Richard Marc Shusterman

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.

This article analyzes the complex relationship between Georg Simmel’s philosophy and the philosophies of pragmatism and somaesthetics. Although his early theory of truth as grounded in utility was immediately recognized as essentially pragmatist in character, Simmel rejected the connection and sharply criticized pragmatist thought, while affirming a form of idealism against pragmatism’s more thorough naturalism. After analyzing other connections between Simmel’s thought and key pragmatist ideas (including that of meliorist self-cultivation), the essay compares Simmel’s analysis of the senses to the theories of somaesthetics. Simmel’s views on the senses, though insightful, are shown to be too limited in their scope and elitist in character, whereas somaesthetics offers a broader, more democratic view of the senses and embodiment and their role in melioristic self-cultivation.