Idea for a Philosophy Seminar
I think it would be possible to cover a large swath of the topics that interest me in philosophy by centering a seminar around the following question: what does it mean to say that requiring players to dribble the ball makes basketball a better game than it would be if they were not required to dribble it?
posted by Charles P. Everitt at 2:06 PM
4 Comments:
Are you familiar with netball? Women play it in Britain and other commonwealth countries. It is like basketball in many respects, but involves no dribbling, just passing.
Yeah, I know about it. They played it at my middle school. It introduces a different difficulty than dribbling in order to make the game more interesting: you're only allowed to take one step with the ball.
Ben doesn't think think this question could sustain a seminar, but I think your comment shows some of the many issues that would come up and which people would presumably disagree about. Some questions would be whether basketball is a better or worse game than netball, how we would tell or whether they can even be compared at all, and what making either of them better or worse would look like or whether that's so much as possible. (After all, if you think different games can't be compared, then you presumably think basketball and basketball-minus-dribbling can't be compared.)
More generally: I think the basketball question introduces in the simplest possible terms both the possibility of first-order normative debate about which sports are better and why, as well as second-order debate about what we're debating about at the first-order level. But it does this in a way that maximally free from complications. Also, it's with regard to something that's undeniably a human construct.
I could talk about this for a really, really long time. But I think others might get tired quickly. One thing that's become apparent to me lately is that such conversations hold my interest for a much longer time than they do for others. Maybe I could write a dialogue about the basketball question. (Is that what motivated Plato to write the dialogues: no one could put up with talking with him about the topics he wanted to talk about?)
You should have tracked down the dude who you overheard in line for the movie and given him a sympathetic pat on the back.
Another possible item for the basketball syllabus: that Dave Hickey paper on how the NBA is great because it changes the rules in response to improving player ability for aesthetic reasons.
And I have a vague memory of Parag publishing some article in a tennis magazine arguing that men's tennis is more interesting than women's tennis.
I almost did that at the time, and I regret not having done it. At one point, after we were seated in the theater, he went off to do something and when he didn't come back for quite some time Ben and I seriously thought he had just left her there, sitting alone in the theater. While he was gone I wanted to go find him and tell him I admired his effort.
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