A Professor and an Athlete Talk Basketball and Philosophy
“For certain majors and certain disciplines, when you leave that discipline, you’re done. Philosophy isn’t like that. You take it with you.”
That’s Trey Kaufman-Renn, philosophy major and star basketball player at Purdue University, reflecting on his education and the value of philosophy.
All sorts of ethical questions that would come up in discussions with his mother as he was growing up, but when he got to college, he says, “I didn’t know philosophy was a thing; like a field you could study.”
After taking a “Transformative Texts” course at Purdue and deciding he was unhappy with his current major, he was put in touch with philosophy professor Jan Cover.
Kaufman-Renn recalls asking Cover:
In basketball, you have these fundamentals. Everybody wants to know how to do a three-point shot. Everybody wants to know how to do, you know, between-the-legs-spin move shot or whatever. But they don’t learn to dribble with the right hand first. So, my question that I came to you with was, what are those fundamentals of philosophy you need in order to progress in the things I want to do?
Philosophy professor Jan Cover and philosophy major and basketball player Trey Kaufman-Renn of Purdue University. [photo via Purdue University]
An article about their shared interests in philosophy and basketball quotes Cover:
“But after you survived that class, we did everything under the sun in my office,” Cover said. “I remember one Saturday you came up here, and I looked at my watch and we had been talking for five hours. What a joy that was for me that a student would come by who’s not taking a class that semester, and we’d just…talk, and think aloud.”
Trey agreed that it wasn’t about grades anymore. Now it was about thinking and learning together.
They’ve gone on to study meta-metaphysics, metaphysics, and ethics.
Asked by Cover if there’s a relationship between basketball and philosophy, Kaufman-Renn says:
There is an aspect of Philosophy in everything. It’s a critical skill set. In basketball, it’s very different than an individual sport. Like you said, you have individual goals and you have team goals, and as a basketball player, the question is, which one do you care about more? Can you sacrifice your stats or your playing time for the good of the team? Some people can, and that’s their choice. Some people can’t, and that’s their choice… Then, how are you going to cope in a locker room? How are you going to talk to and care for your teammates?…
It’s how you live your life.
The full article is here.
March Madness begins later this week.
Discussion welcome, including the recommendation of writings, videos, interviews, etc., on philosophy of basketball.
(via Corey Maley and Alex Guerrero)
When I was an undergrad at Santa Clara, I was the philosophy department assistant, and ended up the tutor for the Bronco Bench Foundation, which was the alumni group that supported the school’s athletic teams. I tutored lots of athletes, but one in particular, Al Gallagher, really took to philosophy. Al would come by my room at random times with interesting questions and we’d really get into it. He was a genuine delight to work with, I’ll never forget the experience. Al went on to play third base for the Giants, and managed a lot of various minor league teams I talked to him much later in life, and he said that the perspective he’d gained from philosophy had permeated his life.
Sometimes it really works.
That’s awesome. I played college tennis at William & Mary, and we had three philosophers on our team that year. (I was a physics major, not philosophy.) Was definitely a lot of fun.