Abstract
- This essay develops a Kantian theory of sports which addresses: (1) Kant’s categories of aesthetic judgment (2) a comparable analysis applied to athletic volition; (3) comparison the structures of aesthetic cognition and experience and athletic volition and experience; (4) Kant’s distinction of ‘free’ and ‘attached’ beauty; (5) athletic experience and Kant’s theory of teleological judgment; (6) the moral concept of a ‘kingdom of ends’ and a community of sportsmanship; (7) the beautiful and the sublime, and their analogues in sport-experience; (8) respect for the moral law, religious emotion and faith, and their analogues in sport-experience; (9) the tension within the Kantian system, which both points to and resists an anthropological theory of cultural forms including sports, and (10) the role sports can play in creating opportunities for human self-knowledge.