A Comparative Philosophy of Sport and Art

Abstract

Sport aesthetics historically has been somewhat marginalized in the philosophy of sport, which is itself a marginalized focus in philosophy—to some degree, not unlike aesthetics itself. Despite the relative neglect of how the artworld and sportworld both intersect and diverge, for the last decade or so there has been growing interest in this topic, complemented in part by theoretical advances in everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, and related areas. Recent books on sport aesthetics include Stephen Mumford’s Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (2012), which has since all but dominated discussions of aesthetics among philosophers of sport, and Andrew Edgar’s Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport (2014), which is concerned with sport and art as sources not so much of aesthetic appeal as of meaning in a broader, ‘de-aestheticized’ sense. My own book, Kinetic Beauty: The Philosophical Aesthetics of Sport (2019), follows in Mumford’s wake, where Paul Taylor’s recent book seems to occupy a similar place with respect to Edgar’s, at least in marginalizing the role of aesthetics in a narrow sense in addressing broad questions of meaning in these domains.