Philosophy of Sport

Steven Connor is Professor of English and Director of Research at the Digital Futures Institute, King’s College London. He is the author of eighteen books, most recently The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing (2019).

[a] sparkling work . . . what we find in Connors book is a series of historical, sociological, metaphysical and existential reflections on intriguing but often neglected aspects of sport . . . Connor does not, it seems, try to persuade us of any grand thesis about sport, yet he rarely fails to illuminate . . . there is plenty here to fascinate. - TLSConnor muses interestingly on the football pitch as a palimpsest of geometries on why to be in the lead is to have an advantage in time, to have wound the clock forward on the extreme demands made on the too-easily-mocked sports commentator on sprinting as the enraptured attempt to escape the capturing drag of mass on the utility of magical thinking in the follow-through of bat or club and on how one does things with balls. - The Guardianthis book will confirm [Connors] reputation as an entertaining and lucid thinker. - Radical PhilosophyConnor takes aim at the significance and nature of sport. His purpose is to understand sport and its collective meaning. Rather than examining these issues in terms of traditional philosophical areas such as metaphysics, ethics, or aesthetics, Connor takes a cultural-phenomenological approach. Recommended. - Choice