Richard Marc Shusterman

This paper shows that goodman's influential theory of the work of art's identity suffers from what for him is a serious omission, the lack of a nominalistic formulation of his definitions of the works of the various arts. i examine the possible nominalistic translations of goodman's platonistic definitions and show that they would either be unsuitable to goodman's views or unacceptable "simpliciter". among the possibilities considered are type-individuals, superindividuals, and multiply-referential labels

Examining key themes presented in the excellent Rorty Reader, this essay also argues that Rorty's philosophical import extends beyond the propositional content of his texts. After indicating how Rorty's central philosophical stance of anti-representationalism is expressed in his aestheticist advocacy of a pluralist literary culture and his theory that ethics and moral progress can be properly based only on sentiments rather than rationality, the paper explains why his philosophy should have therefore embraced the role of embodied experience rather than rejecting it

Preview: In various guises and cultures, the theme of elevating, ennobling love is a recurrent topos in the premodern erotic theory my book traces. Freed from Plato’s problematic dualistic denigration of the body as prison of the soul and from the modern aesthetic prejudice of disinterestedness, Ars Erotica recaptures the valuable core of ennobling desire by showing how a new somaesthetic approach to sex could channel the power of eros to cultivate qualities of courtesy, grace, skill, self-mastery, and sensitivity to the feelings of others, thus evoking a richer, more positive vision of sex education than we have today.

Ethics and aesthetics tend to be sharply distinguished and frequently opposed as rival realms of value. The apparent conflict between them is discomforting for artists and theorists who seek to combine aesthetic values and ethical aims in their work. My article strives to ease this theoretical tension in two ways. First, through a genealogical analysis of the complexity of our concepts of ethics and aesthetics, I argue that, in some of their historical conceptions, they display considerable convergence. Here I appeal both to classical Western and Asian theories of ethics and aesthetics. Second, I show how these notions converge in the pragmatist, somaesthetic notion of an embodied art of living.

Advances in neuroscience and its related technologies promise significant forms of cognitive enhancement, chiefly through the development of drugs, genetic engineering and screening, and electronic devices for augmenting brain functions. Such advances, however, raise a complex cluster of ethical questions that should increasingly concern us in the future as these technologies become more prevalent, powerful, and wide ranging in their effects. Most ethical dilemmas and debates about enhanced cognition seem to focus on our relation to others. These ethical controversies typically concern two kinds of issues. The first is whether our enhanced knowledge about others may be unethically used to limit their freedom ..

Pragmatism is usually understood as a philosophy defined through action, but philosophical thought is typically contrasted with action. Where do we get the psychic energy for action, if thought is not its effective motor? Affect is the pragmatist answer proposed here. Our passionate nature, our feelings, emotions, or mood provide the dynamic trigger for action, including the action involved in cognition and inquiry. This paper explores the crucial, multiple cognitive roles that affect plays in pragmatism’s three founding fathers, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, but also in Richard Rorty’s contemporary pragmatism. Discussing the different affective terms of “emotion,” “mood” and “feeling,” I show how William James emphasized the distinctive notion of “the strenuous mood” in propounding his pragmatist philosophy and then show how this mood is likewise expressed in the pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey, and Rorty

