A Philosophy of Sport

Description

While previous writing on the philosophy of sport has tended to see sport as a kind of testing ground for philosophical theories devised to deal with other kinds of problems - of ethics, aesthetics, or logical categorization - Steven Connor offers a new philosophical understanding of sport in its own terms. In order to define what sport essentially is and means, Connor presents a complete grammar of sport, isolating and describing its essential elements, including the characteristic spaces of sport, the nature of sporting time, the importance of sporting objects like bats and balls, the methods of movement in sport, the role of rules and chance, and what it really means to cheat and to win.

Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory in the School of Literature and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), The Book of Skin (Reaktion Books, 2004), Fly (Reaktion Books, 2006) and The Matter of Air (Reaktion Books, 2010).

'Connor muses interestingly on the football pitch as a palimpsest of geometries; on why to be in the lead is to have an advantage in time, "to have wound the clock forward"; on the extreme demands made on the too-easily-mocked sports commentator; on sprinting as "the enraptured attempt to escape the capturing drag of mass"; on the utility of magical thinking in the "follow-through" of bat or club; and on how one does things with balls.' - The Guardian