Daniel Reid Smyth

Hermann Schmitz offers one of the most extensive descriptions available of embodied space, characterizing it as pre-sensorial, indivisible, and surfaceless yet capable of disclosing absolute locations. Schmitz nevertheless anchors the felt body’s absolute location in temporal irruption rather than in the ability for lived space to ground itself in rest. This article argues that embodied space tacitly involves trans-perceptual conditions of stability and tolerability that Schmitz’s account opens up but does not fully develop. I introduce the concept of existential surface to name this dimension, with the ground underfoot as its paradigmatic case. Acute fatigue serves as the principal test case: it discloses both the felt body’s dependence on a body-bearing world and an autochthonous self-grounding limit of the felt body. I analyze the latter in terms of a recessive boundary that resists further movement and reorganizes practical initiative around what I call being-toward-rest.

This review examines how the Phenomenology of Broken Habits (Routledge, 2025) organizes its diverse contributions around a central thesis — that habits become especially knowable through their breakdown. This review argues that many of the volume’s most valuable chapters in fact elide this frame, analyzing instead habits in their formation, rigidification, transformation, and unbreakability. The result is characterized here as unintended yet productive, as the volume collectively testifies to the epistemic relevance of habit well beyond breakdown. This emerges from a detailed engagement with the individual contributions of Wehrle, Čapek, Hewig, Crossley, Munch-Jurisic, Brincker, and Cavallaro. The review concludes by endorsing how such internal tensions within the volume promote a reading experience that is itself a transformative philosophical habit: namely of appreciating conceptual overdetermination without collapsing into reductive systematicity.

Athletes often report that training and competition, especially under acute fatigue, cease to feel like play and begin to resemble work. Yet discussions in the philosophy of sport have rarely examined how fatigue transforms gameplay from the player’s own perspective. This paper offers a phenomenological account of fatigue’s normative significance for play. Drawing on Bernard Suits and C. Thi Nguyen, the author argues that gameplay depends on what he calls a readiness-to-play: a horizon of immediate possibilities that organizes autotelic action. Acute fatigue, he argues, progressively contracts this horizon through the negative actuality of non-actuality and the constrained anticipation of the dichotomous alternatives of continuing or stopping. Ultimately, fatigue reveals how gameplay may persist formally even as the experiential conditions of play recede.