Abstract

The philosophy of sport cropped up in a rather inhospitable environment. In the 1960s, sport enthusiasts remained largely unconvinced that philosophy could tell them something new about the experience and meaning of physical activity. And the philosophical mainstream remained almost wholly unconvinced that it should spend its analytical powers investigating something as mundane as sport. In its early years, the philosophy of sport worked against the growing tide of analytic philosophy that asked increasingly narrow philosophic questions and answered them in a way that only professional philosophers could understand. If this was the be-all and end-all of philosophy, then sport enthusiasts were right to worry about viability of a philosophy of sport.