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sportów konnych& , op. cit., s. 106. Zob. też: B. Królikowski, Ułańskie lato, Lublin 2005.
48
M. Dupont, Generał Lasalle. Przełożył i wstępem opatrzył B. Wieniawa-Długoszowski, Warszawa
1931, s. X.
Ryszard Wasztyl
40
niawa-Długoszowski mawiał, iż na świecie istnieją tylko dwa zawody godne
wyzwolonego i niepodległego mężczyzny, a mianowicie: zawód poety i ka-
walerzysty 49. Obydwa łączyła fantazja, a tej nigdy Polakowi dosiadającemu
konia nie brakowało, także w zakresie interesujących nas wyścigów!
SUMMARY
ON TARNOPOL LWÓW BRIDLE TRAIL
IN POLAND S EASTERN MARCHES
It has been commonly believed that the first English-style horse racing
in Poland was organised in Poznań in the summer of 1839. Yet the research of
sources conducted by the author proved that such a race was held in Tarnopol
(today s Ternopil) in the Province of Galicia already on 26th July 1836.
Key words: equestrian history, horse riding history, horse racing in Galicia.
49
M. Dupont, Generał Lasalle, op. cit., s. V. Zob. też: J. M. Majchrowski, Ulubieniec Cezara.
Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski. Zarys biografii, Wrocław i in. 1990. W kwietniu 1923 roku w Pol-
sce formacje jazdy przemianowano na kawalerię. O niej zob.: B. Królikowski, Ułańska jesień, Lublin
2002.
TERAyNIEJSZOZ
Każdy rodzaj sportu niesie z sobą bogaty skarbiec war-
tości, które zawsze trzeba sobie uświadamiać, aby móc je
urzeczywistnić. wiczenie uwagi, wychowywanie woli, wy-
trwałości, odpowiedzialności, znoszenie trudu i niewygód,
duch wyrzeczenia i solidarności, wierność obowiązkom to
wszystko należy do cnót sportowca. Zachęcam was..., abyście
żyli zgodnie z wymaganiami tych wartości, abyście w życiu
zawsze byli ludzmi prawymi, uczciwymi i zrównoważonymi;
ludzmi, którzy budzą zaufanie i nadzieję.
Jan Paweł II, Z wystąpienia na spotkaniu ze sportowcami polskimi
w ElblÄ…gu w czerwcu 1999 r.
NR 8 2008
STUDIA HUMANISTYCZNE
AKADEMIA WYCHOWANIA FIZYCZNEGO W KRAKOWIE
Scott Kretchmar
Penn State University
GAMES CAME FROM NOWHERE
AND SOMEWHERE ... AT THE SAME TIME
What follows is a very brief sketch of an idea that I ve had for some time.
It is not very well footnoted or documented, and it is not entirely original
with me. It has its roots in American pragmatism and Continental existential
phenomenology. Because of this, it is suspicious of dualisms of all sorts. It ap-
preciates ambiguity and other forms of messiness. It is cross-disciplinary and
depends on insights gained from the sciences, social sciences and humanities.
But most importantly for us, it provides an alternate method for understand-
ing sport, play, games, and human movement in short, any and all of our
favorite objects of inquiry.
The title of this essay comes with apologies to Thomas Nagel (1986) and
the epistemological perspective that he endorses the view from nowhere.
Nagel suggests that the move from the subjective to the objective is crucial for
those who want to know in any important sense, and it is this objective pole
that pulls us away from the parochial and accidental and toward the universal
and essential that is, toward the truth.
I am not convinced that this is the case. This is not because there is any-
thing wrong with abstract descriptors, clean distinctions, the search for a priori
truths, or objectivity. It is just that this brand of philosophy, on my view, is
neither sufficient nor inherently privileged when it comes to searching for the
way things are. My doubts emerge more from my own experiences in studying
games than they do from any deep metaphysical insights or the adoption of
any one philosophic system over another. I simply have not found conceptual-
izing the epistemological problem as one of subjective-objective tension (with
the advantage going to the objective pole) to be very helpful.
What is my alternative? I believe that the view from nowhere and some-
where are equally important. I also think that most views are a blend of the
two. That is, even when occupying the most extreme, mathematically-tending
nowhere vantage points, one can always detect a little somewhere. And
likewise for the opposite case. Even in the most immediate and local percep-
Scott Kretchmar
44
tions, a bit of generality lurks in the background. In other words, the two can
never be separated, even though one can be emphasized over the other.
Moreover, the poles are complementary, not contradictory (Kelso and
Engstrom, 2006). Somewhere is not opposed to, or in some kind of tension
with, nowhere. As odd as it sounds, they fit together like hand and glove.
Nowhere likes somewhere and visa versa. Therefore, our understanding
of games should include a blend of insights in which the idiosyncratic and
accidental is informed by the essential, and the essential is affected by every-
thing from cell biology to evolutionary history. This is not a matter of pasting
together contraries after the fact. It is a project that sees ambiguity in every
perspective we philosophers can adopt. And it is precisely this acknowledge-
ment of ambiguity that gets us closer to the truth. I hope to make this clearer
as I proceed to recount a portion of my journey in understanding games.
Games from Nowhere
Barely out of graduate school, I started my philosophic travels with the
assistance of Bernard Suits. I read some of his articles on the nature of games
and then, a few years later, delighted in his magnum opus The Grasshopper:
Games, Life and Utopia . Suits, as most of you know, was interested in iden-
tifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for games that is, the defining
features for all game activities. In a sense, Suits was interested in describing
games from nowhere inasmuch as his insights were to be cross-cultural,
a-historical, blind to gender, and so on. In other words, he tried to identify the
factors that make games both intelligible and distinctive the kind of project
that Husserl would have endorsed and Wittgenstein would have rejected.
In many ways, it would appear that Suits succeeded. His definition has
received generally good reviews and is often cited when philosophers of sport
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