John Dewey's Aesthetics

My own experience of much recent so-called art criticism is that there is more descriptive writing going on than actual critique with the art work being examined. So does the art critic's words actually help the viewer (and the artist) access the world of the artwork and artist?

This paper focuses on the peculiar meanings of
the word “aesthetic” or “esthetic” in Dewey and James,
highlighting the continuity between Dewey’s interpretation of the “esthetic” and James’s uses of the term. More
importantly, the paper defends the claim that both philosophers attributed a basically naturalistic meaning to
“aesthetic/esthetic”: Dewey saw experience as basically
esthetically or qualitatively characterized, insofar it is
connected to the biological conditions of life in an environment that directly affects the very existence of organisms. James primarily used the term “aesthetic” in connection to pain and pleasure, i.e., to refer to a living being’s
physiological predisposition to feel and select certain
features of the surrounding world, by assuming specific
attitudes toward given situations. Moreover, both authors
conceived of the aesthetic in a narrower sense, i.e., in
relation to the arts, as the development, enhancement or
refinement of the naturally aesthetic features of human
experience, denying any a priori distinction between the
two spheres.
After clarifying the meanings of the word “esthetic” in
Dewey’s work in relation to his theory of experience and
aesthetic qualities, the paper explores the uses of the
word “aesthetic” in James’s texts, particularly with reference to his theory of temperament and his conception of
emotions. The last section focuses on the influence exercised on James’s vocabulary by the work of Alexander Bain
and suggests the risky yet plausible hypothesis that Edmund Burke’s physiological aesthetics may have played a
role in the way James approached the word, although the
term “aesthetic” is missing in Burke’s text.

La prima parte di questo elaborato si propone di esaminare accuratamente il rapporto tra percezione sensibile e razionalità attraverso una riflessione critica sull'approccio scientista e il suo impatto sul pensiero filosofico moderno. A partire dalla lettura delle Conversazioni di Maurice Merleau-Ponty, si analizzano le limitazioni di una conoscenza esclusivamente razionale e la rivalutazione del ruolo della percezione come fonte di accesso alla realtà. Viene affrontata la questione della dialettica tra soggetto e oggetto, evidenziando come la fenomenologia, in particolare nel pensiero di Merleau-Ponty, smantelli il privilegio della prospettiva antropocentrica, suggerendo un protagonismo molteplice all'interno della natura. Tra il mondo percepito di Merleau-Ponty e il pragmatismo di John Dewey non c'è incommensurabilità. Attraverso il saggio Arte come esperienza, il filosofo statunitense ci accompagna in una rivalutazione pragmatista dell'estetica, in cui l'arte diventa un'esperienza avviluppata alla vita quotidiana, lontana dalle convenzioni rigide e istituzionali. Dewey propone una visione sincretica, un'esperienza estetica radicata nella relazione dinamica tra il soggetto e l'oggetto, emancipando il piano empirico dal regime gnoseologico per conferirgli maggiore ampiezza. Nelle parole del saggio entra in scena una torsione rispetto alla tradizionale idea circa l'azione, che il soggetto si pensa eserciti sulle cose, un'azione il cui fulcro è il campo delle relazioni, come per il filosofo francese, esiste tra enti non separati, realizzantesi in un continuo stato di attività e passività che intrattengono l'uno rispetto all'altro. L'indagine fenomenologica sulla percezione e l'estetica, sviluppata rispettivamente da Maurice Merleau-Ponty e John Dewey, sono il terreno fertile per una concezione dell'arte e dell'esperienza estetica come processi incarnati, dinamici e densi di relazionismo. Sibley, riprende e amplia queste riflessioni verso la natura dei concetti estetici. Nel suo saggio Concetti estetici, Sibley esplora come, diversamente dai concetti conoscitivi o percettivi ordinari, i giudizi estetici richiedano un gusto raffinato e una sensibilità specifica che permetta di cogliere qualità come il "grazioso" o il "dinamico". La sua analisi, sebbene sviluppata nell'ambito dell'estetica analitica, dialoga ed è debitrice con il pensiero di Merleau-Ponty e Dewey. 1.1 Critica dell'approccio scientista "Che cosa è dunque questa cera, che non si comprende se non con la mente? Certo la stessa che vedo, che tocco, che immagino, ed infine la stessa che pensavo essere all'inizio. Eppure, cosa che è da notare, la sua percezione non dipende dalla vista, non dal tatto, non dalla immaginazione, e non lo fu mai, sebbene prima sembrasse così, ma solo da una investigazione della mente" (René Descartes, Meditazioni metafisiche) La seconda meditazione dell'opera di René Descartes delle Meditazioni metafisiche, permette di delimitare la cornice dentro cui emergono le parole della Ⅰ conversazione di Maurice Merleau-Ponty, le quali sono focalizzate ad una discussione circa la metodologia del sapere scientifico. Quest'ultimo, erede di una tradizione filosofico cartesiano, diventa oggetto della polemica merleau-pontyana nelle prime pagine delle Conversazioni. René Descartes, protagonista della fiamma rivoluzionaria da cui scaturisce il pensiero moderno scriverà che attraverso una disamina delle cose percepibili, si è capaci di riconoscere l'inganno dei sensi e di apprendere come affidarsi esclusivamente all'intelletto. Dunque si prospetta un'intelligenza timoniera del veliero antropico, alla quale si attribuisce la capacità di illuminare la strada verso la scoperta della verità del mondo. Un'idea che ha persistito nella tradizione francese, delegittimando l'apparato empirico di questo mondo. Nell'opera L'occhio e lo Spirito Merleau-Ponty scrive: «La Dioptrique di Cartesio è un tentativo in questo senso. È il breviario di un pensiero che non vuole più abitare il visibile e decide di ricostruirlo secondo il modello che se ne crea». Per Cartesio solo ciò che è chiaro e distinto ha una rilevanza. «La percezione è solo l'inizio di una scienza ancora confusa 1 », la dialettica tra percezione e scienza è la medesima frapposta tra apparenza e realtà. Tuttavia, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz dirà che

