This chapter contains sections titled: The Bike as a Vehicle for Meaningful Suffering Suffering as the Hub of the Tour de France Share the Road! (And the Pain) Phil and Paul, and the Extension of Meaningful Suffering Of Suffering and Bicycles Notes.

Mark Johnson’s work The Meaning of the Body presents John Dewey’s pragmatism and pragmatist aesthetics as the forerunners of the anti-Cartesian embodied enactive approach to human experience and meaning. He rejects the Kantian noncognitive character of aesthetics and emphasizes that aesthetics is the study of the human capacity to experience the bodily conditions of meaning constitution that grows from our bodily conditions of life. Using Mark Johnson’s view as a starting-point, this paper offers the (...) beginning of an enactive approach to aesthetic preference contributing to bringing human aesthetic behavior research closer to the enactive approach to human experience. Following enactive studies on bodily sense-making and embodied emotions, I identify the bodily conditions of meaning constitution in which aesthetic preference is grounded with the subject’s self-regulatory visceral embodied constitution of viable degrees of value of the environmental factors according to her bodily structure. Unlike mainstream aesthetic preference research in empirical aesthetics, I claim that the subject’s aesthetic preference constitution requires the lived experience of the bodily conditions of meaning constitution through the conscious experience of the subjectively aroused lived body. The implausibility of the mind/body dichotomy of current aesthetic preference research is highlighted. (shrink)

In his 1934 book Art as Experience John Dewey explores the relationship between human experience and art. His theory builds on the conception of experience inspired by Darwinian biology as the dyna...

The author emphasize the fact, that the world of really existing compound and distinct things leads to the first questions in our spontaneous cognition of the world, such as: "What is it?", "What for?" Spontaneous cognition thus means the primary, direct experience of the real world, which is the basis of common sense. From common sense arise the first fundamental principles of thought and knowledge, such as "For that, what is, it is impossible not to be", expressed in natural language. (...) Although the designations and functions of the natural language are manifold, the rules of its real meanings are determined by the reality itself. All this pre-scientific, spontaneous cognition enters philosophy, being a necessary and sufficient starting point for the epistemological realism, which offers the way leading to the know_ledge of the real world. The common sense knowledge, based on natural language, prevents the philosophical knowledge from apriori formulations in interpretation of reality. The realistic philosophy thus must meet the natural needs of human know_ledge. This can be achieved through developing the common sense knowledge in the frame of realistic knowledge. (shrink)

