Sport often seems to teeter on the edge, on one side of the entertainment industry, on the other of cheating violent aggression: from a make-believe simulacrum of serious play to a nasty chemically enhanced descent into a Hobbesian state of nature. Such perversions lend credibility to reductive views of sport itself as a metonymic feature of capitalism. But that sport as entertainment means fixing it to produce exciting outcomes and amplifying capacities to superhuman proportions, while sport as aggression means treating (...) rules as mere obstacles to brute dominance, shows how far we in fact are from these abysses, even in the days of the Coca Cola/Nike Olympics, Vinny Jones and cricket sledging. In this essay, I try to delineate through history— from Homer to … Gomer?—a common culture of sport and sportsmanship that, with its excesses and perversions, continues to operate as one, albeit complex, ideal of human excellence. (shrink)

This study demonstrates the extent to which academic philosophers and social scientists make philosophy difficult. It highlights the political dimension of the state, law, morality and production, and shows they need to be understood in terms of how a conflict of forces operates.

ABSTRACT In an article in Encounter, Antony Flew usefully opens up the issue of what racism is by giving three ‘concepts’: (1) ‘unjustified discrimination’; (2) ‘heretical belief; and (3) ‘institutionalised racism’. He rejects senses (2) and (3) in favour of (1) and finds much ‘anti‐racism’in fact guilty of it. This article, while benefiting from Flew's account, argues that it basically misconceives and underestimates racism by ignoring its complex ideological (sense 2) and institutional (sense 3) character. In regard to (2) it (...) is argued that we need to distinguish scalar and statistical claims from the binary ‘us/them’essentialism characteristic of racism. In regard to (3) it is argued both that affirmative action is required by justice and that it entails ‘collateral injustice’as well as consequential uncertainties. (shrink)

A crow sat in a tree holding in his beak a piece of meat that he had stolen. A fox which saw him determined to get the meat. It stood under the tree and began to tell the crow what a beautiful big bird he was. He ought to be king of all the birds, the fox said, and he undoubtedly would have been made king, if only he had a voice as well. The crow was so anxious to prove (...) that he had a voice, that he dropped the meat and croaked for all he was worth. Up ran the fox, snapped up the meat, and said to him: ‘If you added brains to all your other qualifications you would make an ideal king.’. (shrink)

As ideas and feelings succeeded one another, and heart and head were brought into play, men continued to lay aside their natural wildness; their private connections became ever more intimate as their limits extended. They accustomed themselves to assemble before their huts round a large tree; singing and dancing, the true offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather the occupation, of men and women thus assembled together with nothing else to do. Each one began to consider the (...) rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be of most consideration; and this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice. From these first distinctions arose on the one side vanity and contempt and on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these heavens ended by producing combinations fatal to innocence and happiness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The welfare state is not just a system of personal insurance but an expression of community, of concern for our fellows. It places some things beyond the question of purchasing power. Yet its structures are often criticised as subverting personal and social cares and responsibilities. Arguably there is a ‘dialectic of self‐destruction’ here, a tendency for the institution to undermine its own support. At the same time this problem is inherent in the capitalist state itself, as is brought out (...) by a study of the philosophers of ‘civil society’ from Mandeville to Greèn. It is schematically argued that the welfare state needs reconstructing as an articulation rather than a substitute for ‘community’. Implications for the class, gender and age structures of society are sketched. (shrink)

//static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%3Aid%3Aarticle%3AS0031819100042005/resource/na me/firstPage-S0031819100042005a.jpg.

The article seeks to function as a cluster of reminders of the rich, robust and subtle place of ‘our’ concept of beauty—hence of its contrasts. It illustrates this through everyday life examples as well as through criticism of writings that, in apparent embarrassment about using the idea, seek to supplant it with something less suspect. The article seeks to show the concept of beauty at work not only in art but, as Plato urged, in human action and reaction at all (...) levels, as well of course in nature. I try to sketch an epistemology of sensibility and a logic of beauty as a more-or-less topic neutral concept attaching to whole, hence individual and perhaps unique situations. (shrink)

‘Pluralism’ may be an ambiguous term. But it is not the multitude of the word's meanings but the multitude of sorts of thing that ‘pluralists’ might be claiming to be not-single-but-plural that generates unclarity about what any ‘pluralist’ position amounts to. Take ethics: a ‘pluralist’ might be maintaining, as against say an ethical hedonist of a Benthamite sort, that there is more than one sort of thing ‘good in itself. Another ‘pluralist’ might maintain that there is more than one sort (...) of life that counts as a ‘good way of life’. Or that not all moral duties are forms of the duty to be truthful. Or that there is more than one framework in terms of which experiences, actions or lives can properly be assessed. There is a problem in understanding what it is that is supposed to be counted: one-or-many of what? While the value today of William James’s popular essays in what we might now call ‘value pluralism’ far exceeds their role in illustrating this difficulty, they do exemplify it. James of course described himself as a ‘pluralist’; he was on the flagship of that movement. But just to what extent and in what respects remains unclear. (shrink)