ABSTRACT
Our evolutionary history shows that humans survived on this planet by the use of various specific and context-sensitive skills. These included not only physical but mental and social skills. It is undeniable, however, that physical skills have profoundly shaped who we are. The well-known French brain researcher Berthoz (2002) states elegantly and quintessentially that our brains were developed not for school subjects but to predict where the tiger will be in the next second. We are experts at movement behavior and our skills are amazing. The problem is that we are so well developed, thanks to a long evolutionary past, that we are no longer aware of how good we are. When the experts at MIT tried to develop a walking robot in the 1960s, they had to give up because the transfer of weight, movement rhythm and balance are so well integrated and elegant that it was impossible to imitate human walking (Dreyfus 1972). In the modern world, our bodily skills play a different role, not necessary for survival, being proudly displayed in superfluous activities like sports, circus, and ballet. The superfluous and the bodily have not had much status and prestige in our Western intellectual tradition(s) and it is no surprise that Scharfstein (1980) in his story of philosophers and their lives found that it was not awry when entitling a chapter on ‘the bodily clumsiness of philosophers,’ though allowing for some non-clumsy exceptions, like Plato and Descartes. But sport philosophers should at least hold the body and sporting skills in high regard and pay attention to how athletes in sports display a multitude of different skills dependent on type of sport and environment. And not only physical skills but other sport-relevant skills, like mental or strategic skills, that is—if they should be called skills at all or maybe something else, like capacities. Even if the concept of skill traditionally has been strongly associated with manual or physical skills, other types of skills should not be excluded. In sports, motor skills and movements are by definition necessary, but perceptual skills are almost on a par since without being able to observe and comprehend a situation, say on a football field, the execution of movements easily becomes sports-irrelevant or clumsy. I am more in doubt whether more abstract and general factors like strategic competence should be called skill and not rather just competence or capacity. I thus propose to reserve the concept of skill to factors that are close to the execution of sports-relative bodily skills.