John Dewey puts aesthetic experience at the center of his reflection on art and beauty, reconsidering it dynamically. Nowadays, this view opened the path to somaesthetics, a term coined by Richard Shusterman, and aesthetic anthropology. Here, it is argued that the contribution of pragmatist aesthetics could be further developed by exploring its analogies with techno-aesthetics, a paradigm proposed by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon in the early 1980s. Art occupies accordingly a special place within the different forms of aesthetic experience, (...) being considered as a way of experimenting the impact of new technologies in the human experience. It is a process by which technologies create ‘devices’ for experimenting perception and reflection: namely, ways of reconstructing the nature of the human mind in-between body and technology, and by means of their interaction. Cinema reconsidered after Dewey’s fellow George H. Mead, offers an exemplary case as both artistic and technological devices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sources of MemoryJeffrey Andrew Barash“What does it mean to remember?” This question might seem commonplace when it is confined to the domain of events recalled in past individual experience; but even in this restricted sense, when memory recalls, for example, a first personal encounter with birth or with death, the singularity of the remembered image places the deeper possibilities of human understanding in relief. Such experiences punctuating (...) everyday life highlight the central place of memory as a source of human identity.With a few notable exceptions, such as Henri Bergson or Maurice Halb-wachs, this central role of memory was rarely a topic of interest in the theoretical orientations of our century. It played only a peripheral role in the different philosophical orientations and in the human sciences of this century until, very recently, new attempts have been made to comprehend the significance of memory, above all in the fields of intellectual history and philosophy. Without dealing exhaustively with the bibliography of works on memory, I will mention what seem to me to be the signs of a recent renewal of questioning in this area of interest to historians and philosophers alike. This will lead me to the specific problem I will address in the pages that follow.One of the chief sources of the historian’s recent interest in memory has been the historians’ conflict (Historikerstreit) of the 1980s concerning the interpretation of the German and European past since the rise to power of Nazism and in the aftermath of World War II. As the generations who lived through and—from a given perspective—remembered these events increasingly disappear, the question concerning their precise historical meaning has reemerged with a new urgency. In this vein, for example, as the relatively new periodical History and Memory: Studies in the Representation of the Past and the collection of essays Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” edited by Saul Friedlander, amply attest, the relation of memory to historical narrative is as important as it is problematic: to the extent that eyewitness memory claims a status of objectivity beyond the fictional sphere of [End Page 707] the imagination, its role in informing historical narrative involves the very issue of objectivity itself. 1Independently of this query concerning the relation of memory and history in recent scholarship focusing on the twentieth century, a number of studies have attempted to place the idea of memory in historical perspective during premodern periods. In this regard, we may cite Janet Coleman’s recently published work, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past and Mary Carruthers’s treatment of the subject of memory in the medieval period in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2 A number of other recent works in the field of intellectual history have attempted to grapple with the intriguing problem of the historicity of the phenomenon of memory in the West. This idea of the historicity of memory has been inspired at least in part by Pierre Nora’s essay, “Between Memory and History,” which introduced the multi-volume series he directed, Les Lieux de mémoire. In this vein, Patrick H. Hutton’s History as an Art of Memory, Matt K. Matsuda’s The Memory of the Modern, and Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis all center on the historical transforma-tions to which, according to the different perspectives of their works, “memory” has been subject. 3 Like Nora, they link this historicity of the social and cultural role of memory to the radical transformations that Western civilization has undergone in the modern period.In a philosophical perspective David Farrell Krell’s work, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge, presents a very different idea of the phenomenon of memory. 4 Where the intellectual historians of modernity stress the mutations in the role of memory, Krell, following in the footsteps of Jacques Derrida, emphasizes one essential line of continuity that, to his mind, has tied [End Page 708] together the tradition of philosophical reflection on memory from Plato and Aristotle up until Freud: the metaphoric reference to memory as the faculty... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aesthetic Classroom and the Beautiful GameBradley Baurain (bio)IntroductionSoccer fans will not be surprised that understanding "the beautiful game" can contribute to understandings of teaching and learning. After all, at least one theorist sees "the nature of all social life" to be reflected in soccer: "The unfolding match between team-mates and opponents [illustrates] … the interdependency of human beings, and the 'flexible lattice-work of tensions' generated through their (...) social bonds. Power flows fluidly between players, jockeying for possession and moving between attack and defence."1 Another finds striking parallels between cultural history and tactics of play in soccer, including a "modernist" period emphasizing cautious ball control and defense-oriented player formations, and the current "postmodern" style emphasizing creativity and fluidity; he even identifies the history of the free kick as a microcosm of the whole.2The idea I explore in this essay is in a sense simply an extended analogy: A well-played soccer game has much in common with a well-taught lesson or course. Features of the one are set for comparison and discussion alongside features of the other. Yet, as with any good analogy, matters are not really so simple. One makes the comparison so that the juxtaposed items inform and illuminate one another—that is, one looks at a thing in order to see a different thing more clearly. So while I contend that soccer has much in common with teaching, the reverse is also true; I am not using soccer only as a "way through" to teaching. Neither of my terms of comparison are merely means to an end; instead both are ends in themselves. Reading the soccer parts of this essay will, I trust, inform and illuminate teaching and [End Page 50] curriculum, but at the same time my goal is for any soccer player who might read the teaching parts also to learn something about "the beautiful game."Soccer, "the beautiful game," is an apt comparison for the aesthetic classroom. My thoughts on what characterizes aesthetic teaching will emerge and take on flesh as this essay develops, but let me begin by describing it as "concerned for acts of mind as opposed to end products, fluidity and imagination rather than fixed sequence, judgment within learning experiences in contrast to deciding everything in advance, and dwelling with subject matter rather than merely covering subject matter."3 As Wanda May comments: "I suggest that when teaching is done well … it is a work of art because we reconfigure and decorate our spaces, make our marks, elevate ourselves and others above confinement, routine, and the mundane. We expand our capacity to see, hear, love, critique, and act on our possibilities in the world."4 I could as easily have applied both of these quotations to soccer. It is no accident that John Dewey links sports with the aesthetic: "Dance and sport are activities in which acts once performed spontaneously in separation are assembled and converted from raw, crude material into works of expressive art."5I anchor my discussion in four concepts foundational to the aesthetic classroom: play, relationality, process, and flow. My analysis of each of these key ideas moves back and forth among soccer, aesthetic and pedagogical theory, and classroom research and narratives. Examples, including those from my own experience, are drawn primarily from the related fields of language education and English as a Second Language (ESL). If soccer and the classroom can have much in common, another way of introducing this essay is to say that I spend it trying to see what takes place in the gaps, in the "muchness" that lies between the two terms of the analogy. I hope that readers will "make much" of this, too, for without them the seeing remains incomplete.The Concept of Play, Playing with ConceptsThough it has become a multibillion-dollar global business, at its best soccer is play: "We play sport, we don't work sport."6 Play means having fun and inspiring joy, but this sense of freedom does not mean play is unstructured. Games have rules, skills, procedures, and boundaries, and these features enable rather than constrain. From Dewey's point of view, they are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dante’s Vision and the Circle of KnowledgeAnthony RodaDante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, by Giuseppe Mazzotta; 328 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, $37.50.Future students of Dante, The Divine Comedy, literature, criticism, the history of ideas, theology, philosophy, and many other disciplines will be in permanent debt to Giuseppe Mazzotta for his keen study of Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. While tracing the principal streams (...) of Western thought which irrigate Dante’s fertile genius, Mazzotta reconstructs the intellectual topography of Dante’s Europe and show how “l’altissimo poeta” reorders and refines it and arrives at a radical reformulation of the foundation of knowledge in contrast to the standard philosophical and theological currents of the times. This new vision of the foundation of knowledge is the central concern of The Divine Comedy which for Mazzotta provides a world view no less monumental than the synthesis of the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions of Thomas Aquinas. Perhaps, more so, for he argues Dante’s great epic provides not only an alternative epistemology but one which captures much more adequately the human historical experience.Vico’s insights, a thorough familiarity of Dante’s sources and his alert appreciation of the unique treatment these sources receive in the context of “la commedia divina” supply Mazzotta with a theoretical framework for his own brilliant critical, historical, and etymological analyses. He marshals these researches around his overriding concern to show that inherent within the Comedy is the view of “poetry as nothing less than the foundation of all possible knowledge” (p. 3). Dante’s radical claim is designed to provide an account which accords with the educational and intellectual development of the individual within history. Consequently for Mazzotta, Dante’s poetic (metaphorical) mode attempts to reconcile what must have been an intellectual and moral landscape of hopeless contradictory systems and projects. Dante’s poem [End Page 194] provides a vivid survey of the breakdown of human bonds, human projects, and human justice and suggests a corrective that escaped the methods of reason, as well as those of the mystic’s. Since both of these are at bottom antihistorical, they attempted to deny conflict and uncertainty (Dewey’s ultimate traits of experience).The above comments should suggest both the general appeal as well as, and I must emphasize, the high level of scholarship Mazzotta exhibits in his project which is arranged into three parts. The first part (Chapter 1–5) is devoted to “poetry and the arts of language,” and a quick glance at these chapters reveals that it is concerned with that part of the liberal arts called the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic). In addition to their educational role, the author examines the role and intricate connections these disciplines have to the central social structures of the times. Consequently, these are not mere sterile academic exercises but serious attempts that show the intimate connections between methods of knowing (discourses) and social structures, especially authority in all of its modes (moral, intellectual, political, etc.). Further, by virtue of this, he shows the need for a reexamination of knowledge which does justice to the lived experiences of the individual and to which the second part (Chapters 6–8) is devoted. Briefly, this means coming to terms with language, memory, imagination, dreams and visions, and that great nightmare, human history. It also invokes the aesthetic (poetic/metaphorical) foundations of all knowledge in contrast to the Cartesian dismissal. The claim, however, enlightening for the Comedy, is controversial as a general tenet and demands will be forthcoming for an evaluation, even though there is much good work in philosophy which lends support to it, e.g., Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses, R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art, and Lewis E. Hahn’s A Contextualistic Theory of Perception, etc.In the last part (Chapters 9–11) Mazzotta argues that Dante’s final organizing vision figures the world sub specie ludi. These chapters examine the problems and experiences of order, transgression and exile which for Mazzotta demand a Theologia Ludens whose roots are imbedded deep in Aristotle’s Ethics and expressed by the virtue of eutrapelia, “a... (shrink)

