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5Art and Pragmatism: James and Dewey on Reconstructive Presuppositions of ExperienceDissertation, . 2010.Dissertation by Matthew Crippen on the pragmatic construals by James and Dewey of how we experience works of art, supervised by EWC and defended in May of 2010, as submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy, Graduate Programme in Philosophy, York University, Toronto, Ontario.
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270Echoes of Past and PresentIn Randall E. Auxier & Megan A. Volpert (eds.), Tom Petty and Philosophy: We Need to Know, Open Court Publishing. pp. 16-25. 2019.The album Echo was produced in a depressed, drug-riddled phase when Tom Petty’s first marriage was ending and his physical condition so degraded that he took to using a cane. Petty filmed no videos, avoided playing the album’s songs on the follow-up tour and reported little memory of its making. The thoughtfulness and self-reflection that traumatic circumstances spur distinguish the album. So too does the tendency to look backwards in times of crisis, whether in hopes of finding solidity in t…Read more
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278Pragmatic Evolutions of the Kantian a priori: From the Mental to the BodilyIn Krzysztof Skowroński & Sami Pihlström (eds.), Pragmatist Kant: Pragmatism, Kant, and Kantianism in the Twenty-first Century, . pp. 150-171. 2019.In this article, I review textual evidence demonstrating that James and Dewey incorporated Kant’s ideas, even while criticizing him. I specifically argue that the pragmatic evolution of the Kantian a priori carried out by James and Dewey is a transition from the mental to the bodily. I further argue that the parallels between pragmatists and Kant, along with the transition from the mental to bodily, relate to scientific contexts in which all developed their outlooks. Though historically grounded…Read more
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271Pragmatism and the Valuative MindTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 54 (3): 341. 2018.Pragmatism is resurging, especially among embodied cognitive scientists. The growing appreciation of the body accompanying this fits with increasing recognition that cognition and perception are valuative, which is to say, emotional, interested and aesthetic. In what follows, I detail how classical pragmatic thinking—specifically that of William James and John Dewey—anticipates recent valuative theories of mind and how it can be used to develop them further.I begin by discussing James's concept …Read more
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870Contours of Cairo Revolt: Street Semiology, Values and Political AffordancesTopoi 40 (2): 451-460. 2019.This article contemplates symbols and values inscribed on Cairo’s landscape during the 2011 revolution and the period since, focusing on Tahrir Square and the role of the Egyptian flag in street discourses there. I start by briefly pondering how intertwined popular narratives readied the square and flag as emblems of dissent. Next I examine how these appropriations shaped protests in the square, and how military authorities who retook control in 2013 re-coopted the square and flag, with the reab…Read more
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769Aesthetics and action: situations, emotional perception and the Kuleshov effectSynthese 198 (Suppl 9): 2345-2363. 2019.This article focuses on situations and emotional perception. To this end, I start with the Kuleshov effect wherein identical shots of performers manifest different expressions when cut to different contexts. However, I conducted experiments with a twist, using Darth Vader and non-primates, and even here expressions varied with contexts. Building on historically and conceptually linked Gibsonian, Gestalt, phenomenological and pragmatic schools, along with consonant experimental work, I extrapolat…Read more
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Politics, Mythic Imagery and Visual Rhetoric in Film: The Apologetics of PleasantvilleOpus Et Educatio 4. 2017.
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172Dewey on Arts, Sciences and Greek PhilosophyIn András Benedek & Agnes Veszelszki (eds.), Visual Learning: Time - Truth - Tradition, Peter Lang. 2016.
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449William James and his Darwinian Defense of FreewillIn M. Wheeler (ed.), 150 Years of Evolution: Darwin’s Impact on Contemporary Thought & Culture, Sdsu Press. pp. 68-89. 2011.Abstract 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 t…Read more
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396Body Phenomenology, Somaesthetics and Nietzschean Themes in Medieval ArtPragmatism Today 5 40-45. 2014.Richard Shusterman suggested that Maurice Merleau-Ponty neglected “‘lived somaesthetic reflection,’ that is, concrete but representational and reflective body consciousness.” While unsure about this assessment of Merleau-Ponty, lived somaesthetic reflection, or what the late Sam Mallin called “body phenomenology”—understood as a meditation on the body reflecting on both itself and the world—is my starting point. Another is John Dewey’s bodily theory of perception, augmented somewhat by Merleau…Read more
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494Screen Performers Playing ThemselvesBritish Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2): 163-177. 2016.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 pa…Read more
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838Egypt and the Middle East: Democracy, Anti-Democracy and Pragmatic FaithSaint Louis University Public Law Review 35 281-302. 2016.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…Read more
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243Darwinism and Pragmatism: William James on Evolution and Self-Transformation (review)Science & Education 27. 2018.
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96The Totalitarianism of Therapeutic PhilosophyEssays in Philosophy 8 (1): 29-55. 2007.[Excerpted From Editor's Introduction] Matthew Crippen takes this up in a Marcusian critique of Wittgenstein that attends, among other things, to the place of silence in that discourse. Referring to Horkheimer’s citation of the Latin aphorism that silence is consent, Crippen is critical of Wittgenstein’s admonition that we must pass over in silence those matters of which we cannot speak. This raises fascinating questions for critical theory that Crippen explores particularly with reference to Ma…Read more
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998Intuitive Cities: Pre-Reflective, Aesthetic and Political Aspects of Urban DesignJournal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 3 (2): 125-145. 2016.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…Read more
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754Embodied Cognition and Perception: Dewey, Science and SkepticismContemporary Pragmatism 14 (1): 112-134. 2017.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, …Read more
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676Dewey, Enactivism and Greek ThoughtIn Roman Madzia & Matthaus Jung (eds.), Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science: From Bodily Interaction to Symbolic Articulation, De Gruyter. pp. 229-246. 2016.In this chapter, I examine how Dewey circumnavigated debates between empiricists and a priorists by showing that active bodies can perform integrative operations traditionally attributed to “inner” mechanisms, and how he thereby realized developments at which the artificial intelligence, robotics and cognitive science communities only later arrived. Some of his ideas about experience being constituted through skills actively deployed in cultural settings were inspired by ancient Greek sources. …Read more
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696William James on belief: Turning darwinism against empiricistic skepticismTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 46 (3): 477-502. 2010.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, secon…Read more
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333Pictures, Experiential Learning and PhenomenologyIn András Benedek & Nyiri Kristof (eds.), Beyond Words – Pictures, Parables, Paradoxes, Peter Lang. pp. 83-90. 2015.
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241Asleep at the Press: Thoreau, Egyptian Revolt and Nuances of DemocracyArab Media and Society 20 1-14. 2015.
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