Bethany Henning

This book explores the relationship between metaphysics and the liberal arts. Part I contrasts the dualistic metaphysics of Platonism, Cartesianism, and materialisms, with the process metaphysics of William James, John Dewey, C.S. Peirce, and A.N. Whitehead with an eye toward illustrating how education should be treated as a transactive and interactive process whose objects of knowledge evolve through time. In Part II, the authors go on to investigate conceptions of the value of a liberal arts education, considering reactionary, conservative, pragmatist, and radical approaches.. Finally, in Part III, the authors explore connections between metaphysics and conservative, radical, and pragmatist conceptions of art, and demonstrate how process metaphysics can be extended to highlight the role of aesthetic experience both in understanding and appreciating art and in liberal arts education. A timely and unique exploration of the relationship between metaphysics and the liberal arts, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and faculty with interests in several branches of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of education, and aesthetics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to CriticsBethany Henningplato knew that philosophy is not something we write; it is something we live. As Deweyans, we know philosophy is an ideal that emerges within experience as the highest possibility for dialogue. Insofar as a book appears as an extended monologue, it obscures the qualitative and transactive dimensions of philosophy as it is practiced. But sessions like these reveal that books are moments in a conversation, "perchings" in a dialogue that is forever in media res. I am deeply grateful to Bill Myers for organizing this panel, and for the generosity of Frank Ryan, Gregory Pappas, and Jim Garrison for having taken the time to read and think about this book. Each of them has served as a model for philosophical scholarship, and I am humbled and honored to have the opportunity to engage with them directly. They have challenged me in three distinct ways and have engaged with what I have written on separate plateaus of thought, at times revealing layers of which I was not fully aware. So I will do my best to respond to their concerns and develop our shared inquiry in their light. I will also own that my reading of Dewey is selective, and it is my attempt to work through a problem that materialized, as all problems do, in the course of ordinary lived experience.At Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where I attended graduate school, we offered a course called "The American Mind." The title was a provocation, so I applied to teach it one semester. It was a fantastic challenge to try to curate a selection of texts that would serve as an encounter with an intellectual tradition that eludes me as much as it informs me—after all, prior to college, I only knew that a "philosopher" is what becomes of the loser in the board game called Life. I did not know that there was something called "American philosophy" until I applied to study at SIUC.If philosophy is the way that a culture reflects upon itself, then in this book, I have tried to invite the American mind to lie down on the couch. [End Page 95] Or, it might be more accurate to say that I have asked John Dewey, as the representative of American philosophy, how he might psychoanalyze such a mind. My hypothesis is that Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience, and the art that communicates and preserves such moments of intensified vitality, touches the deepest, but unspoken meanings that human beings encounter. This is where quality, the character of an event as a singular whole, the immediate aspect of an event that we feel rather than know, can be stabilized and communicated. If an interpretation can be made of the deep conflicts that have left philosophy at the margins of American life, I believe we would be wise to begin with our "dreams," with the creations of our imagination, the artistic products that reveal the felt dimension of our shared world.Many readers of Dewey choose to focus on his theory of inquiry, his recasting of the scientific method, and his instrumentalism as forming the core of his thought. This is an understandable approach; his work here is novel and corrects bad intellectual habits. However, for the purposes of this book, I have emphasized aesthetic experience, the role of the qualitative, and pursuit of meaning over the correction of practice in my interpretation. This is a controversial choice since it courts the irrational and the vague, but I believe that our neglect of these portions of experience prevents philosophy from reconnecting with American life.Response to Frank RyanFrank Ryan is concerned about the extent to which I have cast the organism as porous, and that I have identified aesthetic experience as unconscious. I agree with Dr. Ryan's assessment that defining aesthetic experience as wholly unconscious would be a grievous error—and I hope not to have made it. There is a misleading ambiguity in the title of the book that might predispose the reader to suspect that I am claiming an equivalence, but what I intended to argue was not that aesthetic experience itself is unconscious, but rather...

