The importance of imagination in aesthetic experience: Polanyian thoughts on Elcombe

In his recent work, Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor, Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the cornerstone of aesthetic theory. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend the usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyis distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art.