Although a fair amount of secondary literature on George Santayana’s aesthetics has been produced, almost none of these works –to the best of our knowledge–is concerned with linking his production to the context of the formation of American aesthetics. This is precisely the main purpose of this article. The hypothesis supported here is that by critically comparing the concepts of «sense of beauty» proposed by George Santayana and inspired by Francis Hutcheson’s work, it is possible to highlight the influence of classical British aesthetic theory on the emerging aesthetic tradition in the United States at the end of the 19th century.

This submission explores the concept of aesthetic justice pedagogy, and advocates on behalf of it. In contrast to aesthetic injustice, which denotes any harm done to a person's aesthetic capacities, aesthetic justice pedagogy aims at facilitating the development of students' imagination, perception, and feelings, wherein narrative and story-making are prime locations to contest coloniality and oppression. We emphasize the practice of this philosophy, refusing to see it as only as metaphor or theory. In our attempt to build a praxis of philosophy, education, and art, we lean upon diverse thinkers such as Augusto Boal, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Ursula K. Le Guin. We maintain that aesthetic justice pedagogy requires spaces of liberation whereby initiates can practice, rehearse, and perform new realities and create counter-narratives through various modalities of story-writing.

Although the reception of John Dewey's Art as Experience has not been totally ignored by secondary literature, the few works that have dealt with the subject have been restricted to the English-speaking context, and more specifically to the United States. This essay sought to consider the reception of Dewey's book on aesthetics in the context of Spanish-speaking countries, with special attention to Mexico, Spain, Colombia, and Argentina. The hypothesis put forward and supported here is that Art as Experience had a late reception due to political and cultural factors in these countries and that it is at present that we really find a deeper reception of this work, with an increasing number of publications about the subject.

This paper defends the idea that literary works can be vehicles of what has been called experiential knowledge; that is, literary works can offer knowledge of what it is like to have a particular kind of experience. After reviewing some of the critiques this epistemological conception of literature has recently received, I offer a reading of one of its earliest formulations, found in Dorothy Walsh's book Literature and Knowledge (1969), which I believe is still relevant to contemporary discussions on the topic. By combining some key insights from Walsh's account with John Dewey's understanding of experience as a form of undergoing, I argue that literary works can give a sense or a feel of what it is like to experience something, while acknowledging that there are also some important differences between literary and real-world experiences. I illuminate my own understanding of experiential knowledge by analysing the account of the experience of social death in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved (1987). I am especially interested in identifying the stylistic and literary techniques behind the experiential knowledge I believe the novel offers. The paper ends by providing a closer examination of the character of the literary experience underpinning experiential knowledge and by putting forth reasons why experiential knowledge should be considered a serious epistemic notion.

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between the democratic experience and the legitimacy of an institutional context. In this exploration, John Dewey's concept of the aesthetic experience plays a key role. The main thesis is the possibility to conceive of citizens' recognition of democratic legitimacy as Dewey envisages the feeling of consummation completing the aesthetic experience. This approach gains plausibility when we link Dewey's concept of the aesthetic experience to his concept of experimental democracy, that is, democracy as a cooperative problem-solving practice in which actors try out provisional solutions by means of social communication

Dans l'urgence d'écrire la trace : pour une lecture énonciative et discursive de Notre vie dans les forêts de Marie Darrieussecq Frédérique Lamoureux Le présent vivant est toujours déjà une trace. Cette trace est impensable à partir de la simplicité d'un présent dont la vie serait intérieure à soi. Le soi du présent vivant est originairement une trace. La trace n'est pas un attribut dont on pourrait dire que le soi du présent vivant l'« est originairement ». Il faut penser l'être-originaire depuis la trace et non l'inverse. Cette archi-écriture est à l'oeuvre à l'origine du sens 1. Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène.

This paper aims to reconsider the “artificial” nature of AI not as a result of the simulation of the human organism, but as the result of a disconnection from experience. Experience, in this context, is defined as the ways in which an organism is in nature through culture or has a world which is defined by a universe of discourse. To this end, an artificial intelligence is only “artificial” insofar as it is disconnected from the ways in which the world is experienced as mediated by culture. Put simply, artificial intelligence will cease to be “artificial” the moment it is implicated in nature through culture, at which point it will become “intelligent” or “conscious.”