dewey is an optimistic thinker. He fits into a vein of pragmatism known as meliorism, which holds that the condition of the world can be improved through intelligent, imaginative, human action. For this reason, it is tempting to read Dewey as permanently cheerful—particularly when we compare him with philosophers from the continental tradition who work on similar themes. However, it is important to remember that meliorism holds that improvement is possible through intelligent engagement—not that it is guaranteed. Dewey's aesthetics particularly have been mischaracterized as overly sanguine, lacking solid account of the tragic. This is a misreading since Dewey's aesthetic does make ample room for human suffering on...

The dubious relation of “subjective” experience to “objective” reality finds its correlate in the opposition we often suppose between culture and nature. Twentieth century theorists, most notably Freud, have claimed various methods for interpreting the illusions of one realm that hide the truths of the other. Ricœur has famously called the psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which he sees as a threat to the “mytho-poetic core of imagination.” John Dewey regarded the binary opposition between culture/nature as particularly dubious, preferring to see them as reciprocal phases of a continuous process; if cultural life is an interpretation of the biophysical environment, that environment surely has its say. However, in the century since Freud, the tactics of suspicion have proven themselves to be indispensable for developing of critiques that reveal the subtle operations of anti-democratic ideologies, perhaps at the expense of democratic faith. This paper considers if there are less suspicious, more Deweyan possibilities for the interpreting and sharing of dreams, not for the benefit of the psychic health of the individual dreamer, but for the sake of a recovery of democratic life.

Abstract:American philosophy has an uneasy relationship with sex. At least, this is the central claim of Richard Shusterman’s recent article, “Pragmatism and Sex: An Unfulfilled Connection,” in which he provides for us an overview of the failures of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead to theorize about erotic life in any particularly “useful” way. This paper will critically examine this claim by advocating for a more careful reading of the appearance of sexuality within classical American thought—particularly as it is cast within Dewey’s aesthetics—while ultimately sympathizing with the felt need for American philosophers to engage intimate experience with more frankness, respect, and focus. Although American philosophy has erred on the side of reserve, Shusterman’s misreading of Dewey’s critique of Freud, and his mistaking the appearance of Darwin’s theories as reductive, are critical blunders that paint the tradition as overly prudish, and egregiously dismissive of this important sphere of experience.

The publication of Art as Experience in 1934 marked a theoretical turning point away from the disinterested spectatorship of Kant towards an aesthetics of everyday life. Dewey’s major claim therein is that “aesthetic experience” is privileged and ought to be taken as paradigmatic for all experience because it is controlled by an affective unity that he calls “pervasive quality” which harmonizes thought and action with its social and environmental context. In 1935 Walter Benjamin argued that pre-industrial works of art have an “aura” that exerts an affective lure on consciousness, and that the remnants of this aura in the post-industrial age may lead to the abandonment of critical thought and seduce the masses into the sway of fascism. This paper considers John Dewey’s aesthetic theory in light of the critical perspective developed by his contemporaries in the Frankfurt School. I will consider whether Dewey’s reliance on the qualitative dimension of experience undermines the critical reflection that, theoretically, prevents the “aestheticization of politics” that leads to the spread of fascism, and propose that pragmatist aesthetics would benefit from greater tolerance for the “negativity” exemplified by the critical theorists.

We live in a time of erotic dysfunction: In 2020, and again in 2023, there was a brief media frenzy in the wake of studies published by UCLA that concluded that Gen Z is having statistically less sex than millennials did in their formative years. The generational angle made for good headlines, but the same surveys indicated that people of all ages are having less sex than they used to (Herbenick et al.; Wellingham). We needn't work hard to identify likely factors that might have led us here. The pandemic undoubtedly shifted our tolerance for closeness and contact, which has only reinforced the proliferation of technological commodities (devices, apps, platforms) that have made isolation ever more convenient. These... Read More.