In this essay the author argues that sports penalties are neither prices nor sanctions, but rather are aptly designated as penalties. Flynn's argument depends on distinguishing prices from penalties, as well as penalties from sanctions (or punishments). Following Feinberg, Flynn argues that punishments (or sanctions) require expressive condemnation, while prices entail no failure to meet a standard. Penalties imply a failure to meet a standard but do not include expressive condemnation, which distinguishes them from the false dichotomy sometimes supposed by sports philosophers. As such, Flynn concludes, nothing about the penalization of sports conduct can in itself tell us anything about the blameworthiness of such conduct.
This paper critically analyses the Enhanced Games (EG), a 2026 sporting event embracing medically supervised enhancement, techno-optimism and venture-capital funding. Focusing on the EG's four pillars - science, safety, compensation and funding - the authors show how the project aligns with core values in the philosophy of sport, including athlete welfare, fair play and excellence. They argue that the EG are best understood not merely as a challenge to anti-doping policy but as part of a broader transhumanist project of human enhancement. While the EG expose inconsistencies in anti-doping governance and may catalyse a new sporting equilibrium, they risk reducing sport to a spectacle of biochemical superiority. Initial results also suggest that enhancement may enable athletes to regain and surpass previous performance levels despite age and years of stagnation.
In this paper, the author argues that combat sports hold unique value as a healing tool for those who have experienced sexual violence. Central to this argument is the 'freeze response' which is linked to lasting psychological impacts. Thomas theorizes that combat sports can allow survivors to confront this response and dismantle the negative feelings often associated with it. Drawing from empirical studies of survivors' experiences in combat sports, she suggests that these sports provide a metaphorical way to reclaim one's agency, rewriting the narrative of the body.
Athletes often report that training and competition, especially under acute fatigue, cease to feel like play and begin to resemble work. Yet discussions in the philosophy of sport have rarely examined how fatigue transforms gameplay from the player's own perspective. This paper offers a phenomenological account of fatigue's normative significance for play. Drawing on Bernard Suits and C. Thi Nguyen, the author argues that gameplay depends on what he calls a readiness-to-play: a horizon of immediate possibilities that organizes autotelic action. Acute fatigue, he argues, progressively contracts this horizon through the negative actuality of non-actuality and the constrained anticipation of the dichotomous alternatives of continuing or stopping. Ultimately, fatigue reveals how gameplay may persist formally even as the experiential conditions of play recede.
This article explores different types of aesthetic experiences of nature sports athletes. Specifically, the experience of excellent powder snow skiing is compared to that of technical ski descents in which a fall could result in serious injury or death. The former is smooth and straightforwardly fluid, while the latter may include abrupt starts and stops, with less obvious flow. It is argued that such high-risk contexts provide nature sports athletes with opportunities to create aesthetically complex interactions with natural features. An analogy is drawn between the two very different types of ski descents and different types of harmonies found in music and art. Such considerations help to better understand the experiences of nature sports athletes and what they have in common with aesthetic experiences in other contexts.
At what point does a sporting practice cease to be a game and become a mere procedure? This paper examines traditional archery as a case study in the gradual erosion of the lusory attitude - the voluntary acceptance of inefficiency that constitutes a game as something more than a technique for producing outcomes. This erosion unfolds along three dimensions: standardizing competition formats; traditional equipment incorporating modern designs; and regulatory loophole exploitation. The result is a lusory chasm - a middle ground that imitates Olympic archery's quantitative logic while relinquishing the qualitative complexity that gave the practice its value. The paper concludes by proposing an operational criterion for evaluating whether a given change is congruent with a practice's constitutive values - with implications for any discipline where the quantitative logic risks absorbing the qualitative.
This article challenges the alleged zero-sum payoff structure of competition (zero-sum competition) as a description of the kind of competition we find in contemporary institutionalized sport. Drawing on von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and other game theory literature, it introduces their concept of zero-sum games: games with a binary structure of payoffs in which one's win implies the other's loss, resulting in an overall sum of zero. It then discusses its application within the philosophy of sport, as introduced by Suits and further developed by Kretchmar and others, and reviews its adequacy. This article argues that, whilst zero-sum competition is characteristic of friendly one-off head-to-head matches, it fails to adequately characterize (in fact misrepresents) the kind of competition we find in contemporary institutionalized sport (e.g. leagues and tournaments). In contrast, contemporary institutionalized sport contests are better characterized by a payoff-sum structure that typically is variable-sum, and, in some cases, constant-sum (constant > 0). In addition, at the overall competition level, results are accumulated into an ordinal standings table - an architecture that exhibits contemporary institutionalized sport as an inclusive and humane practice, rather than a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog exercise.
