Announcing: Examined Sport podcast

Some readers may have been familiar with my old Sports Ethics Show podcast. That podcast has been on hiatus for far too long. Instead of just starting that back up again, I am relaunching it with a new name, Examined Sport, and a new concept. You can read more about the new concept over at SportsEthicist.com.

The first episode is, logically, on Bernard Suits classic article: “What is a Game?” It will be released Tuesday, May 30. Episodes will follow every week or two after that.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. You can also watch each episode on The Sports Ethicist YouTube channel.

New Book: Defining Sport

I'm proud to announce the publication of my edited volume: Defining Sport: Conceptions and Borderlines. Several contributors to this blog contributed to this volume.

This is the first volume in Lexington Books' Studies in the Philosophy of Sport series. [As editor of this series, I'd love to hear ideas for contributions to this series. Contact me with ideas.] 

Part One examines several of the standard and influential approaches to defining sport. Part Two uses these approaches to examine various challenging borderline cases (e.g. bullfighting, skateboarding, esport, Crossfit). These chapters examine the interplay of the borderline cases with the definition and provide a more thorough and clearer understanding of the definition and the given cases.

See the full listing of chapters and contributors on my SportsEthicist blog.

It is available from Lexington, Amazon, and other booksellers. There is also an ebook version.

Ethics and the Beautiful Game at The Boot Room

I am a passionate soccer fan. I love to play, ref, coach, and watch the sport. I also am passionate about my job - being a philosopher. One of the great blessings of my life is to be able to combine these two things. And I think that at least some of us who are academics and benefit from the public trust invested in us should try to bridge the gap between our scholarship and public life.

To that end, I will begin regularly contributing to a new but quickly growing site devoted to soccer, The Boot Room, at http://tbrfootball.com/. My focus will be on ethical issues that arise in the game. My first piece explains why I, as an Arsenal fan, don't want the club to sign Luis Suarez: http://tbrfootball.com/no-to-suarez-at-arsenal/

Enjoy, and if you are so inclined comment at CLSoccer. I'd love to get an ethics discussion going over there!

Football, Fame, and Fortune

This paper was just published in the online journal, The Other Journal, and is available here:
http://bit.ly/eucRRX

Here's a short excerpt:

The external goods that are available through participating in football (and many other practices) include fame, fortune, status, social influence, and power. Football players at the professional level often acquire a fortune and some achieve a significant amount of fame. These goods are external to football because one could play football and even achieve excellence in the sport without receiving any of these goods. In fact, in the past this was true of many of the great players who excelled prior to the escalation of salaries and media coverage of the sport. They experienced football’s internal goods but not the external ones. This shows that the external goods are not essential to football.

What is the significance of the difference between the internal and external goods when considering the relationship between football and celebrity? As I will demonstrate, in football (as well as many other sports), the pursuit of the external goods by individual players can undermine the pursuit of the internal goods of the sport, some of which are grounded in a Christian understanding of the nature of God.

Why Winning Matters

My very short paper on this topic is now available at Think: Philosophy for Everyone (http://bit.ly/ck7IX3).

Peter Singer on the World Cup

A nice read, especially the story on Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler:

Is it okay to cheat in football?

The Success of Lance Armstrong

The success of Lance Armstrong on the bike in the Tour de France is unprecedented.  His record of seven victories seems more amazing now, given not only the physical and mental skill that such a record reveals, but the luck that it also required (the lack of crashes, mechanical failures, and injuries). While there is no lack of controversy surrounding Lance (e.g. "Pharmstrong"), he might be right that he is the most tested athlete on the planet, and yet he has never tested positive for banned performance-enhancing substances.

But is Lance Armstrong a success? In the forthcoming book I co-edited with Jesús Ilundáin Agurruza, Cycling - Philosophy for Everyone: A Philosophical Tour de Force, Greg Bassham and Chris Krall address this question. As they point out, on many classical and medieval theories of success, the answer to this question is "no".  Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, the Stoics, and Epicurus would of course disagree on many things, but Lance falls short of each of their notions of success.

But on a contemporary view discussed by Bassham and Krall, Lance is clearly a success. Philosopher Thomas Morris offers a theory of success which he calls the 3-D Approach to Life:
-Discover your positive talents.
-Develop the most meaningful and beneficial of those talents.
-Deploy your talents into the world for the good of others and yourself.

There is much more in this chapter about this and other theories of success, but in brief it is clear that on the 3-D Approach, Lance is a success. First, he has discovered his positive talents. In Texas, where football reigns, Lance discovered his abilities in the endurance sports of running, swimming, and cycling. He had to work to excel at these sports, and work he did. Over time, it became clear that Lance had amazing abilities and great potential on the bike, and with the help of Chris Carmichael and others, and after a battle with cancer, he became perhaps the greatest rider in the history of the Tour de France. Not only did he develop his talent, he has deployed it for good in his battle against cancer through the Livestrong Foundation.

Lance Armstrong is not a perfect human being, but in many of the ways that matter, he is a success.  Lance is an extraordinarily successful human being, but not because he has made incredible amounts of money, dated Sheryl Crow, and achieved celebrity status. Rather, he is a success because he has discovered and developed his talents, and then deployed them in a way that serves the common good.

Sport and character

Readers of this blog may be interested in three recent posts at my blog at Psychology Today, Ethics for Everyone:


Do sports really build character?

Sports and Moral Development

How can character be built through sports?

Soccer and Philosophy, part 1

Ted Richards, editor of Soccer and Philosophy: Beautiful Thoughts on the Beautiful Game, wanted to pass along the following via this blog:

Hello All,

In February, 2009 I posted a CFA for Soccer(Football) & Philosophy. The response and support for the project was overwhelming. The book, Soccer and Philosophy: Beautiful Thoughts on the Beautiful Game, is now widely available, and the pre-release response has been extremely favorable.

I want to publicly thank all those who submitted abstracts, suggested authors to contact, passed on the CFA, and supported this project in all the various ways throughout the process. Without your help, the book would be much poorer.

Thank you!

From Mike Austin: I'll be posting a review of the book in the next month or so. From what I've seen so far, it looks to be of interest to fans of the game and those with interest in the philosophical aspects of sport.

Ethics and the Ancient Olympics

 Philosophy of Sport contributor Jesus Ilundain will give a presentation entitled "The Ancient Olympic Games: Ethics and the Clash at Thermopylea," with the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life.
The presentation can be watched online and viewers can chat at
http://www.philosophyinpubliclife.org/

Wednesday April 14
6:00 pm

Ancient Rome and College Football

See this link at CollegeFootballNews.com which incorporates some of Heather Reid's work.

Upon Further Review

An article on College Football News, by Matt Zemek, discusses some of the philosophical issues related to instant replay. Scroll down to section 3.

Diving and the Integrity of Soccer

Cesar Torres, the current president of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport, has this piece for the NY Times on the integrity of soccer.