Adam Berg

Amid concerns over corruption, human rights violations, authoritarianism, propaganda and overall geopolitical uncertainty, Adam Berg and David Kilpatrick offer contrasting arguments over whether national football associations should choose to boycott the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup Finals, co-hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States of America. Each debater provides three points in support of their respective position, and each provides counterpoints in response. Berg argues for a collective boycott. He focuses on the harms of inauthentic global idealism, corruption within FIFA, and the likelihood that authoritarian actors will use the 2026 World Cup as a propaganda vehicle. Kilpatrick argues against a boycott and emphasizes obligations to maintain associations and partnerships created through the tournament, the unintended drawbacks of a (even well-intentioned) boycott, and the World Cup’s value as a genuine unifying event. The point-counterpoint exercise aims to elucidate competing views and thus enable insight that football practitioners and policymakers can use for ethical decision-making.

Aesthetics in Present Future: The Arts and the Technological Horizon is a collection of essays by scholars and a few artists who focus on the issue of how arts either change when conveyed by new media (such as the web, 3D printers, and videos) or are simply diffused by them. The contributors’ analyses describe how both virtual production and virtual communication change our attitudes toward what we call the arts. The scope of the topics ranges from photography to cinema and painting, from theater to avant-garde art and Net art, and from construction of robots to simulation of brain functions. The result is an astonishing range of new possibilities and risks for the arts, and new perspectives regarding our knowledge of the world.

This bilingual (English/Italian) publication, whose five authors are from Greece, Italy, and the US, invokes as its first inspiration the myth of Hephaestus who embodied a twofold entity: both handicapped and technically capable. The myth of Hephaestus has been passed across the centuries as an ancient metaphor signifying the idea of becoming-world, in which any distinction between the natural and the artificial, or the organic and the technical is blurred. Human beings, by virtue of their very weakness or limits, have enhanced their technological powers to the point of transcending their own given nature. At present, a variety of critical discourses in disciplines such as philosophy, history, aesthetics, and cognitive sciences pay attention to our becoming hybrids (organic and mechanical beings) - unleashing a space for research that probes the concept of transcendence. Each of the contributions in this book addresses - through its peculiar perspective, method and experimental style - a new way to approach the role of transcendence. In the occidental history of ideas, the notion of transcendence has received at least three canonical articulations that are challenged by this book. The religious one (Judeo-Christian traditions); the philosophical one (Platonic-intellectual universality of ideas); and the scientific one (the objective and technological turn of knowledge). Nonetheless, it is with the rise of cybernetics, with its digital and virtual modalities of systems, networks, and knowledge, that our human environment emerges as a source of knowledge in itself. Not simply as an object but rather as an agent molded and molding thinking and behavior. It is through this "immersive" view of nature, knowledge, and technique, that the notion of transcendence is approached as mutually transitive to changes. The transcendence of the actual and the virtual into a "third" element is to be construed and analyzed through conceptual schemes that rely on a post-binary or non-binary understanding of coincidences, triangulations, hybrids, or post-human combinatorics. What is explored here is how transcendence is ejected from the strictly theological, philosophical, or scientific grounding and emerges as a germinating point of becoming (something else)

Questions and analyses centered on race have become more prominent in philosophy. By employing a ‘critical philosophy of race’, thinkers become enabled to address how race and racism continue to operate in subtle and unintended ways, including within concepts, theories, principles, practices, and methodologies otherwise purported to be race-neutral. Yet, North American sports philosophy provides few examples of work that grapples with race, racism, or theories of race. In this essay, I ask why and conclude that the shortage of discussions that include explicit references to race or ethnicity in North American sport philosophy is due to the dominance and normalization of white epistemologies – white ways of experiencing, seeing, and knowing the world.

This paper centers two complementary theoretical approaches to advance the debate about transgender women’s inclusion in elite women’s sports – namely, non-ideal theory and cultural studies. In doing so, the paper highlights divisions between ideal theory and non-ideal theory, normative internalism in sports and normative externalism in sports, and essentialist views of sports compared to non-essentialist views of sports. The paper’s main agenda is to show the value of applying non-ideal theory, externalism, and non-essentialism to the discourse over transgender inclusion.