Matthew Crippen

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that design embodies implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life.

This article examines how Modern theories of mind remain even in some materialistic and hence ontologically anti-dualistic views; and shows how Dewey's pragmatism, anticipating Merleau-Ponty, 4E cognitive scientists and especially enactivism, repudiates these theories. Throughout I place Dewey’s thought in the context of scientific inquiry, both recent and historical and including the cognitive as well as traditional sciences; and I show how he incorporated sciences of his day into his thought, while also anticipating enactive cognitive science. While emphasizing Dewey’s continued relevance, my main goal is to show how his scientifically informed account of perception and cognition combats skepticism propagated by certain scientific visions, exacerbated by commonplace notions about mind, that jointly suggest that human beings lack genuine access to reality.

Few address the extent to which William James regards the neo-Lamarckian account of “direct adaptation” as a biological extension of British empiricism. Consequently few recognize the instrumental role that the Darwinian idea of “indirect adaptation” plays in his lifelong efforts to undermine the empiricist view that sense experience molds the mind. This article examines how James uses Darwinian thinking, first, to argue that mental content can arise independently of sense experience; and, second, to show that empiricists advance a hopelessly skeptical position when they insist that beliefs are legitimate only insofar as they directly correspond to the observable world. Using his attacks on materialism and his defense of spiritualism as examples, I particularly consider how Darwinian thinking enables him to keep his empiricist commitments while simultaneously developing a pragmatic alternative to empiricistic skepticism. I conclude by comparing his theory of beliefs to the remarkably similar theory of “memes” that Richard Dawkins uses to attack spiritualistic belief—an attack that James anticipates and counters with his pragmatic alternative.

If asked about the Darwinian influence on William James, some might mention his pragmatic position that ideas are “mental modes of adaptation,” and that our stock of ideas evolves to meet our changing needs. However, while this is not obviously wrong, it fails to capture what James deems most important about Darwinian theory: the notion that there are independent cycles of causation in nature. Versions of this idea undergird everything from his campaign against empiricist psychologies to his theories of mind and knowledge to his pluralistic worldview; and all of this together undergirds his attempts to challenge determinism and defend freewill. I begin this paper by arguing that James uses Darwinian thinking to bridge empiricism and rationalism, and that this merger undermines environmental determinism. I then discuss how Darwinism informs his concept of pluralism; how his concept challenges visions of a causally welded “block universe”; and how it also casts doubt on the project of reducing all reality to physical reality, and therewith the wisdom of dismissing consciousness as an inert by-product of physiology. I conclude by considering how Darwinism helps him justify the pragmatic grounds upon which he defends freewill.

Whereas recent commentators have suggested that consumer demand, typecasting and marketing lead performers to maintain continuities across films, I argue that cinema has historically made it difficult to subtract performers from roles, leading to relatively constant comportment, and that casting, marketing and audience preference are not only causes but also effects of this. I do so using thought experiments and empirical experiments, for example, by pondering why people say they see Jesus in paintings of him and rarely mention models, but stress that they see actors when encountering photographic stills of performers portraying him. Arguably, this relates to what photographs have historically come to mean, and these meanings would make it difficult for audiences to subtract and not see the actor. Based on such thinking, along with what filmmakers have said and done, and adding to classic accounts of Cavell, Santayana and others, I build the case that cinematic media invite performers to play themselves.

In this article, I discuss prospects for democracy in the Middle East. I argue, first, that some democratic experiments—for instance, Egypt under Mohammed Morsi—are not in keeping with etymological and historical meanings of democracy; and second, that efforts to promote democracy, especially as exemplified in U.N. documents emphasizing universal rights grounded in Western traditions, are possibly totalitarian and also colonialist and hence counter to democratic ideals insofar as they impart one set of values as the only morally acceptable ones. A respectful dialogue in which people from both regions strive to understand conditions giving rise to certain social practices would be more productive than morally superior attitudes, and help all to see areas where their respective cultures could be improved. I conclude by discussing concepts of democratic and pragmatic faith articulated by John Dewey and William James, arguing that democracy will continue to flounder in the Middle East so long as the basic trust implied in these concepts is lacking; and how Westerners might consider this a cautionary tale regarding social attitudes and public policies contrary to democratic life in their own countries.