Some Suitsian Remarks on A Hartian Conception of Sport

Abstract

The paper presents some comments on José Luis Pérez Triviño’s Hartian conception of sport. In these remarks, I will draw on the philosophy of Bernard Suits, whose thought also plays an important role in Pérez-Triviño’s consideration. In the first part, I comment on the analogy between sport and law, which is the main conceptual vehicle of Pérez Triviño’s consideration, and I point out some of the limitations of this analogy. Some of these are particularly interesting in the light of Suits’ conceptual distinctions. In the second part, I reconstruct and comment on the Pérez Triviño’s characterisation of sport. This characteristic is based on an essentialist structure that might be called the Suits-Parry model of the definition of sport. In the third part, I propose an interpretation of Suits’ formalism, that does not necessarily conflict with other theories of sport -conventionalism and interpretivism. I also reconstruct Suits’ position on adjudication in sport and compare it with the Pérez-Triviño position. It turns out that Suits’ formalism is not one of the two extremes between
which the Hartian conception of sport is to be located. In the concluding remarks, I suggest that because of the indicated links with Suits’ philosophy, there are also some important neo-Suitsian elements in Perez Trivino’s Hartian conception of sport.