À l'heure où le débat sur la fin de vie resurgit, Bernard Sportès nous ouvre de nouveaux horizons, dépasse les arguments simplistes et nous aide à comprendre tabous et angoisses. Son analyse, ancrée dans son expérience des fins de vie, nous rappelle que cet accompagnement ultime doit bien rester un soin. Sa vision humaniste se refuse à ces morts administrées selon des critères médicaux prédéfinis, auxquelles il oppose une mort accompagnée, assistée jusqu'aux derniers instants. Cette proposition, nouvelle dans ce (...) vieux débat, prend acte de l'évolution de nos mœurs et place le respect de la volonté au-dessus de toute autre considération. Prééminence d'une volonté trop souvent confondue avec de simples opinions. Émerge ainsi la possibilité qu'une aide à mourir s'inscrive dans la poursuite d'une prise en charge. Le législateur devra l'organiser dans la confiance en la maturité des soignants et des patients, s'éloigner du réglementaire, encourager une pensée collective et supervisée. Nos fins de vies réclament une République fraternelle qui n'abandonne personne, une médecine d'équipe qui résiste au modèle industriel où on l'entraine. Bernard Sportès nous livre finalement un message simple : nous ne mourrons pas mieux tant que nous n'aurons pas bâti cette médecine de la personne qu'il décrit et propose."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Création collective, instinctive, continue, dynamique grandiose de l'imaginaire, le sport traverse avec assurance l'histoire des peuples et n'a pas été inventé, au cours des âges, sur décision des princes ou recommandation des philosophes. Il est vivant, populaire, spontané. Il est émotion. Il est passion. C'est par là d'ailleurs qu'il échappe. Les bonnes raisons ne le touchent qu'en surface...

This study examines the representations conveyed by sports practitioners and the ideologies that govern sports institutions in three European countries. Sports organizations seem to construct identitary references for practitioners through the values they convey and the forms of sociability that they develop. This international study compares the practices and representations of sport based on a questionnaire sent to a sample of practitioners in Cardiff, Great Britain; Nice, France; and Pitesti, Romania. The findings indicate some differences. In Great Britain, sports practices (...) remain imbued with educational values, in line with the ideals that were at the origin of the sporting movement. In France, sports practices seem more rooted in an orthodoxy promoted by community supervision. In Romania, sport remains attached to a therapeutic vocation and social mobility in connection with the communist past. (shrink)

tome 1. Les origines -- tome 2. Les nouvelles recherches.

Before the pandemic, our life was often described as fast, since in globalised society speed has been generally understood as a marker of efficiency, productivity and diligence; and so many people...

There is nothing to suggest academic exercise in attempts to define sport. A politics of sport which expects coherence presupposes such definition, and behind this definition stands a whole conception of man. What is sport? The question is well worth being asked, for it is thrust upon us.

A cursory review of the philosophy of sport readily reveals that it is dominated by Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophical milieux, in the departments of philosophy and kinesiology, the centers of bioethics, and the faculties of health around the world. In France, however, with the exception of a few researchers working in the philosophy or sport, and within an analytical paradigm, the development of the subject has gone almost unnoticed. By contrast, the discipline of history of sport clearly moved away from philosophy (...) in France with the establishment of a separate field of study based on the Anglo-Saxon model from the work pioneer of Pierre Arnaud developed by Thierry Terret and other sports historians. Nevertheless, in French universities, faculties of philosophy have not been open to research in the philosophy of the body. The philosophy of sport is not taught as such in French Universities even if our generation pursues ways opened by Jacques Ulmann, Bernard Jeu, Bernard Guillemain, Michel Bernard, Jean-Michel Berthelot, Gilbert Andrieu, Bertrand During, André Rauch, Marie-Hélène Brousse, Françoise Labridy, and Georges Vigarello, among others, through their reflections on the philosophy of the body. This article discusses the influence of some of these authors, and especially of Georges Gusdorf, Michel Foucault, and Georges Snyders on the nature and prospects for the philosophy of sport in France. (shrink)

In this paper three senses of slow sport are demonstrated through three modalities of technical, and as such, it is found within a precise methodology. Self-awareness is defined by paying attention...

