Eli Kramer

In this paper we outline a theory of aesthetic education in the university, following John Dewey’s theory of art as experience. In the first section we provide a summary of Dewey’s theory, including his account of the spread of aesthetic experiences and creative impulses among audiences in artists’ communities. In section two we offer an illustration of the effect of art in community life in the work of artist and social activist Romare Beardon, whose thought and artistic practice were influenced by Dewey. Beardon insisted, with Dewey, that art is experience that engages the imagination of audiences and engenders the desire for more creative and satisfying ways of living. After surveying the lessons from Dewey and Bearden, in the third section we extend this account of art and aesthetic experience to university education. Starting with a single student learning about some topic, we move to the level of a teacher conducting a course, and finally to a university faculty committee planning a meaningful and coherent program of study for the lower college—the first two years of undergraduate study. Our goal is to show how art and aesthetic experience can function at each of these levels to enrich university life.

Over the past few decades, the idea of philosophy as a way of life (PWL) has gained undeniable prominence in contemporary debates about the nature and function of philosophy. Pierre Hadot forged the notion to denote the specific way in which ancient philosophers conceived of and practiced philosophy, stressing its performative character and its potential for self-transformation on the basis of what he called “spiritual exercises.” Referring primarily to the Hellenistic and Roman eras, Hadot claimed that “philosophy was a mode of existing-in-the-world, which had to be practiced at each instant, and the goal of which was to transform the whole of the individual’s life. Furthermore, he also implied that some modern and contemporary philosophers came close to this model of philosophical practice and described it as his own metaphilosophical ideal. As he comments in the same text: “Such is the lesson of ancient philosophy: an invitation to each human being to transform himself. Philosophy is a conversion, a transformation of one’s way of being and living, and a quest for wisdom.” This normative and pedagogic component is a crucial aspect of Hadot’s account of PWL. Indeed, Hadot is not just describing what philosophy was in the past, but also evaluating what it is in the present and considering what it could become beyond his (and our) time. This is one of the reasons that made his approach so popular and led to so many fruitful developments in the field of PWL. Inspired by Hadot’s account, which was complemented by the late Foucault’s own reflections on philosophy’s practical and performative potential, recent scholarship has characterized PWL as a metaphilosophical model that can be fruitfully used to criticize current academic practices and to develop innovative methodological approaches to the study, research, and teaching of philosophy, which in turn might enable a transformation of philosophical practices in the context of modern universities.

Preview: Philosophy as a way of life (PWL) is an emerging field of study which in the last decades has experienced a vibrant and multifaceted development. Particularly proliferous in the areas of metaphilosophy and the history of philosophy, PWL has also been applied to a wide variety of knowledge domains beyond the academic world. Ever more prominent in contemporary debates, PWL has become a banner under which a very diversified work is being developed by scholars with originally very different areas of research and expertise, who gather under PWL by their dissatisfaction with what has become of philosophy (an abstract and purely theoretical undertaking) and their hopes about what philosophy can be (a way of thinking about and transforming one’s life). Despite the dynamic development of PWL and the wealth of literature it has inspired in recent years – or precisely because of it – there is still no consensus on what it precisely means. What exactly does this expression contain? What does it entail? To what extent is it clear and univocal? And how clear and univocal should it be?

This volume offers critical philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary and historic accounts of living in accordance with the broad natural world as at the center of a good and wise life. It also explores the meaning and idea of nature in these different perspectives as it relates to and is distinguished from cultural life. It builds on the work of Pierre Hadot and others on the connection that philosophers, mystics, scholars, and others (ancient and modern) have seen between nature (as articulated in physics, metaphysics, ontologies, ecologies, biologies, and evolutionary theories) and forms of self-communal cultivation.

In this essay we explore whether and how we should use bibliometrics in hiring, promoting, and granting in the academy. We suggest a Deweyan-Hickmanian pragmatist approach to reflecting on the technology of bibliometrics as a resource for inherently qualitative judgements in these deliberations. We begin with a literature review of current work evaluating the role and use of bibliometrics in the academy, from advocating for them to questioning their construct validity and assessing their limitations and/or dangerous consequences. In the next section, we take a step back and provide a Deweyan philosophical analysis of the validity and practical use of qualitative assessment. In our conclusion we reflect on what pragmatism can teach about recent algorithmic tools used for faculty evaluation.