One vital constant in pedagogical narratives is the link between children’s play and education. Study of their relationship from a philosophical perspective is marked by paradoxes and tensions that have often raised the implementation of their use in educational practice in differing and even opposing ways. This article seeks to set out new ways of interpreting
the relationship between play and education from a conciliatory approach. This relationship is explored from the works of three contemporaneous pragmatist thinkers of the late nineteenth: Jane Addams, John
Dewey, and George Mead. The results suggest that the possibility of a relationship between children’s play and education is not so much
found in the development of potentially educational materials, an extraordinary teaching method, or strictly teaching the curriculum.
Rather, the significant contribution is concentrated in the conviction that play could be crucial for the cultivation of democracy. Pragmatists such as Addams and Dewey relied on the aesthetic experience of play as one
of the most powerful possibilities for not only keeping democracy alive but also cultivating a cosmopolitan citizenship.

By “meaning,” aestheticians are concerned with how art is interpreted. The contemporary art form, “live painting,” is predominantly understood in terms of neo-idealist conceptions of meaning. However, meaning in art entails context. Neo-idealist analyses are out of touch with everyday life and how live painting actually functions in society. Since neo-idealism appeals to meaning outside of experience, it says little about the natural conditions of live painting’s process. Understanding how live painting works in life, then, demands a theory of what it means on its own terms. The leading task, in response, is to justify a method denoting the rules of how live painting expresses meaning. This analysis addresses a lacuna in the contemporary conversation of aesthetics by developing a naturalistic defense for live painting and a critique of neo-idealism in “visionary art.” In service of offering a naturalistic account of live painting’s aesthetic value, John Dewey’s aesthetic theory enables an instrumentalist account of lived experience. “Instrumentalism” is not concerned with the truth of theories, rather in their value to describe phenomena. So, Dewey radically understands “experience” as it is experienced. Since live painting transpires in shared experience, Dewey’s insight offers the theoretical materials to examine the context of how meaning is communicated. The contextual preconditions of experience establish a basis for approaching live painting in terms of its situational environment and social activity. In live painting, the communication of meaning is funded by the natural qualities of the situational context. Further, live painting produces expressive objects capable of producing added aesthetic experiences. Meaning expressed in a naturalistic explanation lends itself to scientific statements. These features of live painting, understood in light of Dewey’s theory, can be leveraged to criticize neo-idealist trends in live painting. Concluding, I discuss the philosophical implications of my work and its baring on Deweyan scholarship and art.

One topic frequently explored in the philosophy of humor is the relationship of comedy and laughter with other facets of human existence-including theological insight and religious experience. The aim of this essay is to employ the mature thought of John Dewey not only to illuminate the nature of humor, but also to discern the deep source and connection between the spiritually exalting and the funny from a naturalistic perspective. While a number of passages on comedy and humor from Dewey's later work are addressed, mostly from Art as Experience, they are synthesized with other ideas from this same text along with a few quotes from John Morreall. The focus is then shifted toward the central themes of A Common Faith, Dewey's proposal for a de-supernaturalized form of the religious life. It is suggested that the humorous and the religious, understood through Dewey's refined account of experience, disclose a few very important things about our place within the cosmos as a whole-that greatest of contexts in and through which laughter and the spiritual alike acquire their significance. This Deweyan vision is further clarified by way of comparison with Peter Berger's theological reflections on humor. The controversies over sin and the place of tragedy in Dewey's religious naturalism are briefly discussed in the conclusion.

The aesthetic theory developed by John Dewey and presented in his 1934 book, "Art as Experience", is considerably influenced by modern art and artists. This influence, however, has so far received little attention from interpreters. The aim of this article is precisely to shed light on these relationships by presenting the relationship between the philosopher and the French painter Henri Matisse. The hypothesis is that these encounters between artist and thinker had an impact on Dewey's philosophy of art. The argument is divided into four parts. In the first, the context in which the meetings took place was discussed, namely the Barnes Foundation. This was followed by a review of the historical letters from these meetings. Thirdly, we sought to understand the theoretical impact of this exchange on Dewey's aesthetics. Finally, brief concluding remarks were presented.

política etc.) e entre os filósofos pragmatistas e outros importantes pensadores do passado recente (Boas, Gadamer, Santayana, Simmel etc.). Sem pretender exaurir as discussões sobre os aspectos múltiplos da estética de Dewey, esse livro espanhol é o enésimo exemplo de que a teoria da arte de Dewey não mostrou sinais evidentes de envelhecimento, mas, antes, é um argumento que ainda se encaixa perfeitamente nos tempos e nos problemas modernos.

The article aims to show that Peirce, after realizing the appropriation that James and others made of Pragmatism, taking it far from an ideal of justice and keeping it in the service of a “nauseating utility”, whose principle was that only individual utility, including spiritual well-being, would be the ultimate goal of all practice, he sought a philosophy that would keep logic and science united in a realistic manner with laws that could be metaphysically real. In this way, he perceived the necessity to transcend the hypothetical considerations incorporated into the sense of the pragmatic maxim, attempting to distance it from nominalist risk. In this process, he took into account two new normative sciences, esthetics and ethics, in addition to logic, so that Pragmaticism, in intelligent criticism, would investigate whether an admirable end of a subject could be pursued in an indefinite and prolonged course of action, without grounding it solely on individual utility, thus replacing...

