Abstract:
The relationship between sport and the body constitutes a core research theme within the philosophy of sport, and it has assumed increasingly fundamental importance alongside transformations in technological practices and theoretical advances. Technology continuously alters bodily modes of participation in sport and reconstructs theoretical understandings of sport’s ontological architecture. These shifts converge into a pivotal philosophical question:
if bodily functions are progressively replaced by technology, why does the body remain indispensable to sport? This inquiry raises ontological concerns regarding how the body carries experiences, executes behaviors, renders judgments, and accommodates theories in sporting practice. As technological evolution proceeds from embodiment to disembodiment and further toward disintellectualization, the evolving interplay between sport and the body can no longer be simplified as a trade-off between bodily functions and technological intervention. Instead, constant reconfiguration occurs across bodily experiences, motor techniques, regulatory frameworks, data systems and algorithmic decision-making. This reconfiguration disrupts the coherent sequential chain that underpins the ontological structure of sporting practice. Earlier scholarship in the philosophy of sport either subsumes the body under the rational subject or defines the body solely from the perspectives of social construction, cultural representation and instrumental utility. Such approaches are incapable of fully addressing the profound shocks wrought by artificial intelligence on experience generation, behavioral enactment, judgment attribution and liability ascription in sport. To revisit foundational theories and pioneer new perspectives, this study reinterprets the sport–body relationship on four interconnected layers: experience, behavior, judgment and theory. In sporting experience, the body presents itself through the mutual generation of being and non-being; in sporting conduct, the body takes shape amid constant flowing and transience; in sporting judgment, the body is activated by guiding momentum in accordance with prevailing conditions; in sporting theorization, the body is reconstructed through implicit meanings beyond literal expressions. Accordingly, the philosophy of sport in the technological age ought to center the body as its theoretical anchor. It needs to reestablish the intrinsic connections between the sporting world and the everyday lifeworld, ontology and epistemology, ethical accountability and aesthetic formation. In doing so, this philosophical framework delivers solid theoretical justification for explaining how sport sustains concrete human existence amid the intelligent technological revolution.