Richard Marc Shusterman

This article responds to the eight essays of the special issue on The Critical Shusterman published in Contemporary Pragmatism 23:3 (2026). Building on the wide-ranging arguments presented in the eight essays, Shusterman’s response treats the topics of interpretation, affect, atmosphere, irony, embodiment, ethics and social criticism, art, pleasure, performance, gastronomy, and autobiography. In doing so, the article clarifies his key positions on pragmatism and somaesthetics, while offering fresh perspectives on the continuing value of experience for philosophy beyond the conventional epistemological frame, thus suggesting new directions for a neopragmatist philosophy of experience aimed at shared qualitative enrichment.

This article revisits a Platonic idea that has been formative for the history of aesthetics and then explores how this idea can be reinterpreted meaningfully in today’s aesthetic context. The Platonic idea I discuss (which Plato introduces in Ion and Phaedrus) is that artistic creation and its appreciative reception involve a form of divine possession. After exploring how this nonrational, supernatural idea has been critically countered yet repeatedly recurs in important subsequent theories of aesthetic experienced proposed by rational thinkers, my presentation suggests how we might give the notion of possession a more naturalistic explanation. I exemplify this through an analysis of performance art presented in The Adventures of the Man in Gold.

This article explores classical pragmatism’s resources for contemporary cognitive science by focusing on the arguments that Peirce, James, and Dewey bring to show the diverse affective and aesthetic factors that crucially shape cognition. Making the case that affect further provides the motor for action (including the action involved in perception), we see that the 4E pragmatist picture of cognition as embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended should be enhanced to recognize cognition’s essential affective and aesthetic dimensions. The article concludes by suggesting how the field of somaesthetics, which emerged from pragmatism and develops (in theory and practice) these six dimensions of cognition, can contribute to contemporary cognitive research.

Collecting sixteen key texts on a broad range of key philosophical topics enables readers to perceive the scope of Shusterman's philosophy and appreciate its systematic aspects. Richard Shusterman is one of today's foremost philosophers. His influential and widely translated work is distinctive for its originality and its integration of multiple philosophical perspectives (analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and East Asian thought) to create a new transcultural pragmatist vision. Although most famous for his groundbreaking writings in aesthetics, somatic philosophy, and philosophy as an art of living, these texts are integrally connected with Shusterman's vital views on ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, ethics, and politics. Collecting sixteen key texts on this broad range of topics, The Critical Shusterman enables readers to perceive the scope of Shusterman's philosophy and appreciate its systematic aspects. Editor Crispin Sartwell's superb introduction highlights those aspects in assessing Shusterman's thought in the context of contemporary philosophy while suggesting ways that Shusterman's project could be developed in the future.