Pedagog akademicki zajmujący się "sztuką dźwięków", żyjący na przełomie XX i XXI wieku określanego mianem epoki postmodernizmu, musi postawić sobie pytanie o wartość "nowości" w muzyce. Otaczająca nas rzeczywistość w sposób szczególny bowiem dowartościowuje to, co zmienne, oryginalne, różniące się od tego, co już znane i zastane, a więc "nowe" właśnie. Czy jednak kategoria "nowości", tak promowana współcześnie, jest też kategorią przydatną dla muzyki, dla rozważań nad jej estetyczną wartością? Na tak postawione pytanie postaram się odpowiedzieć, sięgając do rozważań wybitnego muzykologa-erudyty Carla Dahlhausa. Ten niemiecki uczony, profesor Technische Universität w Berlinie 1 , autor 25 książek i kilkuset rozmaitych studiów, haseł encyklopedycznych oraz recenzji muzycznych, kategorią "nowości" zajmował się dość często i zestawiał ją w rozmaitych kontekstach: postępu i awangardy, problemów gatunkowych i zagadnień rytmicznych. Najczęściej pomieszczał ją w sformułowaniu "nowa muzyka", przywołując tym samym kategorię czasu i prowokując relację: muzyka nowa-muzyka dawna. Rozważania swe, rzecz jasna, prowadził z właściwą sobie przenikliwością, ilustrując obficie przykładami z historii muzyki. Najistotniejszym dla rozważań nad wartością "nowości" w muzyce jest tekst Dahlhausa "Nowa muzyka" jako kategoria historyczna 2 , ale przyczynkowe sfor-5* 1 Żyjący w latach: 1928 (Hanover)-1989 (Berlin). 2 "New Music" as historical category pomieszczony w książce Schoenberg and the New Music. Essays by Carl Dahlhaus. Transl. by D. P u f f e t t, A. C l a y t o n. Cambridge 1987; [reprinted 1990] (opieram się tutaj na wersji angielskojęzycznej). Pierwsze wydanie tego tekstu miało miejsce jako: "Neue Musik" als historische Kategorie. In: Das musikalisch Neue und die mułowania z interesującego nas zakresu znajdziemy także w eseju Muzyka dawna i nowa 3 czy w nowo przetłumaczonej z języka niemieckiego jego książce Estetyka muzyki 4. Kategoria "nowości" Zacznijmy od cytatu z tekstu samego Dahlhausa: "Trywialny fakt, że historia jest procesem rozgrywającym się w czasie, rodzi skłonność do uznawania elementów odróżniających daną fazę od fazy minionej nie tylko za swoiste dla niej, lecz i za najistotniejsze. Kto pojmuje historię jako proces, czuje się mimowolnie zmuszony do akcentowania różnic, a nie elementów stałych, a zatem do poszukiwania i podkreślania w historycznej odmienności także odmienności rzeczowej" 5. Owo dostrzeganie i podkreślanie odmienności stoi u podstaw rozróżniania tego, co "już było", co "jest obecnie" i tego, co nowe-odmienne od stanu aktualnego. W ten sposób dotykamy kategorii "nowości", która pojawia się głównie w obrębie sformułowania "nowa muzyka". To zaś określenie służy sprecyzowaniu różnicy między pewnymi tylko, wybranymi, kompozycjami muzyki XX wieku, a ogromną masą innych utworów 6-pisał Dahlhaus w 1969 roku. I zauważał jednocześnie, że ten właśnie zwrot (czyli "nowa muzyka") jest hasłem: nośnym. Co więcej nawet, może być określeniem precyzyjnym, ale tylko tak długo, jak długo używany jest bezrefleksyjnie. Bliższa analiza wykazuje niejasność zwrotu czy nawet sprzeczność panującą w jego obrębie 7. Kategoria "nowości" jest bowiem kategorią zmienną historycznie (tak jak i sam przedmiot historii jest zmienny) i relatywną czasowo, a zatem: nietrwałą. 68 Część I. Wartości w refleksji naukowej i rozważaniach teoretycznych...

Der Aufsatz beabsichtigt die Skizzierung einer möglichen Produktionsästhetik ausgehend von Adornos Lektüre der Ästhetik Croces. Durch eine Analyse von Adornos Interpretation in der Ästhetischen Theorie (1970) lässt sich Croces Ästhetik nicht allein als eine Bewusstseinsphilosophie, sondern als eine werkimmanente Ästhetik der Transformation auffassen, die sich im Sinnlichen auslotet

In the 1920s, both as a radical artist and as editor of the avant-garde journal De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg watched, with increasing excitement, artistic and architectural developments by Russian artists in the west, and social and engineering developments in Russia itself. In 1922 he was trying to finance a Russian visit by arranging a lecture tour there, and in 1925 he and Kurt Schwitters, the German Dadaist, were again working to arrange a trip to see the Russian experiment, but those arrangements also came to nothing 2. All that Van Doesburg was able to do was to correspond with Alexandre Archipenko in Paris from 1918, and then he took his first opportunity to seek out El Lissitzy in Berlin in 1922. Van Doesburg had admired Kandinsky from afar, but the earliest direct impact of the Russian avant-garde on the artists of De Stijl was through Alexandre Archipenko, who had been in

