PRELUDE FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF GAMES: BERNARD SUITS’S DEFINITION

Abstract

It is assumed that the American philosopher Bernard Suits is central to the philosophy of sport, especially in the international literature. His extensive work offers an original and unexplored theory of game in Brazilian Physical Education. Suits distinguishes the phenomenon of game from the experience of playing, in addition to proposing an analytical definition of game that is presented in the ways of a prelude to his theory. It is argued that, from the point of view of an analytical philosophy, one advances into the metaphysics of games, or an effective philosophy of the game, when Suits’s definition of game-playing is mobilized. One also recognizes different analytical subsidies from the intentionally vague definition of game families of Wittgensteinian heritage, influential in Brazilian conceptions. It is believed that such resources provide new material for game studies in Brazilian sport philosophy and Physical Education, in the domains of metaphysics, logic, epistemology and axiology.