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. “Nonsense,” said the sensible Bernard Suits: “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Through the jocular voice of Aesop's Grasshopper, a “shiftless but thoughtful practitioner of applied entomology,” Suits not only (...) argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal of human existence, and so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. This new edition of _The Grasshopper_ includes illustrations from Frank Newfeld created for the book’s original publication, as well as an introduction by Thomas Hurka and a new appendix on the meaning of ‘play.’. (shrink)

Professeur de philosophie à l'Université de Lille III, Bernard Jeu (1929-1991) était passionné de sport. Son intérêt n'était pas évènementiel. Ses recherches innovantes, particulièrement sur l'imagiaire, seront encore longtemps précieuses au mouvement sportif dont il était l'un de grands dirigeants. "Le sportif, le philosophe, le dirigeant: Bernard Jeu", reprend ses articles les pls significatfs.

The implicit activities of the living body in sports (such as heart rate, involuntary gestures, stress, reflex, emotional regulation and interaction expressions) emerge in the consciousness of the lived body without our voluntary control. We demonstrate physiological emersion, and how, including in dramaturgical perception, physiological flows and processes collide with the image of a whole body. In this paper, we introduce corporeal non-property as the missing (?) link between phenomenology and neuroscience, renewed by research on the cerebral unconscious and the (...) perception of their lived body. Rather than mindfulness, physical activity obliges the subject to learn the unconscious and his motor skills from his living body: a new psychoanalysis of sport is thus established by studying what emerges from the activity of the living body up to the level of the conscious description of motor action. In this paper, we explain why that awareness occurs, and why it matters for the understanding of unconscious activity of the athlete’s living body. This is potentially interesting, although it needs, as a theory, to overcome the obvious reliance of the body on unconscious or habitual/automated physiological processes. But the incorporation of body techniques forms a habitus. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Cybathlon is a new kind of competition that embraces disabled people who use advanced assistive technologies. The purpose of this essay is to interpret the Cybathlon not as a ‘transhuman’ sport for enhanced athletes but as a place for experimenting with ‘capability hybridatization’ of the self. We wish to show that the figure of the transhuman cyborg that dominates the media coverage of disabled athletes is an attempt to approximate the able-bodied standard. This figure is problematic because it excludes (...) athletes who cannot meet it. We defend the idea that capability hybridization, on the other hand, does not seek to approach a standard, but aims to promote and legitimize variedly able bodies. This article will be organized in three stages. First, we will highlight the production of the transhuman cyborg at work in contemporary disability sport. Then, we will show that this transhuman cyborg is based on ableist and heteronormative conceptions of the body that are opposed to a postmodern defini... (shrink)

"Piercing, tatouage, chirurgie esthétique, valorisation du sport et des conduites à risque, exaltation de la jeunesse et refus de vieillir, multiplication des appareils biosensoriels greffés sur le corps - écouteurs, baladeurs, portables, contraceptifs... -, développement du mouvement, de la vitesse et de la glisse - ski, surf, rollers, trottinette, TGV, internet, etc. : le sujet contemporain explore les différentes manières de faire corps avec lui-même et avec les autres. Dans une synthèse subjective entre existentialisme et psychanalyse du sujet, l'auteur analyse (...) cette nouvelle philosophie du corps, apparue depuis les années 1990, qui conditionne notre être-au-monde." (source: 4e de couverture). (shrink)

Body ecology by cosmosis refers to the experience of immersion, or the incorporation of the elements of nature through a body practice, leisure or sport. In this article, we propose comprehensive u...