Il semble évident que la philosophie de l’art développée par Danto s’oppose en tout point à l’esthétique pragmatiste. Non pas que Danto ait été un commentateur critique de Peirce ou de Dewey, auxquels il se réfère finalement fort peu. Mais le renouveau pragmatiste de l’esthétique, quand il remet au premier plan la notion d’expérience esthétique ou quand il cherche à restaurer la continuité entre l’art et la vie, s’est quant à lui en bonne partie explicitement construit contre l’œuvre de Danto. Sans nier ces différences essentielles, Richard Shusterman revient toutefois ici sur sa dette, à la fois personnelle et théorique, à l’égard de Danto.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dewey's Art as ExperienceThe Psychological BackgroundRichard Shusterman (bio)IThe year 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of John Dewey's birth and also the 75th anniversary of the publication of his aesthetic masterpiece Art as Experience—a book that has been extremely influential within the field of aesthetics, not only in philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic education but also in the arts themselves.1 I am honored to commemorate this double Deweyan anniversary with an essay that reexamines Art as Experience by briefly tracing some of its major themes and clarifying its generative context of production and philosophical roots, while also suggesting, in passing, how some of these themes and roots contribute to its continuing philosophical relevance. Before going further, I should offer two preliminary cautions. First, Dewey's aesthetic magnum opus is obviously too rich and masterful in ideas and influence for any brief commemorative essay to hope to do it sufficient justice. Second, as Dewey defined philosophy as "a criticism of criticisms," so my remarks will include a critical dimension.2 This in no way denies my immense admiration for Dewey's achievement in Art as Experience, just as my noting of some formative influences on this work is in no way meant to diminish the impressive originality of his contribution.Dewey's Art as Experience first established pragmatist aesthetics on the philosophical map, yet his text makes no mention of pragmatism. There are good reasons for Dewey's reluctance to highlight the term. The pragmatic is closely linked to the practical, precisely the idea against which the aesthetic has, since Kant, been traditionally contrasted and often oppositionally defined as purposeless and disinterested. To describe his new aesthetic [End Page 26] explicitly as pragmatist might have aroused too much skepticism to insure Dewey's views a fair hearing. Moreover, the pragmatist movement did not yet have a real tradition of philosophical aesthetics on which Dewey could securely rely, a suspicious lack that encouraged the presumption that pragmatism had nothing worthwhile to offer the arts and no real interest in them. Neither C. S. Peirce (who first conceived and baptized pragmatism) nor William James (who made it an internationally famous movement and converted Dewey to it) provided any treatises on aesthetics in their voluminous and wide-ranging writings.It would be wrong to conclude, however, that these first prophets of pragmatism dismissed the aesthetic dimension as unimportant and that they contributed nothing to our understanding of art and criticism. As the originator of semiotics, Peirce significantly advanced the theory of symbols and interpretation in ways that enrich aesthetics. Appreciative of the role of play in creative expression and thought (which he tried to capture through an intriguing concept he called "musement"), Peirce also emphasized the immediately felt quality of experience (so crucial to aesthetics) as his first category of consciousness or "Firstness." Finally, Peirce urged the continuity and collaboration of aesthetics and ethics, even going so far as "making Ethics dependent upon Esthetics" and treating "the morally good … as a particular species of the esthetically good." If "Ethics is the science of the method of bringing Self-Control to bear to gain" what we desire, "what one ought to desire … will be to make [one's] life beautiful, admirable. Now the science of the Admirable is true Esthetics."3William James, whose keen aesthetic taste, wide culture, and love of art inspired his first career choice for painting, offered almost no theorizing in philosophical aesthetics because he was convinced that its abstract formal principles and discursive definitions necessarily failed to capture (and even tended to obscure) the crucial nameless subtleties of art that make all the difference in actual aesthetic experience. But James held the aesthetic dimension of experience (its immediately and distinctively felt but nameless qualities and the appeal that such qualities exercised on our minds and behavior) to be extremely important, well beyond the field of fine art. Maintaining that such aesthetic considerations deeply pervaded one's ethical and philosophical perspective, he even argued that contentions between rival worldviews rested largely on "aesthetic" discords or conflicting temperaments.4 James also devoted specific attention to the aesthetic emotions as "subtler emotions" (along with intellectual and moral...

This paper originated as the keynote address at the conference “Aesthetics Today” organized by the Finnish Society of Aesthetics to mark its 40th anniversary and was delivered at the University of Helsinki on March 1, 2012. Written for that particular occasion the sense of an oral presentation has been maintained. Shusterman’s point of departure is the thesis that contemporary aesthetics can be characterized by a number of leading themes that mark a return to older aesthetic perspectives, after these perspectives have been neglected in modern philosophical discussions. The paper briefly outlines and explores three of these themes whose increasing importance in current aesthetics can appeal to historical antecedents, namely: a focus on perception, the expansion of the aesthetic field beyond the philosophy of fine art, and the close connection of the aesthetic and the practical. After that, Shusterman formulates a fourth theme in aesthetics today which incorporates the first three and whose value for contemporary aesthetics he seeks to highlight, namely: the somatic, as exemplified by somaesthetics