Sport and children’s spirituality: an Australian perspective

The benefits of sport and physical activity are endorsed by a number of professionals as a means of improving children’s health and their sense of well-being, and their unity with the natural world, other people and the Transcendent. For children, sport is a spiritual source of joy and wonder. Using Champagne’s ‘spiritual modes of being’, my recent study of Victorian children demonstrated their heightened sensory awareness, enriched relationships and robust sense of personal identity, arising from active and passive participation in sport. The children in the study seemed to benefit in each of these areas from Australian culture’s high value of sporting participation and achievement.     

Being-on-the-Bench: An Existential Analysis of the Substitute in Sport

Being a substitute in sport appears to contradict the rationale behind being involved in that sport, especially in those sports where substitutes frequently remain unused or are brought on to the field of play for the final moments of that game. For the coach or manager, substitutes function as a way to improve the team achieving a particular end, namely to win the game; whether to replace an injured or tired player, to change a team's structure or tactics, to complete a specialised manoeuvre (such as goal kicking in American football or a short corner in hockey), or to run down the clock. Whether a substitute is afforded an opportunity of playing the game appears to be directed by others; arguably if one had a choice in the matter one would chose to be on the field of play rather than off it. Nevertheless, the Existentialist position is that our situation is always inexorably one that is freely chosen. To argue that one has not freely chosen one's position is to be ‘inauthentic’. Furthermore, to conceptualise one's manifestation and to be treated by others as a thing ‘in-itself’–such as a substitute – is to fall into ‘bad faith’. Culbertson (2005 Culbertson, L. 2005. The paradox of bad faith and elite competitive sport. Journal of Philosophy of Sport, 32: 65–86. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) has already argued that elite competitive sport is an arena that promotes rather than avoids bad faith due to its constituent factors. Culbertson's frame of reference primarily applied to sporting events that involve individuals competing in co-active, parallel competition – such as athletics, swimming or weightlifting – where bad faith is generated via a tacit acceptance of ever-improving and quantifiable performance. The purpose of this paper is a continuation of such an enquiry but with a redirection of focus away from parallel competition by individuals towards team competitions which are, by nature, less concerned with an unremitting contest against time, distance or some other measurable concept. This paper sets out to examine the nature of the substitute in sport, who appears to be equally liable to find herself being ‘inauthentic’ and/or in ‘bad faith’. It attempts to consider the nature of these concepts and offer direction as to how substitutes can attempt to realise the Existential ideal.     

Paradigms and possibilities

This paper is a excursus into a philosophy of science for deployment in the study of sport. It argues for the virtues of Thomas Kuhn's account of the philosophy of science, an argument conducted strategically by contrasting that account with one derived from views of Karl Popper. In particular, it stresses, first, that Kuhn's views have been widely misunderstood; second, that a rectified Kuhnianism can give due weight to truth in science, while recognising that social sciences differ in crucial ways from natural sciences. For, as Kuhn recognised, social sciences do not function in the paradigm-relative way characteristic of natural sciences. Yet there Kuhn's jargon, and especially misguided talk of ‘paradigms’, is almost ubiquitous.

These thoughts have relevance for three groups. First, as both sports scientists and exercise scientists come to grips with the claims to scientificity of their work, they will need increasingly to locate it within an epistemological framework provided by philosophy of science. So they must begin to take Kuhn's view seriously. Second, social scientists of sport – faced with the predominant scientism of colleagues in sport and exercise science – must also recognise alternatives to a postmodernist rejection of the concept of truth, where Kuhn's picture of natural science clarifies one such. Finally, philosophers writing on sport must not let antipathy to scientism close off the options they present or the terms in which they (we!) present them. And that may require debate among ourselves on abstract issues not immediately connected with sport.     

The Inner Game of Sport: is Everything in the Brain?

The article deals with the following: (1) Three brain imaging studies on athletes are evaluated. What do these neuroscientific studies tell us about the brain and mind of the athlete? (2) Empirical investigations will need a neuro-theory of mind if they are to make the leap from neural activity to the mental. The article looks at such a theory, Gerald Edelman's ‘Neural Darwinism’. What are the implications of such a theory for sport science and philosophy of sport? (3) The article appreciates some of the neurosciences applications, but questions the hope of giving a complete theory of mind.     

Images and Symbols in Ancient and Modern Sport

Several aspects of human life are pervaded with images and symbols that often belong to what Jung (1981 Jung, G. Carl. 1981. Archetypes and the collective unconscious, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.  [Google Scholar]) called archetypes, characteristics of the mind with a profound influence on most aspects of culture and sport. The rationality introduced into our society, as the fruit of both the positivist concept of progress and the rapid development of technology, has, albeit while driving out excessiveness due to irrational explanations and often knavery, also disregarded the importance of images and symbols in everyday life. Yet a number of these inevitably still exist, since they are archetypal. With this observation as a starting point, the present work has been designed to analyse whether it is still possible to find ancient images and symbols in modern sport activities. The a priori reason for such a question arises from the acceptance that modern and ancient sports are profoundly different. This has been historically proved in terms of organisation and quantification, among other characteristics (Guttmann 1978 Guttmann, Allen. 1978. From ritual to record, New York: Columbia University Press.  [Google Scholar]).