In his article, "The End of Aesthetic Experience" (1997) Richard Shusterman studies the contemporary fate of aesthetic experience, which has long been regarded as one of the core concepts of Western aesthetics till the last half century. It has then expanded into an umbrella concept for aesthetic notions such as the sublime and the picturesque. I agree with Shusterman that aesthetic experience has become the island of freedom, beauty, and idealistic meaning in an otherwise cold materialistic and law-determined world. (...) My paper starts from the main dimensions of aesthetic experience in the history of Western aesthetics as concluded by Shusterman. In terms of our experiential practices in the fragmentation of modern life and the disjointed sensationalism of the media, I also agree with Shusterman that people are losing the capacity for deep experience and feeling, especially when we are undergoing various extensive series of informational revolutions. My paper is also a response to Shusterman's claim that the concept of aesthetic experience is worth recalling, not for formal definition but for art's reorientation toward values and populations that could restore its vitality and sense of purpose. I mention the recent calls for values and life concerns in art in the Anglo-American aesthetics circles, which has also turned to the possible strength of aesthetic experience, claiming that "Aesthetics is the Mother of Ethics." Amidst the discourse is the review of John Dewey's notion of "aesthetic experience," which claims to support a transcultural view and common patterns, as the relationship is structured around human needs. A basic question posed in the article is whether this Deweyan notion still remains equally influential as in the past and whether it really provides a satisfying answer to the problem of art and value? The discussion will turn then to neo-Confucian aesthetic models for reference, and to point out some meaningful comparative revelations. (shrink)

