Philosophy of Sport

What it asks

The object of golf is to put a ball in a hole. The efficient method is to walk over and drop it in. Nobody does, and doing so would not be winning badly but not playing at all.

Bernard Suits drew the conclusion in 1978: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. The rules prohibit the efficient means, and they are accepted precisely BECAUSE they make the activity possible.

That definition is unusually successful for philosophy - it withstands the counterexamples that defeat definitions elsewhere - and it opens the field's real questions. If the obstacles are arbitrary, what makes the achievement admirable, and what may be done to win?

The recurring problems

What the rules are. Formalism says the rules constitute the game and breaking them means not playing. That makes any foul a departure from the sport, which fits the logic and not the practice, where tactical fouling is part of the game. Conventionalist and internalist accounts try to close that gap.

Cheating and gamesmanship. Cheating breaks the rules. Gamesmanship exploits them to defeat their purpose while remaining within them, and is harder to condemn and easier to despise.

Enhancement. The case against doping is usually put in terms of health, fairness or naturalness, and each argument permits things sport prohibits or prohibits things sport permits. Altitude tents, surgery and specialised training are all enhancements. A principled line has proved elusive.

Categories. Sport sorts competitors into classes to make competition meaningful. Every such boundary - by weight, age, sex, disability classification - is a judgement about what counts as fair, and some are now among the most contested questions in public life.

How it developed

Ancient thought took athletic excellence seriously as a form of human excellence, and Greek philosophy discussed it alongside other virtues rather than as a separate subject.

Modern academic work begins in the 1970s, with a journal and a society, largely from physical education faculties rather than philosophy departments - which is one reason the field is less known than its quality warrants.

Suits's The Grasshopper in 1978 is its founding text and its best-known result. It was written partly against Wittgenstein's claim that games have no common definition, and it makes a strong case that they do.

Since then the field has divided between conceptual work on rules, games and competition, and applied work on doping, fairness and the ethics of dangerous sports. The applied side is increasingly consulted by governing bodies, which has made it one of the few places where philosophers write rules that people follow.

The positions within it

Formalism, conventionalism and broad internalism about rules; mutualist accounts of competition as a cooperative pursuit of excellence; libertarian and prohibitionist positions on enhancement. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The applied questions dominate, and they have moved from academic to institutional: eligibility criteria, classification, and the governance of enhancement are all being decided now, usually by bodies that would benefit from the conceptual work and rarely consult it.

The theoretical side continues on the value of games, and Suits's further claim - that in a world without necessity, playing games would be the ideal of existence - is taken more seriously than it once was.