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"Tournaments, Tests, and the Aims of Intercollegiate Athletic Competitions"
Recent discussion in the philosophy of sport literature concerns what organization of sport best fosters the identification of athletic excellence. However, it’s not clear that any championship system (season-long tournament, playoff system, or Championship Pluralism) is likely to have great success in identifying or measuring athletic excellence in college sports. There are a number of significant challenges to the basic project, which goes deeper than mere logistics. I explore some of the significant obstacles. I contend that any organization of college tournaments, leagues, or playoffs should give us little confidence that we have identified or measured athletic excellence overall (although we may have better success in some sports than others).
If college sports cannot be organized in such a way to provide an accurate measure of athletic excellence, how should we think about them? I believe a few responses are available, but my main argument borrows from Kretchmar’s well-known distinction between a test and a contest. Given the quality of college sport contests, I propose to treat intercollegiate athletic competitions instead as tests, aiming especially at self-improvement or self-perfection.
This paper will be presented at the 2022 IAPS conference.
"Virtue is Wisdom: Socrates' Unity of the Virtues in Xenophon and Plato"
This paper represents an attempt to understand Socrates' conception of the unity of the virtues. Plato's writings usually provide the entrance into this topic, with an apparent unity of the virtues appearing in many of his dialogues. However, to better understand what might have been Socrates' actual view, I begin by investigating the Socratic unity of the virtues described by Xenophon. In particular, I examine how virtues are related to wisdom and whether this indicates any essential unity amongst the virtues. After working through Xenophon, I compare the account to Plato's, with special focus on the Protagoras. I conclude that the agreement between the accounts of unity in Xenophon and Plato are only superficially similar. This helps us to better understand what Socrates must have said about virtue, though it leaves some important philosophical questions unresolved.
This paper was presented at the 2016 Pittsburgh Area Philosophy Colloquium
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