Philodemus’s On Frank Criticism offers a unique conception of friendship that relies on frank speech, or truth-telling. The ability to have frank conversations with one another is the heart of a conception of friendship in which we are seen, heard, and acknowledged. This is the friendship through which we become better citizens and better selves. In particular, Philodemus is offering this truth-based friendship to students and their mentors. Yet, one would be hard put to find such trust and deep friendship in the university philosophy classrooms of today. Our professionalized and content acquisition focused culture in the academy all too often inhibits fostering these kinds of relationships with our students. We begin the essay by tracing the roots of this kind of frank friendship in Plato’s Lysis, and then contextualize its emerging role in the ancient philosophical classroom by exploring its place in Philodemus’ Epicurean philosophical community at Herculaneum. We do so to see how such friendship moves beyond discourse and into practice. Next, we use Arendt and Foucault to unpack the public and private dimensions of frank friendship in the philosophical learning environment and its role in a good life and good politics. Finally, we show how the classroom practice of Modern Socratic Dialogue (MSD) can re-enliven frank friendship as a spiritual exercise in the contemporary university-philosophy classroom. Specifically, we argue that MSD is a particular method of dialogue suited for the public realm of friendship and that it contributes to the care of one’s soul, thus modeling in our classrooms a method of dialogue for both the public and private dimensions of life.

This essay intends to create a path forward for philosophical work in higher education that is sensitive to the discursive, organizational, economic, epistemic, and political cultures of the institution. This essay will therefore not provide a grand theory of higher education that might be overlaid onto university practice. Instead, as we will argue, any viable philosophy of higher education must not only recognize but also be prepared to account for and harness the heterogeneity of theoretical, organizational, economic, epistemic, and professional perspectives that are the ground of institutions of higher learning.

In this essay, I explore Cassirer’s brief discussion of utopia in An Essay on Man, as likely built upon Kant’s theory of genius as from the Critique of Judgment. This exploration of Cassirer’s theory of utopia lays the groundwork to argue that a utopia is the dynamic product of the “ethical genius,” a work that advances culture by luring it, via ideal imaginaries, to new realms of possibility for ethical advancement. Utopias have their dangers and limits, but nevertheless have a critical role to play in improving our ethical life.

This introductory piece provides context for this symposium on Richard Shusterman's new book, Philosophy and the Art of Writing. The piece reflects on the symposium genre from Plato's classic dialogue to its form today. It claims that Shusterman's work asks us to take this kind of philosophical writing more seriously, and for that reason the symposium itself has taken on a different structure. The piece discusses how each of the contributors responding to the book (with Shusterman leading the way), Eli Kramer, Randall Auxier, and Charles Johnson, have engaged in practicing, nurturing, and supporting broad modes of philosophical writing, and in turn why they have chosen to do so in this context.

Richard Shusterman's Philosophy and the Art of Writing suggests something vital about the tension between philosophical discourses that cannot capture or be the full meaning of living a life in relation to wisdom, and lived philosophies that cannot do away with discourses to deepen a lived experience beyond them: that philosophy as “an embodied way of life” is a sub-creation that emerges from the tension between them. This paper uses several different moments and ideas from Philosophy and the Art of Writing as points of departure for further inquiry. Some “memories,” repurposed, reorganized, and manipulated, take up these starting points to further the investigation. The present work was a spiritual exercise for the author and, one hopes, will be for the reader in what it means to practice philosophy as a way of life. By doing so, we may find more forgiveness and appreciation for our philosophical vocation that creates something more than what we say or are now.

Preview: Philosophy has notably struggled in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to come to terms with how it participated in the erasure and invisibility of persons across the globe. Western philosophy over hundreds of years found itself immersed in the colonial project, in all its economic, social, political, legal, disciplinary, and aesthetic dimensions. Its logic of Western racial superiority, grounded in eugenics, social Darwinism, and deterministic accounts of racial realism, grew and deepened, especially in Europe and the Americas. No domain was free, even Hugo Grotius’ grand work on international law and diplomacy, Mare Liberum (The Free Sea) was founded in justifying Dutch colonial seizures of ships and resources. The haunting of those shorn of their dignity besets us. We have forgotten, in a sense to go “backwards”; not just to “bracket” our stories of the world, but to see the persons we have continued to ignore through certain horizons of dominating meaning. It has been up to these people to find themselves even when under the erasure of the dominant mode of history, and in turn they have much to teach those of us willing to turn back to listen

Until rather recently, philosophy, when practiced as a way of life, was, for most, a communal enterprise of mutually reinforced personal cultivation. In these times of social isolation, including in academic philosophy itself, it is time, yet again, to revitalize this lost, but vital, intercultural mode of philosophy. This volume characterizes a neglected communal mode of philosophy - the philosophical community - by describing the constellation of metaethical principles (general, axiological, cultural, and dialectical) that cultivates its values. The book draws on examples from across the globe and history, including interviews of adherents of living philosophical communities.

In this essay, I defend philosophical wandering not only as an approach to doing philosophy, but also as an important force to incite critical reflection in cultural life. I argue that philosophical wanderers have an embodied, errant praxis, supporting wisdom whenever they engage with others. For these philosophers reflection is not given in a series of systematic assertions, nor through phenomenological description, nor analytic dissection. Rather, reflective life is the force that enhances the performative element of philosophy as an exercise in being obnoxious to bring people within a culture to particular kinds of critical awareness and action. I conclude by suggesting that this mode of philosophy has a correlate mode of truth, “incited reflectivism,” different from coherentism, foundationalism, warranted assertibility, and other theories that have been previously defended as the standard for “truth.”