Abstract
Sport and philosophy are our major legacies from ancient Greece. This is not a coincidence: we take brains and muscle apart at our peril. Even today, the Olympics Movement website includes at the top of its homepage a list of the philosophers who attended the original Olympic Games. This is the basis of sports’ claim to support human excellence and happiness: sport arises from within a philosophical culture and gives its adherents — whether participants or spectators — opportunities for reflection on features of life that are otherwise difficult to reflect upon. Sport is an important addition to contemplation, artistry, appreciation, socialising, worship, and the other reflective leisure activities. But it is also the leisure activity that is most naturally understood as playing: if an activity is sport, it is always ‘people playing’.
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Notes
Heather Reid The Philosophical Athlete (Durham NC: Carolina Press, 2002).
Jan Boxill (ed.) Sports Ethics: an anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 1.
For athletics as reminder of our mortality, training the body and soul, and homage to the gods, see Stephen Miller Ancient Greek Athletics (New York: Yale University Press, 2004).
This idea comes from Anthony Skillen ‘Sport is for Losers’ in J. McNamee and S. Parry (eds) Ethics and Sport (London: E. and F. Spon, 1988), pp. 180–1: ‘because it is one of the few domains in which humans are engaged to stretch to their limits, sport has the potential to teach us to live with such limits, and at the same time, because we have to be “given” a game by the person who beats or is beaten by us, sport has the capacity to teach us to live within the limits of a human fellowship informed by awareness of common frailty. Good sports have much generous wisdom in their bones.’
Cf. Robert Simon Fair Play: the ethics of sport (Boulder CO: Westview, 2004), p. 27: the principal value of sport lies not in winning, but in overcoming the challenge presented by a worthy opponent. That is, competitions are a ‘mutually acceptable quest for excellence through challenge’, not a ‘zerosum game’.
Heather Reid ‘Sport, Education, and the Meaning of Victory’, Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, Massachusetts, from August 10–15, 1988 http:www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/SporReid.htm
Stephen Miller Arete: Greek sports from ancient sources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. ix: ‘The word “arête” has imbued ancient athletics with an aura of the quest of man for perfection.’
Russell Gough Character is Everything (Fortworth TX: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p. 30.
John Hoberman Mortal Engines (New York: Macmillan, 1992).
Claudio Tamburrini ‘What’s Wrong with Doping?’ in Torbjorn Tannsjo and Claudio Tamburrini (eds) Values in Sport: elitism, nationalism, gender equality, and the scientific manufacture of winners (London: E. and F. Spon, 2000).
For general discussion of TV and sport, see Ellis Cashmore Making Sense of Sport, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1990), Ch. 10.
John Heeley ‘Leisure and Moral Reform’ in Journal of Leisure Studies 5, 1986, pp. 57–67.
William Morgan Leftist Theories of Sport (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
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© 2005 Hayden Ramsay
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Ramsay, H. (2005). Playing by the Rules. In: Reclaiming Leisure. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512825_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512825_8
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