not follow the national institution development of the subject but rather integrates the discipline in Latin languages – French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish (Torres and Campos, 2012). The history of philosophy of sport in these countries is long though sporadic. In Spain, José Ortega y Gasset published some articles about the relevance of sport in the society at the beginning of twentieth century. But perhaps the author that made a deeper contribution to the philosophy of sport in Spain during the 1960s and 1970s was José María Cagigal. Although his main concern was the social meaning of the sport, some of his writings contained original philosophical insights. The culmination of work in the Spanish language, in particular, occurred in 2013 with a new journal, published in both Spanish and English, Fair Play: Journal of Sport: Philosophy, Ethics and Law, and a newly formed Spanish Association for the Philosophy of Sport.
Interestingly, in both these countries, the philosophical background, drawing extensively on the phenomenological tradition, developed its own nomenclature. The terms, favored here include “physical culture” and “movement culture” over sport as the object of their philosophical interest, and, in the Czech Republic, at least, the phrase “philosophical kinanthropology” (Jirasek, 2003; Jirasek and Hopsicker, 2010) identified the field that is internationally known as the philosophy of sport.
Philosophical traditions and the philosophy of sport
The linguistic economies generated by these heterogeneous organizations and fields of scholarship in the philosophy of sport – loosely understood – indicate more than mere linguistic differences. For instance, what is commonly called “sport” in the West draws upon a rich history of Greek and Roman athletics (Reid, 2010) that extends all the way to the modern incarnation of educational sports in Victorian Britain and finally to the rebirth of the Olympic Games by Baron Pierre de Coubertin and others (Reid and Austin, 2012; McNamee and Parry, 2012). While across Europe the paradigmatic sports recognized as Olympic sports were practiced and promoted, so too were alternative movement cultures including fitness- and health-related activities groups, and sport-for-all organisations, which bore only a family resemblance to the rule-governed and competitive activities we typically think of and classify as “sports” in the West. Notably, in France, work in the philosophy of the body and in social theory of sport have gone hand in hand with reflections on movement forms that would not fall under a narrower conception of “sport” such as articulated by the founding scholars of the field.
There is, however, even a deeper and more philosophically interesting difference between published philosophical work on sport in North America, particularly the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, and Britain and larger Europe. That difference has to do with the dominance of analytical philosophical approaches to sport in the USA and Canada. This is not to deny that Continental philosophy has not developed a sport philosophical literature. Indeed the labels themselves, as Bernard Williams (1995) once noted, are somewhat misleading – and both, being traditions of Western philosophy, take no significant account of Eastern philosophy, which is a major source of published work in the philosophical literature on sport in Japan.
Given that philosophical research is always and everywhere internally related to the expression of ideas particular to different cultures, the idiom of that expression shapes somewhat the boundaries of what can be said. In contrast to the biomedical sciences of sport, which make ready use of a technical language (the scientific method) spoken and understood the world over, philosophers working in the Continental tradition speak a much more specialized language understood only by specialists in fields such as existentialism, hermeneutics, ontology and phenomenology (see Martinkova and Parry, 2012).
Although the label “Continental” itself reflects geocultural considerations (the work emanated from communities of scholars in France (Andrieu, 2014), Germany, and more broadly in Continental Europe), one finds philosophers of sport across the globe drawing upon those traditions. Similarly, analytical philosophy, though the dominant tradition in the Anglo-American tradition of Western philosophy, is misleading in the sense that some of its founding fathers were indeed from Continental Europe. The drawing of distinctions to represent our experience of the world, however, is common to all schools or traditions of philosophical and sport philosophical endeavour.
Conclusion
In this volume we hope to have given full voice to individual scholars and traditions that represent the best of such work independent of its self-identification. Although omissions and errors will always remain in compendium works, we hope that this volume will give newcomers to the field a sense of the import and vitality of the field. Equally, we hope that those who have ploughed their own furrows in the field of philosophy of sport, however long or deep, will find here continuing nourishment for their critical reflections. What is clear is that owing to both the high quality of its scholarship and the internationalization of the field, the philosophy of sport can be said without exaggeration to be flourishing.4
Notes
1 The background material for the historic role that Brockport played in the institutionalization of sport philosophy as an academic subject comes from an oral history that Bill Morgan conducted with one of its central figures, Warren Fraleigh. A version of that history appeared in Fraleigh (1983).
2 Bill Morgan personally attests to its success, having presented a paper and attended many of the sessions, including the Weiss–Schacht exchange, as a newly graduated 21-year-old.
3 We have not made comment on English-language nomenclature and have taken as synonymous the phrases philosophy of sport and sport philosophy, and also sport philosopher and philosopher of sport. In each case, the former tends to be more widely used than the latter in North America.
4 Thanks to Bernard Andrieu, Warren Fraleigh, Lev Kreft, Irena Martinkova, Cesar Torres, Jose Luis Triviño, for their assistance with particular developments of the subject in their respective regions.
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