This paper introduces a novel framework for evaluating dangerous actions in sport by integrating Pike's Essentialist theory with a core-periphery model of action centrality. Recognising that some actions are more fundamental to a sport's identity than others, the framework distinguishes between core and peripheral actions and assesses their associated risks of harm. Through visual mapping and RAG (Red/Amber/Green) rating, the model enables sport governing bodies to make ethically defensible decisions about rule modifications, such as lowering tackle height in rugby or restricting heading in youth football. The framework is applied to the case of cliff-diving to demonstrate how peripheral yet high-risk actions can be mitigated or eliminated without compromising the sport's integrity. By offering a structured, normative tool for balancing sports tradition with athlete welfare, this approach contributes to transparent, evidence-based policy in sport ethics and governance.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of desire and schizophrenia, this paper examines the transformation of Turkish football fandom from a schizo socius into a disciplined and regulated one. Ultras once functioned as desiring-machines that resisted commodification and political intervention but, in the last decade, have increasingly been contained through surveillance, repression and economic exclusion under authoritarian neoliberal governance, resulting in the withdrawal of fans from overt political expression. By situating Turkish football fandom within a Deleuzian framework, the study contributes to a postmodern understanding of the football socius and highlights the tension between grassroots resistance and neoliberal regulation.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to a deeper understanding of sporting activities such as free solo climbing by complementing dominant psychological and medical approaches with a philosophical perspective. The focus of the analysis is the award-winning documentary Chin and Vasarhelyi (2018), which portrays free solo climber Alex Honnold's rope-free ascent of El Capitan in June 2017. The film provides rare insights into the athlete's subjective experience, including references to a mild form of autism and neuroscientific findings suggesting a reduced emotional response to disturbing stimuli. While such aspects have attracted considerable attention in both popular media and scientific literature on high-risk sports, philosophical interpretations remain comparatively underdeveloped. Drawing primarily on existential phenomenology - especially Martin Heidegger's concept of being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode) - this paper argues that high-risk sport, and free solo climbing in particular, can be understood as a meaningful mode of existence rather than as a manifestation of pathology or irrationality. By engaging both critics and proponents of Heidegger, and by critically examining neuroscientific reductionism, the paper defends the claim that existential philosophy offers an indispensable framework for interpreting the lived meaning of extreme sporting practices.
This article critiques W. J. Morgan's proposed 'modest revision' of Suits's utopian vision in his 2023 symposium contribution 'Work, Games, and Utopia', wherein he hierarchizes games by distinguishing 'simple' (deemed unworthy of utopia) from 'complex' ones (valorized for their strategic depth). Through analysis of Morgan's internalist framework, the paper examines an underlying philosophical elitism that privileges institutionalized games while marginalizing spontaneous, traditional and children's games. By drawing parallels to Caillois's agonistic hierarchies and J. S. Mill's distinction of pleasures, the study reveals how Morgan's stance risks rehabilitating an exclusionary logic within philosophy of sport - despite his historicist claims. Ultimately, the article challenges the conflation of complexity with intrinsic value, advocating for a pluralistic, socially situated understanding of games that resists elitist stratification.
In this paper, the author addresses the persistent question of why, in an age of increased emphasis on athlete health and safety, dangerous sport persists and seems, in many ways, to resist calls for change from broader society. Building on Lev Kreft's and Sandra Meeuwsen's applications of Giorgio Agamben's 'state of exception' concept to elite sport, Oldham demonstrates that the state of exception is a far more fundamental element present broadly within sport practice communities at all levels and narrowly within individual sport contests. Drawing on Jon Pike's theory of 'essential actions' and Emily Ryall's positioning sport actions as the primary 'risk bearing phenomena', Oldham proposes that lasting and meaningful change to the practice of sport must account for a rules-norms-values entanglement that sanctions and perpetuates sport actions. Finally, he introduces the concept of 'slow emergencies' as a means of articulating the long-duration impact of risk of harm in sport and the ethical responsibility for action that recognition of such emergencies places on sport governing bodies.
Bernard Suits's Return of the Grasshopper: Games, Leisure and the Good Life in the Third Millennium explores the intricacies of a Grasshopperian life guided by play. A crucial theme of the text is death and its role in the good life. Indeed, Suits addresses the subject in Return by having the Grasshopper and his disciples engage in a thanatological inquiry focused on devising ways to defeat death. This essay draws from S & oslash;ren Kierkegaard's discourse At a Graveside to shed light on the significance of death in Suits's vision of the good life, and concludes that a central existential lesson of Suits's work is that facing death earnestly is a necessary element in pursuing a good and meaningful life. Powers concludes that a central existential lesson of Suits's work is that facing death earnestly is a necessary element in pursuing a good and meaningful life.
The dangerous-sport paradigm conceptualizes danger as voluntary peril for autonomous individuals, rendering relational configurations unintelligible. Analyzing Tinku (Bolivia) and Huka-Huka (Brazil), this article develops communal relational danger: situations where bodily peril is the constitutive medium through which cosmological and communal relations are enacted - relations impossible through safer means. Safetification reduces danger to protect individuals; this preserves individualist sports but would threaten practices where peril constitutes the relations themselves. This asymmetry reveals epistemic injustice (the paradigm lacks interpretive resources to recognize that danger can belong to configurations rather than individuals) and motivates methodological pluralism in sport philosophy.
