PHIL 2240: Philosophy & Sports
3 Credit Hours
A&S Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts & Humanities, Distribution-Social Sciences
Introduces students to philosophical issues surrounding sport. Topics may include: paying college athletes, sex testing in sports, the use of performance enhancing drugs, sports and gambling, the nature and value of sports and sportsmanship, gender equity and sports, the ethics of strategic fouling, sports fandom, the coach-athlete relationship, athletes as role models and the risk of extreme bodily harm.
Learning Objectives
- Improve your ability to clearly identify arguments and their structure;
- Improve the quality and clarity of your writing;
- Introduce you to the basic tools of philosophy.
In this course, you will
Explore how your participation in sports or fandom has helped shape your personal and social identities;
Interview family or close friends about how they have been influenced by sport;
Enrich your understanding of the nature of sport and the relationship between sport and society.
Ted Shear
I began my time at CU Boulder in January 2020 as a Lecturer and was subsequently hired as an Assistant Teaching Professor in Fall 2022. I received my BA (Hons.) with majors in Philosophy and Linguistics from the University of British Columbia and completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. I also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the School of Economics at the University of Queensland.
My research interests are broad. I spend a lot of time thinking about the mental processes associated with epistemic change. These include things like reasoning, considering and evaluating evidence, imagining and the varieties of updates to our judgments that they involve. While my interests are in the normative constraints on these processes, I see descriptive questions about how real (viz. non-ideal) agents engage in these processes as relevant to the normative questions. As such, my work has cross-disciplinary connections with economics, computer science and the behavioral sciences. My work often involves the use of logico-mathematical tools, however, as a methodological pluralist I value the use of all available tools in inquiry. I am also a committed teacher interested in helping my students grow and appreciate the complexity of new ideas.
Before my career as a philosopher, however, I was a performance athlete. More specifically, I was a member of the U.S. National Badminton Team and, at my peak, was ranked 3rd nationally in Men's Singles. Although I retired from the sport when I started my PhD in 2010, I remain an athlete. Currently, my athletic interests largely revolve around rock climbing and skateboarding. Needless to say, both philosophy and sport have been instrumental to my personal and intellectual development. As such, I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to share these passions with you and, hopefully, enrich your understanding of sports!