Ueshiba Morihei (1883-1969), créateur de l’aikidō, fonde son « budō » (voie martiale) avec Deguchi Onisaburō (1871-1948), dirigeant de l’Ōmoto-kyō, l’une des « nouvelles religions » japonaises. Ils conçoivent le budō comme « la voie de création et d’ordonnancement de l’univers » en opposition aux « budō corporels » influencés par le modèle occidental du sport. Selon eux, l’Occident, « matérialiste », a profondément modifié les pratiques japonaises de telle sorte que le vécu du corps comme shintai, comme réceptacle des (...) kami (esprits ou divinités) lors des transes de possession est en voie de se perdre, et avec lui tout un monde. Le corps de possession rend communiquant les mondes : avec sa perte, il n’y a plus de transgressions possibles des frontières ontologiques ; l’homme ne peut plus s’unir à sa racine et retrouver sa totalité ; les animaux, les plantes et les pierres ne parlent plus et le dieu originel unique devient inaccessible, caché dans « l’imperceptible de l’imperceptible ». (shrink)

Chapitre 1. Sport et domination capitaliste (Patrick Vassort) -- Chapitre 2. Sport, anthropofacture et conformisme généralisé (Clément Hamel) -- Chapitre 3. Le sport contre les femmes (Ronan David) -- Chapitre 4. Le sport ou la fin de l'espace vécu (Simon Maillard) -- Chapitre 5. Propagande sportive et colonisation du quotidien (Fabien Lebrun) -- Chapitre 6. Le sport: une entreprise d'uniformisation et de déculturation. L'exemple des JO de Pékin (Bernard Allain) -- Chapitre 7. Le sport contre la culture et l'éducation (...) (Camille Dal et Nicolas Oblin). (shrink)

Argument of this text is that: to develop aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with aesthetics as philosophy of art but with aesthetics of everyday life; to start with aesthetics of sport, we should not begin with beautiful of ‘pure aesthetics’ but with the dramatic; to analyze the dramatic in sport, we should not open the analysis with analogy between theater and sport, but with sport as a sort of performance; to get at the meaning of sport as a (...) drama, we have to discuss different meanings ‘drama’ has in theory and everyday communication; to map the dramatic in sport as performance, we have to discuss some features of sport which determine its dramatics first, and its potential as spectacle later. To proceed with the argument, we have to take into account contemporary state of aesthetics, recent development of aesthetics of everyday life, and theory of performance, together with Bernard Suits’ definition of game, Gadamer’s idea of play, and Lévy-Strauss’ account on conjunctive and disjunctive ritual. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka’s Games, Sports, and Play is a collection of essays with two seemingly cohesive aims. It is intended to be both a conference proceeding focused on the work of the late Bernard Suit...

ABSTRACTThe Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of sport. In the book, Suits investigates two fundamental issues in general p...

Thomas Hurka’s Games, Sports, and Play is a collection of essays with two seemingly cohesive aims. It is intended to be both (1) a conference proceeding focused on the work of the late Bernard Suits and (2) a printing of the first posthumously released original work by Suits in the thirteen years since his passing. I evaluate how well the book functions in each of its intended purposes, and offer a justification of my conclusion that – despite being an (...) excellent contribution to the field of Suits scholarship – its two aims stand in considerable tension with each other. (shrink)

Applying Bernard Suits’s conceptual definition of game-playing, and his outline of a conceptual definition of sport, I ask and answer the following question: can hunting be a sport? An affirmative answer is substantiated via the following logic. Premise one, all sports are games. Premise two, a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Premise three, fair-chase hunters voluntarily accept unnecessary obstacles. Conclusion one: fair-chase hunting is a game. Premise four, a sport can be defined as a game (...) that requires the exercise of physical skill, has a wide following, and institutional stability. Premise five, some fair-chase hunts require physical skill, have a wide following, and have institutional stability. Conclusion two: fair-chase hunting that requires physical skill, has a wide following, and institutional stability is a sport. After substantiating each premise and conclusion I consider and refute several important objections. Primarily, that hunting lacks constitutive rules and that hunting lacks volitional engagement and thus cannot be a game or sport. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAn essential and yet often neglected motivation of Bernard Suits’ elevation of gameplay to the ideal of human existence is his account of capacities along perfectionist lines and the function of games in eliciting them. In his work Suits treats the expression of these capacities as implicitly good and the purest expression of the human telos. Although it is a possible interpretation to take Suits’ utopian vision to mean that gameplay in his future utopia must consist of the logically (...) inevitable replaying of activities we conduct in the present for instrumental reasons, because gameplay for Suits is identical with the expression of sets of capacities specifically elicited by game rules, it is much more likely that he intends utopian gameplay to be an endless series of carefully crafted opportunities for the elicitation of special capacities, and thus embody his ideal of existence. This article therefore provides a new lens for understanding both... (shrink)

