Fighting and Victory as Basic Terms in Agonistics and Praxeology and the Art of War

Abstract

Questions of how to overcome problems are probably the basic questions of fighters. Answers to them, from a historical perspective, the principles of martial art have been provided. These provisions, often mutually exclusive, raise questions related to the scientific approach to this issue. The scientific specialty dealing with the issue of combat is agonistics. This article is devoted to the presentation of the main concepts of agonistics and the general combat theory. In the first section, the author searches for an answer to the question whether an agonist meets the basic criteria of a scientific theory. The second section is devoted to the presentation of its main category, which is  the concept of struggle. The last chapter refers to the purposeful cause of this theory represented by the concept of victory. This article confronts praxeological and sociological content with concepts characteristic of martial arts, and its main idea is to harmonize divergent insights on the phenomenon of struggle and victory, the main categories of agonistics. The research used theoretical (analysis, synthesis, comparison, inference and generalization) and empirical methods have been used. Additionally, a diagnostic survey has included the expert interview technique. The research results are presented in individual subsections of the article.