The History Book Club discussion

The focus of this thread is on the sport of Rugby. This is a request made by abclaret.

An upcoming book:
Release date: August 28, 2015

After the Final Whistle: The First Rugby World Cup and the First World War

by Stephen Cooper (no photo)

Synopsis:

As Britain's Empire went to war in August 1914, rugby players were the first to volunteer. They led from the front and paid a disproportionate price. In 1919, a grateful Mother Country hosted a rugby tournament: sevens teams at eight venues, playing 17 matches to declare a first 'world champion'. There had never been an international team tournament like it. For the first time teams from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Britain and France were assembled in one place. Rugby held the first ever 'World Cup'. It was a moment of triumph, a celebration of military victory, of Commonwealth and Allied unity, and of rugby values, moral and physical.

In 2015 the tournament returns to England as the world remembers the Centenary of the Great War. Values of teamwork, respect, discipline were forged and tested in war - and enjoyment of rugby helped men through it. This is the story of rugby's journey through the First World War to its first World Cup, and how those values endure today.

Thank you Jerome - also thank you Jill for all of your wonderful posts in this folder's threads.

Another:
Release date: September 1, 2015

The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby

by Tony Collins (no photo)

Synopsis:

Rugby has always been a sport with as much drama off the field as on it. For every thrilling last-minute Jonny Wilkinson drop-goal to win the World Cup or Jonah Lomu rampage down the touchline for a try there has been a split, a feud, or a controversy.

The Oval World is the first full-length history of rugby on a world scale--from its origins in the village-based football games of medieval times to the globalized sport of the twenty-first century, now played over a hundred countries. It tells the story of how a game played in an obscure English public school became the winter sport of the British Empire, spreading to France, Argentina, Japan, and the rest of the world, and commanding a global television audience of over four billion for the last World Cup final. It also explores how American football--and other games, such as Australian, Canadian, and Gaelic football--emerged from their English cousin.

Featuring the great moments in the game's history and its legendary names--David Duckham, Serge Blanco, Billy Boston, and David Campese, alongside Rupert Brooke, King George V, Boris Karloff, Charles de Gaulle, and Nelson Mandela--The Oval World investigates just what it is about rugby that enables it to thrive in countries with very different traditions and cultures. This is the definitive world history of a truly global rugby.

Thank you Jerome

Interview with David Papineau who is a Philosophy professor and sports enthusiast with Five Books:

"How did you get interested in philosophy and sport? It’s not a mainstream topic in philosophy, and you’re better known as a philosopher of mind and of science.

I’m glad you asked about philosophy and sport, rather than philosophy of sport, because even though I’ve started working in this area quite a lot, I don’t really think of myself as a philosopher of sport. I got interested in this by accident.

I’ve been a philosopher all my working life, and I’ve also always been a terribly keen amateur sportsman. Since I left school I’ve played, in competitive organised contexts—cricket, rugby, soccer, field hockey, tennis, golf, sailing and squash—without very much success in any of them.

But it’s occupied a great deal of my life, not to mention watching on television an awful lot. Somehow I’d never put the two things together.

But then I was asked to give a talk in a series running up to the Olympics, ‘Philosophy of Sport’, organised by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and I started thinking about the nature and value of sport. I wasn’t getting anywhere, and then I thought, no, I’m just going to write about something that interests me: I don’t care if it’s really philosophy of sport.

I wrote about fast sporting skills and concentration, especially in the context of cricket, and I had great fun. I told lots of sporting anecdotes, but I actually developed a philosophical thesis that I hadn’t had before.

And then I realised that there were quite a few philosophical topics that were illuminated by sporting contexts, that somehow sport highlighted philosophical issues in a way that they weren’t always highlighted in everyday life.

So I’ve been working in this area a lot recently, and I’ve come up with many ideas of that kind. My interest is in sport being used to illustrate philosophical issues of a general kind, and also in philosophical ideas being used to highlight certain features of sport that people mightn’t have thought about.

Could you give an example of the kind of philosophical problem that’s illuminated by something that occurs in sport?

Let me just take something that won’t come up in any of the books we are going to discuss, which is ideas of altruism and team reasoning, the tendency of humans to co-operate.

This is something that’s of great interest to philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and economists. They develop all kinds of models, but you can see the issues that they’re talking about very graphically illustrated in any number of sports.

One that grabbed my attention was road cycle-racing, where you will see individuals from different teams, with no common interest, co-operating for nine-tenths of the race, going out in front, taking turns being in front.

Why are they helping each other? What’s going on here? If you think about it, it casts some of the philosophical and analytic issues in a very helpful light.

And you wrote about that on a weblog. Why did you choose that way of communicating your ideas?

I didn’t really think of this as a way of communicating ideas I already had. It was just that I discovered all these really interesting topics. I’m a philosopher, I’ve got a philosophical turn of mind, and I spend a lot of time playing and watching games.

So I’m naturally inclined to start thinking in philosophical ways about this area that many other people are interested in, and probably haven’t thought about from quite that perspective.

So I thought I had something interesting to say, and I just found myself putting out these ideas. I didn’t write only about altruism and co-operation, but also about fast-sporting skills, fandom, identity, nationality, heredity, the economics of sport and so on. Why a weblog? I didn’t want to be particularly academic.

I don’t want to say that I didn’t want to be careful and precise—I did want to be careful and precise—but I found it quite liberating to be writing outside an academic context. I found I could explore and put forward ideas without the constraints of all the academic paraphernalia.

That was fun, and I thought it was suited to this topic. I wanted to reach an audience who would probably be impatient with careful philosophical argument going on, paragraph after paragraph. I wanted to get the argument across but illustrate it with sporting stories, sporting references, and this made it a nice way to write.

I’m going to write a book now drawing on that material: I’m stopping the weblog so I can write the book, and I hope to do the same kind of thing with the book."

More:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/davi...

Source: FiveBooks

The Grasshopper

by Bernard Suits (no photo)

Synopsis:

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all.

"Nonsense," says the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles."

The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia.

Originally published in 1978, The Grasshopper is now re-issued with a new introduction by Thomas Hurka and with additional material (much of it previously unpublished) by the author, in which he expands on the ideas put forward in The Grasshopper and answers some questions that have been raised by critics.

Review:

Here is an excerpt from an interview on FiveBooks which discussed this book - Nigel Warburton interviews Philosophy professor and sports enthusiast - David Papineau.

"Now, let’s go to the first of your book choices, Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper which, for a long time, was a very-little-known classic, and now it’s probably just a little-known classic.

My first choice is a book about the nature and value of sport. I wanted to look at this via Suits because his is probably the best-known full-length work in this area. It’s a wonderfully engaging, eccentric, ingenious book, which has a terrific idea in it, but I think it’s completely wrongheaded about the nature and value of sport.

So I’ll start by explaining the good idea, and then explain why I think it’s not as helpful for understanding sport as many of its enthusiasts suggest.

The book is a quasi-Socratic dialogue with the grasshopper as the main character, and the grasshopper’s idea is that the highest virtue is playing, that he is going to spend all his time playing, doesn’t care if he dies, and the overall argument of the book is that in utopia, where humans have all their material needs satisfied at the push of a button, what we would do would be play games, and therefore playing games is the ideal of human activity.

Freed from all the necessities of having to do things we don’t want to do in order to get the material means of life, we’d do nothing but play games. That’s the main thesis."

More:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/davi...

Source: FiveBooks