The present analysis refers to a limited number of images and symbols concerning ancient and modern sport, which include a primordial Ur-symbol, that of bodily action or of body in movement. Others concern various aspects of the athlete's life, such as expression of religious beliefs, immortality, eternal return and the front. It suggests that many of these images and symbols may still be found in contemporary sports, in open contrast with some of the Olympic principles suggested by De Coubertin and chiefly prevalent in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Readjusting Our Sporting Sites/Sight: Sportification and the Theatricality of Social Life

This paper points out the potential of using sport for the analysis of society. Cultivated human movement is a specific social and cultural subsystem (involving sport, movement culture and physical culture), yet it becomes a part of wider social discourses by extending some of its characteristics into various other spheres. This process, theorised as sportification, provides as useful concept to examine the permeation of certain phenomena from the area of sport into the social reality outside of sport. In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of sportification which we parallel with visual culture and spectatorship practices in the Renaissance era. The emphasis in our investigation is on theatricality and performativity; particularly, the superficial spectator engagement with modern sport and sporting spectacles. Unlike the significance afforded to visualisation and deeper symbolic interpretation in Renaissance art, contemporary cultural shifts have changed and challenged the ways in which the active and interacting body is positioned, politicised, symbolised and ultimately understood. We suggest here that the ways in which we view sport and sporting bodies within a (post)modern context (particularly with the confounding amalgamations of signs and symbols and emphasis on hyper-realities) has invariably become detached from sports’ profound metaphysical meanings and resonance. Subsequently, by emphasising the associations between social theatrics and the sporting complex, this paper aims to remind readers of ways that sport—as a nuanced phenomenon—can be operationalised to help us to contemplate questions about nature, society, ourselves and the complex worlds in which we live.     

Making Sense of the Philosophy of Sport

Beginning from an earlier claim of mine that there was really no such area of study as the philosophy of sport, Part One of the paper reconsiders the place previously given to David Best’s distinction between purposive sports and aesthetic sports. In light of a famous cricketing event in the 1977 contest between England and Australia (‘The Ashes’), in which Derek Randall turned a cartwheel after taking the winning catch, the paper clarifies that not all aesthetically-pleasing events taking place in sporting competitions can be understood as the aesthetic in sport. Then, in Part Two, the force of the claim that philosophy is one subject is explored. The conclusion is that a focus just on the philosophy of sport is necessarily inappropriate, since it will present the student with only cases from sport to then apply to sport. Rather, one’s understanding must be informed by (much of) the breadth of philosophy. Charles Travis’s view of occasion-sensitivity provides a clear example of appropriately contextual appeal. Part Three of the paper returns to the need for an institutional account of sport, one recognizing that there is no one occasion on which a particular sport is played; and hence no single set of conditions which can uniquely identify that sport. Thus, soccer played with one’s children typically differs from elite soccer: but both are (genuinely) soccer. When one turns to the appreciation of sport (in the light of Stephen Mumford’s excellent Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion [2012a]), one recognizes that, in order to genuinely appreciate sport, one cannot detach oneself from the outcome as completely as Mumford’s extreme purist seems to. But reflection on that case may also return us to contextualism by moving us away from attachments to the complete or the exceptionless in our accounts of spectating as of sport: maybe there is no one thing that occurs in all the relevant cases.     

Elite sport: reification,instrumentalization and dignity

Elite sport is both worshipped disparaged. It is adored because athletes embody an ethical act of courage, self-sacrifice and fair play; it is criticized for too many scandals that plague and discredit it. Too often, athletes seem trapped in and crushed by a system much bigger than they are, a system that also compels them to do wrong, in a way that seems to instrumentalize them. But what is the real status of elite athletes? Does the system treat them with dignity in a manner that allows them to accept freely and voluntarily the end purpose of the record to be beaten that demands enormous sacrifices? This article considers how an analysis of the concept of human dignity can help us better understand the place of the athlete in this complex reality of elite sport.     

The relationship of coping and its perceived effectiveness to positive and negative affect in sport

This article examined the ability of six different coping strategies and their perceived effectiveness in predicting positive and negative affect in sport. Furthermore, it was investigated whether perceived coping effectiveness moderated the influence of coping strategies on affect. British University athletes (N = 356) were requested to recall a recent important competition in their sport when they had a stressful or challenging experience. They were then asked to rate the extent to which they relied on a number of different coping strategies to deal with the situation and the degree to which they found these effective. In agreement with the theoretical predictions of Folkman (1984), problem-focused coping predicted positive affect whereas emotion-focused coping predicted negative affect. Furthermore, for almost all the coping variables, their perceived effectiveness predicted, in a positive way, positive affect and negatively, negative affect. Moreover, the perceived effectiveness of the coping strategies of seeking social support, venting of emotions, and behavioural disengagement, moderated the influence of those strategies on affect. Lastly, a comparison between high and low effective coping groups showed that the former was associated with more pleasant affective experiences.