It is now a truism that life, for most in the Western world, has become too hurried, too fragmented, and too full of stimuli. Awash in a surfeit of information, entertainment, and distraction, we struggle to define our current situation — is there a new kind of “hyper-attention” that has arisen alongside the older “deep-attention”? (Hayles 2007) Should we cope or just adapt to the next evolution of our psychological habits? Or maybe we have gotten used to rationalizing what stimulates or pleases us? Uncertainty rules, and cherished institutions — religious, educational, legal, governmental, familial — wonder whether to enforce or relax old norms in conflict with new, twittery populations.
Nearly a century ago, in Art as Experience (1934, LW10, hence AE), John Dewey worried about precisely this situation. While Dewey celebrated innovation and invention in America, he was deeply concerned that experience might be impoverished aesthetically over the long term. To a profound degree, I think, we share these exact worries. Dewey wrote AE to both describe and address the above phenomenon — the “anaesthetic” character of experience which was spreading throughout everyday life. In AE, Dewey describes the nature of aesthetic experience, showing how it develops and threads through our biological and psychological natures, our social interactions, and the largest structures with which we organize societal life, such as education and the art world. Art, understood most adequately as experience potentially at its zenith, provides us with models of experience which can be translated and replicated in various aspects of life. It provides us, I will argue, with an answer to the question, “What should we do about technology?”

Where do we find ourselves, in 2022? As we all know, we are increasingly enmeshed in a growing network of information-oriented tools, systems, and techniques. Smart phones, transportation apps, learning thermostats, location trackers, on and on. The benefits of these devices is usually foremost in our minds; after all, it is the job of marketers to be sure we know why we need something more. The downsides are also familiar to most of us — we fight interruption, distraction, information overload, and the fear of missing a notification or update. What seems increasingly clear, is that these ostensible “externalities” have become significantly more troublesome; disinformation and propaganda spread like wildfire, and the usual touchstones of commonsense seem lost in the noise. The trends composing the problem have long roots, and a long list of prominent thinkers have weighed in. As philosophers, we can also raise questions about the implications for democracy and education. Dewey has put his finger on exactly what is being challenged by our new technologies,
a metric with which to judge technology: the encouragement or discouragement of experience capable of becoming aesthetic and/or consummatory. With this, we can develop a strategy for interrogating technology and also to for pushing back against narrow conceptions of technology.

Judith Green's recent book continues the line of inquiry initiated a decade ago in her work on Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation; moreover, the book is self-identified as the first in a trilogy of books that will be devoted to formulating "a general theory of democracy-deepening processes" (p. 192). This volume addresses the unique existential situation of citizens searching for a hopeful narrative about democracy in an era transformed by the tragedy of 9/ II. It also wrestles with the earlier story told by the late Richard Rorty is his 1998 book about Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thollght in Twentieth Century America. Green's story differs from Rorty's in a number of respects, most especially, as the subtitle of her book suggests, because she is determined to conceive of the future of democracy in global terms, and not simply as an American phenomenon (despite the fact that the intellectual resources from which she draws her insights are almost exclusively American).

This paper will address some design concerns relating to philosopher Étienne Souriau's work Les différents modes d'existence (2009). This has important bearings upon design because, first, this philosophical attitude thinks of designing not as an act of forming objects with identity and meaning, but rather as a process of delivering things that allow for a multiplicity of creative remodulation of our very existences. Secondly, Souriau unpicks the concept of a being existing as a unified identity and redefines existence as a creative act of nonstop production of a variety of modes of existence. In doing this he not only moves ontological considerations to the fore of philosophical discussions away from epistemological ones, but does so in such a way as to align with attitudes to ethics that relate it to ontology-notably the work of Spinoza. (This places Souriau in a philosophical lineage that leads back, for example, to Nietzsche and Whitehead, and forward (from his era) to Deleuze and Guattari.) In thinking both ontology and ethics together, this paper will introduce a different approach to the ethics of design.

Małgorzata A. Szyszkowska Metafora w doświadczeniu dzieła muzycznego. Wokół koncepcji Rogera Scrutona "M e ta fo ry nie da się u su n ą ć z opisu m u zyki, p o n ie w a ż określa ona p rze d m io t in te n cjo n a ln y d o ś w ia d czen ia e ste tyczn e g o. U su w a ją c m etaforę, p rze sta je m y o p isyw a ć d o św ia d cze n ie m u zy k i" 1.

This article argues that Ralph Ellison in Three Days Before the Shooting... radicalizes John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy. To that end, the character arc of the black jazzman LeeWillie Minifees, who sets his expensive Cadillac aflame in the public sphere, discloses a dormant revolutionary zeal in Ellison's political imagination. The two narrative spaces Minifees occupies-chapters four and fifteen-articulate a scathing critique of late capitalism and its attendant effect on US democracy. This article therefore posits that Minifees's Cadillac-burning dissent constitutes a mode of creative democratic experimentation that is typical of the Deweyan pragmatic tradition, except that the jazzman's actions suggest that the unmaking of the extant material conditions of existence is a precondition for African American subjects' acquisition of proper political agency. In light of the analysis conducted herein, this article concludes that Minifees's character arc should occasion a reassessment of Ellison's textual politics, which are too often reduced to the thesis that black and white US citizens cannot escape their shared histories.

