In 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts at a YMCA school a young physical education teacher named James Naismith found himself frustrated during the winter months because there was no game to play with his students indoors. He spent a lot of time speculating about how to overcome this deficiency but all he could come up with was various forms of dodgeball and touch football in the gymnasium. However, above the gym floor there was a running track and he began to wonder if somehow he could devise a game that incorporated the vertical dimension as well as the horizontal one.
Naismith figured that if he could place the respective goals above the floor it would add a whole new dimension to the students’ games. He borrowed two peach baskets from the janitor and hung them from the edge of the running track, one at each end of the gym. As it happened, the running track was placed exactly ten feet above the playing floor. With an old soccer ball to throw into the baskets Naismith had the makings of a brand-new game. Next, he had to devise various rules that would govern the way the game would be played.
It was not long before he realized that the baskets had to have their bottoms cut out so the ball could be retrieved easily after a goal was scored. Then he made rules about how the ball could be passed and how defenders could not foul the players with the ball. Fouling had to be defined differently from the way it was in football. Before long Naismith had in fact invented a brand-new game which was destined to sweep through the entire world. In fact, by the 1930’s nearly every high school and college in the country had built basketball courts and fielded a team. At first there were strict rules about dribbling, passing, and guarding, but soon these were revised in order to speed up the game and make it safer.
Within a decade Naismith became the first basketball coach of all time and shortly thereafter he became the Athletic Director and Basketball Coach at Kansas University. Soon the game was being played by school boys and college young men all over the country. By 1897 there were hundreds of teams all over the country and soon there were National and State championships every year. It wasn’t long before the Harlem Globetrotters began to tour the world with their crazy but highly effective antics. Today, of course, the game of basketball is a world-wide universal phenomenon.
I myself began to play basketball when I was about ten years old and I did not stop until I was 80 years old. I played on a college team and have played on various faculty teams throughout my teaching career. I’ve had the privilege of seeing many great games all around the country, including a couple of college championships and many, many professional games. In fact, I had a friend who coached in the NBA and I was able to see many of his teams’ games. In addition, I have initiated several basketball camps, one even in my wife’s home country of Finland.
I remember celebrating the one-hundred-year anniversary of basketball’s invention in 1991. It is hard to believe that I have lived through almost all of basketball’s history. With all its changes, in rules and types of players, basketball remains an amazing phenomenon. One can play it by oneself or with others, and it is always open to new ideas and people. A real game for everyone.

David Hume is famous for his skeptical critique of any and all claims to our having knowledge of the world because he claimed that we can have no real knowledge of the world outside of our own minds since all our “knowledge” might simply be the creation of the mind itself. How can we know that there is a real world “out there” since we cannot get out there to see it for ourselves? We are trapped, Hume claimed, in the “ego-centric predicament” of not being able to know that what we experience is not simply a creation of our own minds.
Immanuel Kant claimed to have been shaken out of his rationalistic “dogmatic slumber” by Hume’s critique of the possibility of any real knowledge at all. He set about to create an epistemological model which would guarantee that we do in fact have knowledge of the world outside of our minds. He argued that while it is the case that our minds provide the “structure” of our knowledge by means of what he called the “categories of the understanding”, such as space, time, and causation, the actual “content“ of our knowledge, involving sensations of color, weight, and size, for instance, arranged in space, time and causality, are the direct result of sensory impressions.
This way of thinking about the formation of our knowledge, Kant argued, admits that while we cannot get “outside” of or beyond our minds to experience the world “as it is” in and of itself, we can and do in fact know the world as filtered by the structure of our minds. This way of looking at the problem Kant argued allows for both Hume’s skepticism on the one hand and as much real knowledge of the world as we need to do science and have everyday experience. Kant did deny that we can have any knowledge of the real world “as it is in and of itself”, but he argued we have all we need to carry on scientific investigations.
Thus Kant claimed to have eliminated Hume’s skepticism by an understanding of the relation between the mind and reality which allowed for Hume’s skepticism and for real knowledge at one and the same time. This, of course, left us without any knowledge of how the world “really is” apart from the structure of our minds, but Kant did not think this was a real problem. We have the only kind of knowledge we need to live and gain scientific knowledge without having to worry about the question whether or not reality “really” is as we see it. Thus Kant solved Hume’s skept as dicism by redefining what we mean by knowledge.
Kant went on to argue in his later books that the kind of knowledge we seek can only be approached through a study of “practical reason”, or morality, as distinguished from the “pure reason”, of science. The latter, which we have discussed above, he termed discussed in his Critique of Pure Reason, while the former he took up in his Critique of Practical Reason. In the former he had pretty much eliminated the possibility of any knowledge about both the “real world” outside of our minds and anything “beyond”, such as God and anything eternal. In the latter, however, he reasoned “backwards” from our everyday moral experience to the possibility of God without making any reference to the “categories of the understanding”.
Thus, as he put it in one place, Kant had “done away with knowledge of reality in order to make room for faith”. Thus in his own mind not only had he solved Hume’s skeptical problems , but he had opened the way for speculative reasoning, based strictly on moral experience, about that aspect of human experience that really matters most. Kant really was the “watershed” between modern philosophy and contemporary thought. As some scholars have put it, Kant was the “continental divide” between the old thought world and the