ABSTRACT
Philosophy of mind is a vast subject, covering the criss-crossing areas of consciousness, subjectivity, personhood, personal identity, thought, cognition, action, emotion, free will and responsibility, transcendence, authenticity and death. The phenomenological approach is fused with the more analytical approach of J. R. Searle in V. F. Moe’s philosophical critique of classical cognitivism in sport. This chapter outlines some approaches in the philosophy of mind, before proceeding to some of their manifestations in the philosophy of sport. Modern materialism’s simplest version is the mind–brain identity theory, which proposes contingent psychophysical identities for ‘occurrent states’. For dualism, a person is a mind and a body, although most dualists hold that a person is essentially a mind and merely has a body. Idealism is the monist theory that all that exists is mental. Double-aspect theory is the theory that the mental and physical are properties of an underlying reality which is neither mental nor physical.