Dear readers,

Attached is the syllabus for This is Environmental Ethics. I published this new book last year, and am preparing to teach it as a course. I have deep-going moral commitments about not generating royalties from may own students, so I will be donating these dollars to Best Friends Animal Rescue. I hope you find the course and the book of value.

Wendy Lynne Lee
8.16.23.
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While many disciplines have an interest in the environment, its inhabitants and ecosystems, its biotic diversity, and its future stability, it falls to philosophy perhaps more than to any other to offer an environmental ethic. Ethics is never merely about what is the case, but what should be. As an organizing feature of our ways of life, moral decision-making always has one foot in the context of our present actions and another pointed towards the future. A life that lacks self-reflection concerning our place in the many roles we occupy, the impacts our actions have on our relationships with others, human and nonhuman, present and future, is not as likely, as Socrates might have put it, to be a life worth livingespecially as we face the implications not only of resource pollution, clean water scarcity, and food insecurity, but the crisis that dwarfs them all: climate change. Can any 21 st century ethic provide a roadmap to the life worth living? Or are we just checking off days to an ecological apocalypse? What's my personal stake? What's our collective responsibility? How do I know?

At the turn of the twenty-first century, when the call for democracy in China once again becomes intense, it is crucial to pause and to think over what democracy means and in what ways the significances of democracy resonates with Chinese people. Almost a century ago, John Dewey elaborated his understandings of democracy to the Chinese people and made a number of suggestions about how they might work towards democracy. This article examines Dewey's notion of democracy and his legacy to Chinese people, the circumstances that restricted the wider acceptance of Dewey's ideas in China, and some problems in Chinese society that militate against their uptake.

Overall abstract: In discussing the worldwide influence of Dewey's ideas Thomas Popkewitz (2005) has introduced "[t]wo intellectual tools" (p. 9), the notions of 'the indigenous foreigner' and of 'travelling library.' The first focuses on "how particular ideas as modes of living are brought into new contexts in which the 'foreignness' of the ideas are seen as indigenous […]. John Dewey is one such foreigner" (Ibidem). The second "gives focus to the different sets of assemblages, flows, and networks through which intelligibility is give to the changes" (p. 10). On the other hand, Biesta and Miedema (2000) have invited us to take into consideration "context and interaction" when we assess Dewey's influence on the educational discourse of countries other that the US where his ideas originated. Against this backdrop, the proposed symposium aims at contributing to further developing the reflection on how Dewey and hi...

Nas últimas duas décadas a estética do cotidiano tornou-se um importante tema de debate entre fi lósofos de tradição anglófona. Essa teoria contempla a possibilidade de que o cotidiano seja fonte de experiências estéticas, além de realizar uma crítica da tradição. Ambos os elementos também estão presentes e são centrais para a estética pragmatista desenvolvida por John Dewey na primeira metade do século XX. Neste breve ensaio, realiza-se uma aproximação dos dois projetos teóricos por meio de um eixo de questão em comum, a saber, o dilema de como é possível relacionar a estética e a vida cotidiana. Palavras-chave: Estética pragmatista. Estética do cotidiano. Experiência estética. John Dewey.

Artículos
El secreto del encuentro: La poesía de Paul Celan entre hermenéutica y deconstrucción
Andrej Božič
7-34

Las ruinas: Una poética del tiempo
Gustavo Cataldo Sanguinetti
35-69

El cognitivismo estético de John Dewey
Laura Elizia Haubert
71-95

Archivo
Aforismos metódicos de Carl Einstein
Gisela Fabbian, Maximiliano Crespi
99-110

Comentarios bibliográficos
Luciana Martínez y Esteban Ponce. El genio en el siglo XVIII || Viviana Suñol y Lidia Raquel Miranda. La educación en la filosofía antigua
María Nidia Casís, Ariel Vecchio
111-123

Galería
Simulacros
Eduardo Stupía
125

As a way to capture a broadly acceptable high-level characterization of design, we focus on the guiding values or ideals of the discipline. We first reason from the notion of engineering interfaces for usability and utility up to the 1990s to the current ideal of designing interfaces for experience and meaning. Next, we identify three recent technical and societal developments that are challenging the existing ideals of interaction design, namely the move towards hybrid physical/digital materials, the emergence of an increasingly complex and fluid digital ecology, and the increasing proportion of autonomous or partially autonomous systems changing their behavior over time and with use. These challenges in turn motivate us to propose three directions in which new ideals for interaction design might be sought: the first is to go beyond the language-body divide that implicitly frames most of our current understandings of experience and meaning, the second is to extend the scope of interaction design from individual interfaces to the complex sociotechnical fabric of human and nonhuman actors, and the third is to go beyond predictability by learning to design with machine learning.

