On Judged Sports

Abstract

Whereas Bernard Suits argued that judged sports such as diving and figure skating are aesthetic performances rather than games, I argue that they’re simultaneously performances and games. Moreover, their two aspects are connected, since their prelusory goal is to dive or skate beautifully and the requirement to do somersaults or triple jumps makes achieving that goal more difficult. This analysis is similar to one given by Scott Kretchmar, but by locating these sports’ aesthetic side in their goals rather than in their rules, it better captures the importance of beauty in them.

Keywords:

• sports
• Suits
• judged sports
• figure skating
• diving

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Page references are first to the 1978 edition, then to the 2005, then to the 2014.

2. In a more recent paper, Kretchmar may seem to come closer to my account when he says participants in judged sports ‘want to dive beautifully, carry out an ice skating routine gracefully, or negotiate a high bar routine with apparently effortless precision’ (2008, 148). But in the surrounding discussion, he still treats these sports’ aesthetic demands as analogous to ‘barriers’ to a destination, that is, as mandated by their constitutive rules rather than figuring in their prelusory goal (147).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Hurka

Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 Canada. E-mail: [email protected]