ABSTRACT

When I finished Sport, Rules and Values (SRV;1 McFee, 2004a), my plans did not include another book on philosophical issues raised by sport: as I saw it, those issues were best addressed in something like a piecemeal fashion (as typified by some of the later chapters here, as well as some papers of mine (McFee, 2002, 2004b, 2014). Certainly, I doubted the usefulness of any wholly general account. But latterly, however, I have become aware of inte - grating forces within my work, of a kind that might escape even sensitive reading of individual papers. Three related issues (fundamental to philosophy of sport – two substantial, one methodological) seemed to me recurrent through out that work as it applied to sport, and on them I felt I had come, fairly recently, to a kind of (justified) stopping point. The two substantial issues were:

• What is the philosophy of sport? (What does one do, to count as a practitioner in the philosophy of sport?)

• What conception of philosophy underpins the answer to that question?