The Meaning of the Body:The Epistemological Value of Sports from the Perspective of Phenomenology

Body-mind dualism used to be a focus on thinking over action, including sports, was regarded as having no epistemological value in nature. The “return to the thing itself” of phenomenology prompts a renewed focus on the first-person,original physical experience in body movement, which constitutes the most basic material of mind and cognition. Embodied cognition asserts that cognition is an embodied action, and the sensory-motor patterns of the body shapes people's thinking style. In this view, sports as a particular form of physical activity has important epistemological implications as it inevitably affect people's way of perceive the world.