This essay argues that idleness as play and leisure would be recognised as an ideal over game playing in Bernard Suits’ Utopia. Idleness is unaccountably overlooked as an ideal by Suits, as is the problem that his description of game playing is an anachronism, pushing his Utopians into a pre-Utopian condition. There is room for playing games in an idle Utopia but in a less prominent and more restricted role. Idleness as play and leisure is not defended as the sole (...) ideal of Utopian existence though it is possibly that. Rather, it is presented as a compelling and preferable ideal for Suits’ Utopians, thus refuting his claim that game playing is ‘the only possible’ ideal of human existence in Utopia. (shrink)

This paper argues that for the purposes of any sort of serious discussion about immoral conduct in sport very little is illuminated by claiming that the conduct in question is cheating. In fact, describing some behavior as cheating is typically little more than expressing strong, but thoroughly vague and imprecise, moral disapproval or condemnation of another person or institution about a wide and ill-defined range of improper advantage-seeking behavior. Such expressions of disapproval fail to distinguish cheating from many other types (...) of immoral conduct. The discussion shows that we should set the concept aside and assess the moral disapproval implied by claims of cheating by reference to the moral and other principles that underlie the practice of sport. This allows us to consider carefully the complexity of the issues that are raised when allegations of cheating are made and not be distracted by the emotionally loaded, conversation-stopping tendency of the concept. This means that some types of disputes in sport will be messy and demand more effort to resolve, but the payoff will be better informed and more thoughtful discussions and greater awareness of the moral complexity of sport and of its principled underpinnings. (shrink)

A well-known term in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, the “beautiful soul” (die schöne Seele) has resurfaced in recent years. Deleuze refers to the beautiful soul’s “religiosity” and argues that aggressive “selection” is necessary as its antidote. However, in volatile contexts of social destabilization, such selection risks recoiling into reactionary violence. After first developing in more detail the beautiful soul’s background as a discursive figure, I argue that understanding Deleuze’s selection within a context of spiritual experience is necessary to mitigate this (...) worry. Exploration of this experience is pursued through juxtaposition of Deleuze’s thought with Nishida Kitarō’s investigation of the ontological structure of religious consciousness. The comparative resonances I develop suggest an ontological objectivity to the problems and structuring of the logos of religious consciousness and show how a more explicitly spiritual rendering of “selection,” developed through the Deleuze/Nishida encounter, intervenes into the broader beautiful soul problematic. (shrink)

This paper studies “environmental personhood” legislation as a transitional concept. A transitional concept is one whose originating context sets parameters for its pragmatic functioning even as the eventual coherence of this functioning entails deep change in this originating context. By more explicitly thematizing environmental personhood as a transitional concept, we can acknowledge worries about its entanglement with a rights paradigm emphasizing private property and human exceptionalism while still exploring how it might contribute towards deeper ecological transformation. The paper introduces Nuu-chah-nuulth (...) philosopher E. Richard Atleo’s notion of ‘phase connectors’ as a heuristic for thinking transitional tensions in environmental personhood especially in terms of the gap between its present operative strategy and possible future effects on wider imaginaries. Indeed, this gap indicates how environmental personhood’s transitional potential is entangled with challenging dominant presuppositions in what Anna Grear calls ‘law’s onto-epistemic imaginary’. Using Atleo’s heuristic and drawing on a range of sources, the paper thinks through some of the prominent fault lines and volatile dynamics of environmental personhood as a transitional concept. After establishing these critical tensions, it considers how its conceptualization in domains beyond legislative or academic articulations may or may not help induce ethico-phenomenological changes in constitutive imaginaries. Though such popular presentations are frequently reductive, understanding why and how is important if theorists can contribute to the construction of creative alternatives. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationship between James’ radical empiricism and Deleuze’s study of the genesis of sense without a transcendental subject as necessary condition. It shows that James’ concept of pure experience changes the form of relation between mind and world. Considering how to conceptualize experience without a fixed metaphysical or transcendental subject destabilizes ontological identity, leads to a founding conceptual divergence from traditional phenomenology, and motivates Deleuze’s efforts towards transcendental empiricism. The paper reads Deleuze’s work on the genesis of (...) sense in this context, arguing that one important result is an ontological pluralism. Such pluralism is crucial in considering how meaning can be made between and across differences and is in keeping with radical empiricism’s openness to life’s complexity. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Nicholas Dixon's defence of the moderate partisan as the ideal fan of team sports. For Dixon, the moderate partisan is someone who combines a partisan fan's loyalty for a particular team with a purist fan's desire to see fair and skilful play by all participants. My aim is to argue that there is no ideal fan of team sports. In particular, there is nothing specially commendable about the moderate partisan's loyalty that justifies the claim (...) to be the ideal fan. There are many other ways of being a fan than being a purist or a partisan as described by Dixon. None of them is morally superior to the other, assuming that they meet basic requirements of respect for others and for fair play. I argue that the commitment of partisan fans to particular teams is better explained by other values than the moral virtue of loyalty. A better explanation and justification of partisanship, and indeed of fan interest in sport generally, is found in the human attachment to narrative as a way of creating meaning in our lives. (shrink)