Whereas Bernard Suits argued that judged sports such as diving and figure skating are aesthetic performances rather than games, I argue that they’re simultaneously performances and games. Moreover, their two aspects are connected, since their prelusory goal is to dive or skate beautifully and the requirement to do somersaults or triple jumps makes achieving that goal more difficult. This analysis is similar to one given by Scott Kretchmar, but by locating these sports’ aesthetic side in their goals rather than (...) in their rules, it better captures the importance of beauty in them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we contextualize and introduce the papers that comprise the special issue, “Bernard Suits’ Legacy: New Inspirations and Interpretations.” The articles discuss the work of S...

ABSTRACTIn this article, I consider Bernard Suits’ Utopia where the denizens supposedly fill their days playing Utopian sports, with regard to the relevance of the thought experiment for understand...

In this paper, I am going to present a condensed version of my theory of what sport is from my book The Philosophy of Football. In that work, I took my starting point in Bernard Suits’ celebrated,...

When sporting agents fail through wrongful or faulty behaviour, they should feel guilty; when they fail because of a deficiency in their abilities, they should feel shame. But sometimes we fail without being deficient and without being at fault. I illustrate this with two examples of players, Moacir Barbosa and Roberto Baggio, who failed in World Cup finals and cost their teams the greatest prize in sport. Although both players failed, I suggest that neither was at fault and neither was (...) deficient. I argue that we can fail through no fault of our own because our abilities are always fallible. This fallibility means that to succeed – to achieve sporting glory – we must run the risk of failure. The appropriate emotion to feel over such failures is agent-regret. Sporting agents and observers should not take up what I call the ‘critical position’: the idea that someone who fails must be deficient or must have been at fault. This allows for a softer, but also more accurate, attitude towards our own failures and the failures of others. I end by suggesting that the fallibility of our abilities is made clear through playing or watching sport, and this can illuminate life more broadly. (shrink)

The idea that cheaters cannot (really) win in sports persists among philosophers, mainly due to the lingering influence of Bernard Suits’ logical incompatibility thesis. In this article I explain why the thesis does not apply to sports. I argue that the question whether cheating can be prohibited in sports is empirical rather than analytic, as is the case for games subject to the thesis. Thus, sports rules do not make cheating impossible and since game officials cannot always detect cheating (...) and punish cheaters, cheating is a part of sports and cheaters sometimes win. Even if advances in technology made it impossible for cheaters to evade detection, since in-game officials will never know whether their attempts to provide restorative justice to those victimized by acts of cheating are successful, and since cheaters exploit this fact, it follows that not only is cheating a part of sports, but it always will be. (shrink)

Arriving at definitions in philosophy is as time-honored as it is controversial. Although learned reflection in the west about sport goes back at least to the time of ancient Greece, the sub-discipline of the philosophy of sport emerged in the world of Anglophone analytic philosophy in the 1970s. Shawn Klein’s edited volume, Defining Sport: Conceptions and Borderlines, is both the fruit of and a valuable contribution to such an emerging field (indeed, it is the first book-length study of its topic (...) within philosophy of sport). Although Huizinga had sought to define the phenomenon of play very broadly in his Homo Ludens (1938), investigation of the overlapping questions of what is sport? what is a game?, and what is play? were central to the sub-discipline at its inception. Foundational was the work of Bernard Suits, whose Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (1978) sought to refute Wittgenstein’s claim that the notion of game was indefinable. In order to refute Wittgenstein, Suits sought to establish the conditions or properties both necessary and sufficient of the concepts of game and sport such that all instances of those concepts share such properties. (shrink)

