Sport – A Slightly Cluttered Desk

Fair Fights and Foul: Competition Categories and Human Rights in Sport

Note: The discussion of sport as a human right (and why it isn’t) was a central motivator for this paper. The final (for now) version of this discussion for me, and more or less the final version of this paper, is in “Human Rights, Goods, and Preferences in Sport”, published in Cathy Devine’s anthology Sex,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”