Over 40 years ago, Daniel Bell made the provocative claim that ideological polarization was diminishing in Western democracies, but new ideologies were emerging and driving politics in developing nations. This article tests the EndofIdeology thesis with a new wave of public opinion data from the World Values Survey (WVS) that covers over 70 nations representing more than 80 per cent of the world's population. We find that polarization along the Left/Right dimension is substantially greater in the less affluent and less (...) democratic societies than in advanced industrial democracies. The correlates of Left/Right orientations also vary systematically across regions. The twin pillars of economic and religious cleavages remain important in European states; cultural values and nationalism provide stronger bases of ideology in Asia and the Middle East. As Bell suggested, social modernization does seem to transform the extent and bases of ideological polarization within contemporary societies. (shrink)

In this book, the authors present current research in the study of the philosophy of the mind. Topics discussed in this compilation include the concepts of hope and belief; how consciousness builds the subject through relating and human behaviour; analysing the neurophysiological mechanism of qigong on the mind and brain activity; the conscious and unconscious mind and implications for society, religion, and disease; how the mind is shaped by culture; and the power of computational mathematics to explore some of the (...) universal ways by which each human mind builds its image of the world. (shrink)

This commentary considers Wahl’s 1942 “Poetry as Spiritual Exercise” in the context of his interests in radical empiricism and process metaphysics. In doing so, it raises appreciation for the complexity of his thought, identifies specific notes of influence on Gilles Deleuze, and responds to worries that Wahl’s notion of spiritual exercise is predominantly a form of withdrawal, quietism, or retreat from the horrors of World War Two. For Wahl, rather than passive contemplation of a determinate artifact, poetry is a mode (...) of experience that, to speak with Whitehead and James, is a making. This experience of poetry develops affordances of thought that strengthen existential capacity for remaining open to uncertainty, fragility, and vulnerability. (shrink)

Michela Bella’s Ontology after Philosophical Psychology: The Continuity of Consciousness in William James’s Philosophy of Mind offers a detailed survey of James’s thought using “continuity” as its focal lens. Because the book presumes significant familiarity with James and frequently includes dense exegesis of his work’s most technical aspects, it is primarily for specialists. It will particularly interest James scholars studying the entanglement of the metaphysical with the psychological and epistemological.Combining “historical” and “theoretical” points of view, Bella tracks “James’s gradual translation (...) of psychological experimental observations of the continuity of thought into an ontological perspective... (shrink)

This paper argues that human psychological resilience is a central virtue in sport and in human life generally. Despite its importance, it is an overlooked virtue in philosophy of sport and classical and contemporary virtue theory. The phenomenon of human resilience has received a great deal of attention recently in other quarters, however. There is a large and instructive empirical psychological literature on resilience, but connections to virtue theory are rarely drawn and there is no agreement about what the concept (...) refers to. This paper attempts to clarify the concept of resilience and explain how it fits into and supports a traditional Aristotelian conception of virtue. It shows how resilience figures centrally in sport and can extend and enrich our understanding of virtue and success in sport and of sport's internal values. The investigations into the nature of resilience in sport can also help us to understand better sport's contributions to human culture and well-being. (shrink)

Current general restrictions on performance-enhancing drugs pose a collective action problem that cannot be solved and bring a variety of adverse consequences for sport. General prohibitions of PEDs are grounded in claims that they violate the integrity of sport. But there are decisive arguments against integrity of sport-based prohibitions of PEDs for elite sport. We defend a harm prevention approach to PED prohibition as an alternative. This position cannot support a general ban on PEDs, since it provides no basis for (...) prohibiting non-harmful PED use. We argue that a harm prevention approach to restricting PEDs is ethically justified, has better prospects of compliance, is consistent with respecting the integrity of sport, and holds at least a modest prospect of resolving the collective action problem around PED restriction. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article explores the connection between James's “radical empiricism” and Deleuze's “transcendental empiricism” with a particular focus on the concept of “pure experience.” It argues for the substantial nature of this connection in terms of both philosophical motivations and formal innovations. Both thinkers are motivated to construct “better” empiricisms that do not complacently accept conventional conceptual representations as exhaustive of the real. Moreover, radical empiricism develops a latent critique of representational models of consciousness that is accomplished through a turn to (...) events or processes as ontologically primary. These innovations are further developed by Deleuze in his treatment of the problem of individuation. Taken together, they help to specify the metaphysical reasons for the experimental pluralism that both James and Deleuze affirm, showing how these reasons are inextricable from the radical empiricist impulse to be maximally inclusive of modalities of real experience, including the felt, the vague, and the affective. Emphasizing the metaphysical dimensions of these alternative empiricisms brings into clearer focus the stakes of philosophical thought as part of the open-ended and ongoing relational processes by which the universe continues to unfold. (shrink)