The Eagles released their season kickoff video. It is perfect.
The video is an invitation not just to watch, but to participate, to try to be part of something. To try to keep working out among ourselves, in a city where it matters, what it means to be tough.
The Eagles released the season kickoff video on Sept. 3 and it is fascinating. For a film sometimes called a hype video, this one is subdued. It is talkative. It is reflective.
And it is absolutely perfect.
The video is largely in the form of a conversation sparked by a question from Coach Nick Sirianni: What is toughness?
I can’t help but wonder if Sirianni knows that a “what-is” question is the original form of the philosophical question, the kinds of questions Socrates asked and discussed all over Athens: What is virtue? What is the good? What is beauty?
What-is questions get at what is fundamental, what is truly at stake.
They are the kinds of questions with which I begin every class as a professor at a college committed to discussion-based learning. It’s no surprise that a team with a star player who reads on the sidelines might just be a very philosophical team, too.
What unfolds in the video is precisely what a what-is question should lead to: Conversations with differing opinions, personal interpretations, and varying viewpoints on the topic of the question.
Socrates often asked people to define the very thing they claimed to know best, so a question about toughness feels especially apt for a team that has demonstrated its fortitude in a city that prides itself on grit. The players exchange opinions and offer uncensored, thoughtful, and at times emotional perspectives as they try to answer the question.
The video has music quietly playing throughout and of course there are the requisite game and locker room clips that offer evidence and support for what the players are telling us in voice-over. Every good argument should be supported by demonstration, and the clips show us toughness, but the video itself suggests that even when we recognize something and can point to it, it can be very hard to capture that thing in words.
A question about toughness feels especially apt for a team that has demonstrated its fortitude in a city that prides itself on grit.
As is also right for a philosophical conversation, there is no absolute consensus and at the end of the video the question still stands, posed as a prompt for every fan.
In this way, the whole season is introduced not in the form of an answer, something predetermined, but as a conversation.
This conversation doesn’t end in the video, it goes on through a whole season between the players, the coaches, the city, the fans. The video is an invitation not just to watch, but to participate, to try to be part of something. To try to keep working out among ourselves, in a city where it matters, what it means to be tough.
It challenges us not to use a word thoughtlessly but to consider what we mean when we say it. And the video reminds us this is a team that thinks, grows and learns together, as all good philosophers do.
Rebecca S. Goldner has a doctorate in philosophy and teaches at St. John’s College in Maryland, a discussion-based liberal arts college.