scholarly journals Performance Enhancement and the Spirit of the Dance. Non Zero Sum

Philosophies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Blanca Rodríguez López

The current anti-doping policy in sports has enormous costs in economic, social, and human terms. As these costs are likely to become even bigger with the advent of bioenhancing technologies, in this paper I analyze the reasons for this policy. In order to clarify this issue, I compare sports with dance, an activity that has many similarities with sports but where there are no bans on performance enhancers. Considering the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) criteria for banning a substance, we argue that two of them, the potential to enhance performance and the risk for health, are similar in dance and sports, thus I claim that the difference had to be in the so-called “spirit” of sports and dance. After looking into this matter and analyzing the special case of dancesport, I conclude that the main difference can be found in the competitive character of sports and the subsequent concern about competitive justice.

Author(s):  
Thomas M. Hunt

Performance enhancement in sport has a long and controversial history. Although several organizations enacted prohibitions on the subject of doping prior to the Second World War, public scrutiny on the issue remained relatively light until the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1960s, officials passed a number of regulatory measures with the twin goals of protecting the health of athletes and ensuring the fairness of competitions. Due partially to the effects of Cold War political rivalries, the use of drugs by athletes nevertheless remained widespread in the world of sport. This policy situation changed dramatically with the end of the superpower conflict in 1991, however. The following decade was marked by increasingly vociferous calls for reform from outside the international governance structure for sport. In February of 1999, regulatory powers over the subject were centralized in a new organization called the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).


Philosophies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Lopez Frias

(1) Background: The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) utilizes three criteria to include a technology in the List of Banned Substances and Methods—performance enhancement, health, and the spirit of sport. The latter is arguably the most fundamental one, as WADA justifies the anti-doping mission by appealing to it. (2) Method: Given the interrelationship among the notions of “human nature,” “natural talent,” and “sport,” I investigate what view of human nature underpins the “spirit of sport” criterion. To do so, I focus on both WADA’s official documents and scholarly formulations of the spirit of sport (that align with that of WADA). (3) Results: I show that the value attributed to excellence and effort in WADA’s formulation of the “spirit of sport” criterion has its roots in the notion of human nature of the work ethic that resulted from the secularization of the Protestant ethic. (4) Conclusion: Drawing on my analysis of the “spirit of sport” criterion, I pose critical questions concerning the justification of WADA’s anti-doping campaign and a tentative solution to move forward in the debate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-174

The article explores the significance of suspicion for conceptual work in sociological theory. The key question is what the relationship is between the transcendental suspicion of the researcher and the mutual suspicion among social agents? Can we say that the suspicion of a sociologist is only a special case of the universal fundamental suspicion of social agents? Or instead that the suspicion of sociologists forces them to attribute the property of suspicion to the suspects themselves? Paul Ricœur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” does not allow an answer to this question because Ricœur makes three reductive maneuvers: he makes suspicion a condition for distinguishing between consciousness and the unconscious, eliminates the symmetry of suspicion, and reduces suspicion of motives to suspicion of consciousness. Ricœur’s concept of suspicion therefore is triply encumbered: it is excluded from the world, disconnected from intersubjectivity, and alienated from action. Niklas Luhmann explicates suspicion precisely in the mode of “suspicion of motives,” for which Marxist social criticism or, in other words, exposing hypocrisy is the paradigm. However, Luhmann is faced as Marx was with the problem of distinguishing between mutual social suspicion and the privileged transcendental suspicion of the researcher. Focusing on motives locates unity in the difference between transcendental and social suspicion and allows us to distinguish two specific forms of suspicion: the paranoid form aimed at detecting a “double bottom” in human actions; and the schizoid form which finds a “double bottom” in surrounding reality itself, which makes schizoid suspicion a much more fundamental stance. It is based on ontological doubt — a refusal to recognize the visible as valid. That doubt fostered the metaphysics of multiple worlds (only one of which is social) that has become an unproblematic axiomatic assumption of sociology.


2021 ◽  
pp. bjsports-2020-103512
Author(s):  
Rosa Ventura ◽  
Peter Daley-Yates ◽  
Irene Mazzoni ◽  
Katia Collomp ◽  
Martial Saugy ◽  
...  

