Sport as bodily semiosis: physicality, freedom, and mediation

This article develops a Peirce-oriented philosophical account of sport as bodily semiosis. Its central claim is twofold. First, sporting meaning is not externally attached to bodily performance by rules, institutions, or spectators alone: it arises through embodied action itself. Second, the value of physicality in sport is not exhausted by its instrumental role in producing performance outcomes, but includes a more basic disclosure of bodily freedom. On this basis, the author argues that technologically mediated practices such as e-sport should not be treated as conceptually external to the philosophy of sport, nor as straightforwardly disembodied phenomena. They should instead be understood as historically transformed configurations of embodied agency in which bodily semiosis becomes technologically layered. The article thus offers a unified framework for thinking body, meaning, action, and mediation together in the philosophy of sport.