Pragmatism is experiencing a powerful revival. But the new pragmatism has not yet expressed itself in a new aesthetic, and not since Dewey's Art as Experience has there been a comprehensive pragmatist treatment of this field. Shusterman's bold and lively book fills the gap by proposing a pragmatist aesthetics for our current postmodern condition. Pragmatist Aesthetics treats the traditionally central topics of aesthetics: the definition of art, aesthetic experience and value, form and unity, interpretation, and the cognitive and moral worth (...) of art. But it also directs philosophical aesthetics towards a much wider and more socially pertinent agenda by considering such contemporary issues as the institutionalization and cultural oppression of art, the aesthetic legitimacy of popular culture, and the ethical art of living beauty through the stylization of conduct and the aesthetic construction of the self. Gracefully but vigorously argued, Pragmatist Aesthetics is an important book which breaks new ground and liberates new areas and directions for philosophical inquiry. Its wide-ranging breadth and accessible style will appeal to all readers with an interest in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics and cultural studies. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell is concerned in this book with the foundations of knowledge. He approaches his subject through a discussion of language, the relationships of truth to experience and an investigation into how knowledge of the structure of language helps our understanding of the structure of the world. This edition includes a new introduction by Thomas Baldwin, Clare College, Cambridge.

This is the leading, full-scale comprehensive dictionary of philosophical terms and thinkers to appear in English in more than half a century. Written by a team of more than 550 experts and now widely translated, it contains approximately 5,000 entries ranging from short definitions to longer articles. It is designed to facilitate the understanding of philosophy at all levels and in all fields. Key features of this third edition include: • 500 new entries covering Eastern as well as Western philosophy, (...) and covering individual countries such as China, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain • Increased coverage of such growing fields as ethics and philosophy of mind • More than 100 new intellectual portraits of leading contemporary thinkers • Wider coverage of Continental philosophy • Dozens of new technical concepts in cognitive science and other areas • Enhanced cross-referencing to add context and increase understanding • Expansions in both text and index to facilitate research and browsing. (shrink)

Late Dewey on democracy and its social and political roles in American society. Republished in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925-1953, Vol. 14.

With mention of Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning, and drawing on Mailinowski, for an opening example, Dewey argues for the importance of the relationship of interpretation and meaning, to context and and situation of usage or utterance. In this article, Dewey expounds, among other themes, on the the prospect of interpretation of a radically alien language and what this prospect tells us about linguistic meaning.

The Aesthetic Field develops an account of aesthetic experience that distinguishes four mutually interacting factors: the creative factor represented primarily by the artist; the appreciative one by the viewer, listener, or reader; the objective factor by the art object, which is the focus of the experience; and the performative by the activator of the aesthetic occurrence. Each of these factors both affects all the others and is in turn influenced by them, so none can be adequately considered apart from them. (...) Thus aesthetic appreciation, for example, has creative, objective, and performative aspects. This situation of four factors, together with social, cultural, technological, and historical influences on them, is called the aesthetic field. Although the factors are theoretically distinguishable, they are experienced as a unity. It is important, therefore, not to confound the theoretical explanation of aesthetic experience with the experience, itself. The aesthetic field has important implications for understanding the various individual arts, new developments in the arts, and the critical appraisal of the arts. Moreover, the concept transforms traditional issues in aesthetics. (shrink)

Preface This volume contains essays written during the period 1972-1980. They are arranged roughly in order of composition. Except for the Introduction, ...

überall einen richtigen Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft giebt, in welchem Fall es auch einen Canon derselben geben muß, so wird dieser nicht den speculativen, sondernden pr.ntischen Vernunftgebrauch betreffen, den wir also iezt ...

Widely acclaimed as the most authoritative and accessible one-volume dictionary available in English this second edition offers an even richer, more comprehensive, and more up-to-date survey of ideas and thinkers written by an international team of 436 contributors. Includes the most comprehensive entries on major philosophers, 400 new entries including over 50 on preeminent contemporary philosophers, extensive coverage of rapidly developing fields such as the philosophy of mind and applied ethics, more entries on non-Western philosophy than any comparable volume, and (...) increased coverage of Continental philosophy. (shrink)

This Critical Reader provides a new perspective on the work of France's foremost social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, by examining its philosophical import and promoting a fruitful dialogue between Bourdieu and philosophers in the English-speaking world. The contributors include leading philosophers who critically assess Bourdieu's philosophical theories and their significance from diverse philosophical perspectives to reveal which dimensions of his thought are the most useful for philosophy today. These discussions also raise important questions about the current institutional limits of philosophy and (...) how those limits may be overcome through a more robust alliance with the social sciences and the practical social world. The contributions cover Bourdieu's use of central figures in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition; his relationship to analytical philosophy and pragmatism through his concept of habitus; his position in twentieth-century continental philosophy; the political dimension of his work; the function and limits of his notion of "the field"; and the relation of his explanatory models to new directions in the philosophy of science. The book also discusses some of his most recent writing not yet translated into English, and it concludes with a chapter by Bourdieu in which he analyses the diverse structural problems and the transformations involved in importing intellectual ideas from one national field to another. The volume also offers a specially prepared comprehensive bibliography of Bourdieu's publications in French and English from 1958 to 1998. (shrink)

This much acclaimed book has emerged as neo-pragmatism's most significant contribution to contemporary aesthetics.

Written with verve and intensity (and a good bit of wordplay), this is the long-awaited study of Flaubert and the modern literary field that constitutes the ...

Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

Hickman situates Dewey’s critique of technological culture within the debates of 20th-century Western philosophy by engaging the work of Richard Rorty, Albert Borgmann, Jacques Ellul, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Martin ...

"... a comprehensive canvass of Dewey’s logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of history, and social thought."—Choice "... a major addition to the recent accumulation of in-depth studies of Dewey." —Journal of Speculative Philosophy "Larry Hickman has done an exemplary job in demonstrating the relevance of John Dewey’s philosophy to modern-day discussions of technology."—Ethics.

If aesthetics is both surface and depth, impassioned immediacy yet also critical distance of judgment, how can this doubleness be held together in one ...

Applying contemporary pragmatism to the crucial question of how philosophy can help us live better, Shusterman develops his distinctive aesthetic model of philosophical living that includes politics, somatics, and ethnicity, while critically engaging the rival views of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Foucault, as well as Rorty, Putnam, Goodman, Habermas, and Cavell.

Annotation In this provocative book, Philip W. Jackson examines John Dewey's thinking about the arts and its implications for educational practices. Jackson discusses Dewey's aesthetic theory, considers the transformative power of the experience of art, and shows in specific instances how the application of Dewey's view of the arts would improve learning experiences.