It’s how you live your life. “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 […]
It’s how you live your life.
“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.”
Discussion welcome, including the recommendation of writings, videos, interviews, etc., on philosophy of basketball.
“For certain majors and certain disciplines, when you leave that discipline, you’re done. Philosophy isn’t like that. You take it with you.”
Trey agreed that it wasn’t about grades anymore. Now it was about thinking and learning together.
Kaufman-Renn recalls asking Cover:
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.Cover liked the analogy and Kaufman-Renn enrolled in his course on Early Modern 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.”
That’s Trey Kaufman-Renn, philosophy major and star basketball player at Purdue University, reflecting on his education and the value of philosophy.
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?
Asked by Cover if there’s a relationship between basketball and philosophy, Kaufman-Renn says:
March Madness begins later this week.
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?…
The full article is here.
Philosophy professor Jan Cover and philosophy major and basketball player Trey Kaufman-Renn of Purdue University. [photo via Purdue University]
(via Corey Maley and Alex Guerrero)
An article about their shared interests in philosophy and basketball quotes Cover:
They’ve gone on to study meta-metaphysics, metaphysics, and ethics.