The systemic effect of glucocorticoids (GCs) following injectable routes of administration presents a potential risk to both improving performance and causing harm to health in athletes. This review evaluates the current GC antidoping regulations defined by the World Anti-Doping Agency and presents a novel approach for defining permitted and prohibited use of glucocorticoids in sport based on the pharmacological potential for performance enhancement (PE) and risk of adverse effects on health. Known performance-enhancing doses of glucocorticoids are expressed in terms of cortisol-equivalent doses and thereby the dose associated with a high potential for PE for any GC and route of administration can be derived. Consequently, revised and substance-specific laboratory reporting values are presented to better distinguish between prohibited and permitted use in sport. In addition, washout periods are presented to enable clinicians to prescribe glucocorticoids safely and to avoid the risk of athletes testing positive for a doping test.


2018 ◽  
pp. 5-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. M. Grigoryev ◽  
V. A. Pavlyushina

The phenomenon of economic growth is studied by economists and statisticians in various aspects for a long time. Economic theory is devoted to assessing factors of growth in the tradition of R. Solow, R. Barrow, W. Easterly and others. During the last quarter of the century, however, the institutionalists, namely D. North, D. Wallis, B. Weingast as well as D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, have shown the complexity of the problem of development on the part of socioeconomic and political institutions. As a result, solving the problem of how economic growth affects inequality between countries has proved extremely difficult. The modern world is very diverse in terms of development level, and the article offers a new approach to the formation of the idea of stylized facts using cluster analysis. The existing statistics allows to estimate on a unified basis the level of GDP production by 174 countries of the world for 1992—2016. The article presents a structured picture of the world: the distribution of countries in seven clusters, different in levels of development. During the period under review, there was a strong per capita GDP growth in PPP in the middle of the distribution, poverty in various countries declined markedly. At the same time, in 1992—2016, the difference increased not only between rich and poor groups of countries, but also between clusters.


Author(s):  
Brian Willems

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Kunal Debnath

High culture is a collection of ideologies, beliefs, thoughts, trends, practices and works-- intellectual or creative-- that is intended for refined, cultured and educated elite people. Low culture is the culture of the common people and the mass. Popular culture is something that is always, most importantly, related to everyday average people and their experiences of the world; it is urban, changing and consumeristic in nature. Folk culture is the culture of preindustrial (premarket, precommodity) communities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00013
Author(s):  
Danny Susanto

<p class="Abstract">The purpose of this study is to analyze the phenomenon known as&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 1rem;">“anglicism”: a loan made to the English language by another language.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism arose either from the adoption of an English word as a&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">result of a translation defect despite the existence of an equivalent&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">term in the language of the speaker, or from a wrong translation, as a&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">word-by-word translation. Said phenomenon is very common&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">nowadays and most languages of the world including making use of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">some linguistic concepts such as anglicism, neologism, syntax,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">morphology etc, this article addresses various aspects related to&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicisms in French through a bibliographic study: the definition of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism, the origin of Anglicisms in French and the current situation,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">the areas most affected by Anglicism, the different categories of&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Anglicism, the difference between French Anglicism in France and&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">French-speaking Canada, the attitude of French-speaking society&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">towards to the Anglicisms and their efforts to stop this phenomenon.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">The study shows that the areas affected are, among others, trade,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">travel, parliamentary and judicial institutions, sports, rail, industrial&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">production and most recently film, industrial production, sport, oil industry, information technology,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">science and technology. Various initiatives have been implemented either by public institutions or by&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">individuals who share concerns about the increasingly felt threat of the omnipresence of Anglicism in&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">everyday life.</span></p>


Dreyfus argues that there is a basic methodological difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences, a difference that derives from the different goals and practices of each. He goes on to argue that being a realist about natural entities is compatible with pluralism or, as he calls it, “plural realism.” If intelligibility is always grounded in our practices, Dreyfus points out, then there is no point of view from which one can ask about or provide an answer to the one true nature of ultimate reality. But that is consistent with believing that the natural sciences can still reveal the way the world is independent of our theories and practices.


Author(s):  
Rachel J. Crellin ◽  
Oliver J.T. Harris

In this paper we argue that to understand the difference Posthumanism makes to the relationship between archaeology, agency and ontology, several misconceptions need to be corrected. First, we emphasize that Posthumanism is multiple, with different elements, meaning any critique needs to be carefully targeted. The approach we advocate is a specifically Deleuzian and explicitly feminist approach to Posthumanism. Second, we examine the status of agency within Posthumanism and suggest that we may be better off thinking about affect. Third, we explore how the approach we advocate treats difference in new ways, not as a question of lack, or as difference ‘from’, but rather as a productive force in the world. Finally, we explore how Posthumanism allows us to re-position the role of the human in archaeology,


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