There is a contention that sport can never be truly fair given that there are always inequalities between competitors: differences in height or metabolism, age, training, skill, etc. including differences that result from social inequalities, such as opportunities to develop abilities as a consequence of class, wealth, location, and so on. If we follow suchContinue reading “On Meaningfulness in Sport Competition”
Author Archives: Leslie A. Howe
Fair Fights and Foul: Competition Categories and Human Rights in Sport
This paper was mostly written in June 2021 and has undergone a number of revisions since then. It has been sent to several journals, but it seems impossible to publish. So it is here. Abstract: If sport is understood as a contest between human individuals on the basis of developed bodily movement involving skill, strength,Continue reading “Fair Fights and Foul: Competition Categories and Human Rights in Sport”
Rational Amateurs: Excellence and Authenticity
[I worked on this paper between 2011 and 2013. It put together two papers that were related but not very well integrated, and it was originally pretty polemical. It got savaged by reviewers. Eventually I gave up on it, but I had done a lot of research on amateurism and the amateur ideal and itContinue reading “Rational Amateurs: Excellence and Authenticity”
Time, Digitisation, and Human Effort: an existentialist perspective on VAR
[This talk was supposed to have been delivered at the EAPS (European Association for the Philosophy of Sport) Meeting at Paris-Sorbonne in April. Then Covid-19. Since I’m unlikely to be going anywhere for some time, it is here.] Public debates about the value or execrableness of VAR seem to coalesce around two main issues: fairnessContinue reading “Time, Digitisation, and Human Effort: an existentialist perspective on VAR”
At the Left Hand of the Divine
[Through the ‘90s I was doing the academic job tour: trying to get a permanent position and moving almost every year. I also played a lot of hockey, especially while I was living in Quebec. I ended up playing something like eighty games a year: bi-weekly faculty pick up games, women’s city league games, intramuralContinue reading “At the Left Hand of the Divine”
A Slightly Cluttered Desk 