The idea that cheaters cannot (really) win in sports persists among philosophers, mainly due to the lingering influence of Bernard Suits’ logical incompatibility thesis. In this article I explain why the thesis does not apply to sports. I argue that the question whether cheating can be prohibited in sports is empirical rather than analytic, as is the case for games subject to the thesis. Thus, sports rules do not make cheating impossible and since game officials cannot always detect cheating (...) and punish cheaters, cheating is a part of sports and cheaters sometimes win. Even if advances in technology made it impossible for cheaters to evade detection, since in-game officials will never know whether their attempts to provide restorative justice to those victimized by acts of cheating are successful, and since cheaters exploit this fact, it follows that not only is cheating a part of sports, but it always will be. (shrink)

Since Sigmund Freud developed and popularized psychoanalysis, this psychological theory has significantly influenced contemporary thinking, particularly in philosophical disciplines focused on understanding human behavior and addressing social problems. Take the examples of political philosophy, race theory, and feminist thought, among many others. However, although sport philosophy qualifies as one such discipline, scholars in this field have given little to no attention to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical theorists. Remarkably, psychoanalytical notions, especially those of Eric Berne and Norman O. Brown, significantly shaped (...) class='Hi'>Bernard Suits’ pioneering thoughts on games. Nevertheless, sport philosophers have largely overlooked the importance of psychoanalysis in Suits’ examinations of games and, more broadly speaking, rarely attempted to apply psychoanalytical concepts to their analyses of sport. In this paper, I explain the psychoanalytical roots of Suits’ theory of games and explore how much of his theory of games is indebted to psychoanalysis. Specifically, I first compare Suits’ analysis of unconscious gameplay to psychoanalytic concepts of repression and neurosis. Subsequently, I explore the alignment between Suits’ views on gameplay and psychoanalytic accounts of play and pleasure. To conclude, I examine the therapeutic and emancipatory character of Suits’ proposal, drawing parallels between his philosophical corpus and critical theorists whose critical analyses of modern society are heavily indebted to Freud. (shrink)

Les quatre volumes publiés sous le titre évocateur de Sport et Genre à la suite du 11e carrefour d’histoire du sport, tenu à Lyon du 28 au 30 octobre 2004, à l’initiative du CRIS (Centre de Recherche et d’Innovation sur le Sport) de l’Université Claude Bernard, viennent combler un manque historiographique certain sur le sujet. La somme dirigée par Thierry Terret et alii veut prendre acte de la transformation et de l’extension des regards sur la question du sport et (...) du genre, faire le point su... (shrink)

Cet ouvrage synthétise les actes d’un colloque organisé par l’Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 et la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Grenoble, en mai 2008. Il s’interroge sur les conditions sexuées d’émergence et de développement des pratiques de montagne et répond à la thématique de la construction des masculinités et des féminités, ainsi que des rapports hiérarchiques de genre dans les disciplines alpines. L’ouvrage est essentiellement historique, mais des contributions sociologiques, psy...

Volume 13, Issue 3-4, August - December 2019, Page 486-488.

Volume 13, Issue 3-4, August - December 2019, Page 485-485.

ABSTRACTHidden among the many fascinating things that Bernard Suits says in his classic The Grasshopper is a passing observation he makes about one of the works of Søren Kierkegaard, the Seducer’s...

ABSTRACTThe Japanese translation of Bernard Suits's The Grasshopper was published in 2015. We report in this article the background of the translation, the way our project was operated, some notable difficulties we had and the impact that our translation has had so far. The description of the difficulties with translation touches upon how we interpreted the terms ‘lusory’ and ‘prelusory’. This article also includes an appendix describing the history of how the word ‘grasshopper’ has been translated into Japanese.

In this article, I consider Alkis Kontos’ and Allan Bäck’s critiques to Suits that his theory of games and good living lack ontological grounds or rests on the wrong foundations. Taking these criti...

Although a large number of theories justify the presence of games in school, all of them converge in two of the educational functions described by Biesta, socialization and qualification. In contra...