El presente artículo desarrolla la hipótesis de que existiría en la teoría estética de John Dewey una especie de "cognitivismo suave". Para alcanzar este objetivo, la investigación se ha dividido en cuatro fases. En la primera de ellas, una breve introducción presenta la cuestión del cognitivismo. A continuación, se analiza cómo John Dewey resignifica los conceptos, posibilitando así la formulación de otra teoría. En tercer lugar, se retoma el duodécimo capítulo de su libro El arte como experiencia, de 1934, donde se explica mejor su postura. Por último, a modo de conclusión, se apunta la importancia de esta perspectiva para el diálogo estético contemporáneo.

Welcome, one and all, to volume 32, issue 2 of Education & Culture. I originally began assembling this issue without a specific theme in mind. Nonetheless, as you can see from the title of my remarks, one soon began to emerge. More than a few scholars have commented on an apparent shift in Dewey's later writings that provided a counterbalance to his ardent attention to science in his early-and middle-period works-a so-called aesthetic turn. It seems to me that this move loosely parallels current initiatives in education calling for a broadening of popular curriculum focused on the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) to something like STEAM, which looks to add the arts, in various forms, to this modern-day quadrivium. Not surprisingly, proponents of STEAM now frequently enlist Dewey as a philosophical ally. It also seems to me that the authors in this issue, in their own unique ways, provide tacit support for this initiative in featuring often neglected dimensions of Dewey's work and underscoring their increasing relevance to education and a life well lived. We begin the issue with Larry Hickman's 2015 John Dewey Lecture entitled "What We Can Teach When We Teach (About) Religion." In this timely piece, Hickman appeals to the Pragmatism of James and Dewey in an effort to address the educational and religious needs of three different types of students: (1) those of "an exclusivist persuasion"; (2) those "who [have] been persuaded by relativist claims of deferral and difference"; and (3) those who believe "that religious faith is no longer possible. .. because affiliation with institutional religion is no longer possible." When approached from a Jamesian/Deweyan perspective prioritizing religious experience, Hickman writes, a Pragmatist pedagogy of religion can serve the first type of student by "open[ing] the door to a genuine sense of alternatives in the way of religious belief" responsive to "the effects that advances within the technosciences have had on the objects of religious dogma." Alternatively, the second type of student might begin to acquire a heightened appreciation for "the processes by which effective evaluations of competing religious orientations are possible in the light of the ideals, norms, and goals" that might emerge through a genuine democratic pluralism. Finally, Hickman offers that the third type of student might have the door opened to "an understanding of the potential religious dimensions of all types of experiences, including those that are moral, political, and scientific." Next up is Seth Vannatta's "What Use is Instrumentalism? Conservative Pragmatism in Liberal Learning." Vannatta begins by briefly sketching the main features of the current attack on the liberal arts as inadequate to the vocational needs of both brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

Philosophers approach the issue of an artwork's authenticity in a diverse range of ways. The distinction between original and copied artwork can be examined along the axes of aesthetics, ontology, and culture. It seems conceivable to consider how the experience of the artwork affects its authenticity as well as the art object itself. In the sense of emphasizing not merely the art object but also the experience of, Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura and authenticity of artwork with its presence in time and space may help us better comprehend art. This paper aims to investigate the aesthetic and ontological dimensions of authenticity and argue the point that, rather than these differences, authenticity is more concerned with the experience of art. For this reason, several understandings of the concept of authenticity-that is, the distinction between the original and a copy of an artwork-will be presented. The concept of the experience of art will then be attempted to be illuminated.

Autonomy operates as a key term in debates about the rights of families to choose distinct approaches to education. Yet, what autonomy means is often complicated by the actual circumstances and contexts of schools, families, and children. In this essay, Terri S. Wilson and Matthew A. Ryg focus on the challenges involved in translating an ideal of educational autonomy into the "nonideal" contexts and circumstances that surround families' choices. Drawing on the methodological insights of Elizabeth Anderson and John Dewey, they sketch out a nonideal approach for exploring autonomy. Wilson and Ryg particularly focus on Dewey's notion of an ideal, his treatment of autonomy as a concept, and his view of the self. Such a nonideal approach draws attention toward the specific circumstances, habits, and environments that make autonomy possible. Wilson and Ryg illustrate the salience of this nonideal approach by exploring one example of an empirically engaged study of autonomy.

My work aims to focus on the intersections between aesthetics, intergenerational values, and climate change while exploring some core questions. How do aesthetic values interact with the construction of social and intergenerational values? Can the aesthetic experience of art have any influence on our attitudes toward the environment? These questions are related to the broader question: is the aesthetic experience of art connected to the aesthetic experience of nature? The thesis underlying this paper is that aesthetic appreciation of nature and art mutually influence each other. To prove this claim, I propose a Deweyan and pluralistic approach to environmental aesthetics that interacts with the fields of neuroaesthetics and intergenerational thinking. The key concept on which my proposal rests is the Deweyan connection between aesthetics and experience.

This case study discusses the controversy that arose between Randolph Bourne and John Dewey over the 1918 American edition of F. Matthias Alexander’s book ―Man’s Supreme Inheritance.‖ Not only is the history surrounding the 1918 American and especially the 1918 British edition of the book a jumble of facts and distortions, but it seems that even now, more than a century later, secrets are coming to light, secrets that beg for an explanation. Some are explained, but a great mystery remains for which no explanation can be given: Why did John Dewey have a private letter to Randolph Bourne published in the 1918 British edition of Alexander’s book? This case study is an update of the text of a 1994 booklet discussing the 1918 Bourne-Dewey controversy, incorporating new finds into the 1994 detective tale.

El presente ensayo aborda el problema de la comunicación tal cual es desplegado por el guion cinematográfico Homo-Humus y por el largometraje Mburucuyá, cuadros de la naturaleza de Jorge Acha. Ambas obras se enfocan en una parte del viaje de Alexander von Humboldt y Aimé Bonpland por Sudamérica, específicamente su estadía en la selva del Orinoco y su contacto con el pueblo yaruro. Humboldt contempla extática y estéticamente la naturaleza pero esa forma de relacionarse con el ambiente está en función de recolectar especímenes y realizar mediciones de todo tipo sin comprender cómo ese proceder afecta a la cosmovisión de los indígenas. Esta contradicción marca una división interna al propio Humboldt. Bonpland, por su parte, se aparta de la actitud de Alexander cuando se mimetiza con la población local, encarnando así una forma alternativa de conocimiento. Los yaruros, a su vez, mantienen una relación poética con el entorno, su manera de comunicarse, a diferencia de la de Humboldt, no rompe el continuum entre cultura y naturaleza. Acha propone, como salida comunicativa al desencuentro, que los europeos e indígenas se coman los piojos mutuamente, que confraternicen carnal y horizontalmente.

This essay interrogates the aesthetic ground of Ponzio and Petrilli's 2003 concept "semioethics" as activated by what they call a "logic of otherness". I take my lead from Charles S. Peirce's assertion that "Ethics, or the science of right and wrong, must appeal to Esthetics for aid in determining the summum bonum" (1903: CP 1.191). Given that Peirce's esthetics, depicted as the first of his normative sciences, "ought to repose on phenomenology" (ibid.: CP 1.191), I offer a communicological analysis (i.e., a phenomenological interpretation of the operative aesthetic sign actions of a semioethic). To accomplish this, I turn to fellow American philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey, whose experiential aesthetics offers insights into Peirce's claims. Dewey's understanding of the importance of semiotic "form" and existential or embodied "rhythm", when applied to dialogic relations, reveals phenomenological "felt qualities" and their reflexive semiotic relation to what I call "embodied intensities". We discover that, when mediated by emotional or energetic interpretants, felt qualities and embodied intensities provide both the necessary and sufficient conditions for a logic of otherness that makes an ethical stance even possible. I contend that our human relationality remains precarious in our global, digitalized environment as long as we disregard or fail to perceive, appreciate, and cultivate this aesthetic phenomenological ground of otherness.

Essa terceira edição do Seminário, realizado em setembro de 2017, foi dedicada à relação entre as diferentes artes e os processos coletivos, tais como, no caso brasileiro, as manifestações de julho de 2013, a ocupação das escolas pelos alunos secundaristas em 2015, e as ocupações de áreas urbanas pelo "Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto", desde o fim dos anos 1990; entre outras formas de resistência ao retrocesso político, econômico e social, ainda em curso, que determina como natural a ordem neoliberal. Agradecemos aos professores convidados e aos pesquisadores de diferentes universidades que apresentaram suas pesquisas sobre as relações entre estética e política. Foram examinados os agenciamentos estéticos no sistema das artes ou no espaço público evidenciando a mobilidade das fronteiras entre arte e não-arte; os regimes da imagem na sociedade das mídias de massa e da rede digital; o dito retorno do real em certa literatura e teatro contemporâneos, entre outros temas relevantes no debate estético do presente. Agradeço, por fim, aos membros do "Grupo de estudos de estética contemporânea" pelo empenho solidário que tornou possível tanto a organização do III Seminário, quanto à publicação desses anais:

In some ways, the inaugural thought of the Western tradition is Aristotle's, repeated with regard to almost every subject matter he investigated. We could call this thought teleology, technology, or means-ends rationality. Here is the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics: "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." This notion reappears in fits and starts throughout the tradition and has a particularly fraught relation to Christianity. But in Adam Smith's economics and in utilitarian ethics, as well as in the economic and political orders they reflect, it reasserts its dominance. And in pragmatism, teleology becomes a theory of all value, and in particular a theory of truth. The West, however, also suffers from teleology, or from (in the current phases) "excellence" or a "purpose-driven life." And it is possible for a planet to suffer from our enthusiasm for its technological transformation. Within the Western tradition, the Eastern tradition is read as a cure for teleology, as a place where ends are annihilated into being, or into immediacy, in which one lets go of purpose and finds peace. This essay explores that imaginary construction of teleology's Asian other. But even Aristotle, and even the pragmatists, felt an urgency to collapse ends into means, to find meaning in the process as well as the products of living. They found it, I propose, in perhaps the zone where West meets the West's East-in the concept of art, particularly as set out in Dewey's great work of aesthetics, Art as Experience. I Let's begin by asking some basic questions about human action, truth, art, and the relation of means and ends: Crispin Sartwell is associate professor of art and art history at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books, including Six Names of Beauty (Routledge, 2004).