In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modern philosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers (...) at the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work. In Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Dewey argues that modern philosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment. Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy. (shrink)

Deflationary views have emerged in many areas of philosophy over the past several decades. In the art world, one of the most significant deflationary approaches toward aesthetic experience has been taken by Noël Carroll in his collection of essays, Beyond Aesthetics (2001). The modus operandi of such an approach, according to Carroll, is to emphasize the context (historical, cultural, political, etc.) in which an art experience is embedded and explain its significance relative to a particular narrative. Interestingly, there is a (...) precursor to this type of view that predates it by roughly eighty years. This is the account of aesthetic experience given by John Dewey. Although Carroll acknowledges Dewey’s contribution to the concept of aesthetic experience, he fails to see how Dewey laid some of the groundwork for not only his own deflationary account but also for a conception of aesthetic experience that is continuous with other facets of human experience. This paper will highlight the similarities between the two approaches with the aim of establishing Dewey’s work as a forerunner to deflationary-type approaches. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic (...) expression. Over." --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic (...) expression. Over." --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

The “Neuronal man”, as Changeux has called him, is now credited with an aesthetic mind. This mind is not the “Geist” of the philosophical tradition. The cognitive sciences have took over from philosophy and now they deal with art and aesthetics as they do with whatever aspect of human thought, experience and activity. Philosophers like Kant were interested in the empirical sources of beauty, but for him empirical features of its development did not change anything at all to its (...) very essence. The naturalism implemented in the philosophy of mind and sciences of cognition has changed the terms of the question, so that the main point in discussion is whether aesthetic experience can be explained in terms of brain and/or computational process or whether it should be considered as irreductible to empirical or physical facts. These debates can be seen as new and interesting, but they drive directly to an aporia reminding in a certain way the old debate between the "Sons of the ground" and the "Friends of ideas". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningFrank X. RyanDewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience Bethany Henning. Lexington Books, 2022.In this important and splendidly crafted book, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom distinct from the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. Unlike the psychological atomism of European Empiricism, from its outset, American philosophy embraced nature's aesthetic splendor (...) and the continuity between our thought and our world. Jonathan Edwards held that relations among ideas reflect beauty in the structure of being. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" where the cultivation of nature's spontaneous beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom Henning touts "aesthetic experience as the highest mode of human experience" (55).Although the aesthetic is generally associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, of special significance for Dewey is its non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In so doing, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism that masks our history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Despite America's disdain for psychoanalysis, Henning wonders whether it "could have accepted a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10).Dewey's alternative, says Henning, arises from his underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy. In Henning's interpretation of this, meaning is embodied as a "sense of fulfillment" among accumulated habits—a "coming to terms with the world around us" through an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world." As such, to appreciate meaning, we must affirm the tacit, unconscious depth of experience; that is, we must "welcome aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (5).Embodied meaning signifies that "the sensuous, lived body" is "the primary reality" (69). In this reality, qualitative immediacy is a non-reflective, aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs. Such needs are satisfied in organism-environment interactions where, says Dewey, "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins" (LW 10:61). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the [End Page 114] brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). As such, the body-mind relation is a problem of aesthetics, not epistemology. For Dewey, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body "is the organic and dynamic condition of my thought" (75). The body is not a thing, however, but a process "always organically involved in exchanges" (86).Following the feminist thought of Susan Bordo, Henning agrees that the ascendance of the body amounts to a kind of philosophical recovery. Seventeenth-century science eviscerated the organic "female" universe of the Middle Ages. But this loss of an integrated world evoked existential fright, which Descartes tried to calm by subjugating feminine vagaries of the body to a masculine cognitive certitude bent upon controlling the whole of nature. In America today, this neurosis perpetuates our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, it is possible to acknowledge and address this trauma."Feeling," in Dewey's sense, is unconsciously affective: a constant rhythm of disequilibrium and equilibrium, of need and resolution noticed only when a problem rises to the point of requiring our conscious attention. This affective "charge," this rhythm of sensed need and the desire to overcome it, is Dewey's appropriation of Plato's Erōs. Thomas Alexander casts Dewey's Erōs broadly as humanity's aesthetic investment in our world—our collective effort "to transform a biophysical environment into a world filled with meaning" (Alexander 11). But Henning turns to the more familiar sense of Erōs attuned not to the world at... (shrink)

The article aims to demonstrate to what extent the work Art as Experience by the American philosopher and pedagogist John Dewey, a proponent of pedagogical activism, may have contributed to Loris Malaguzzi’s thought and the Reggio Emilia Approach. Starting from the idea of an aesthetic experience as a privileged means of knowledge, the comparison between the two authors continues through reflections on the relationship between art-community and art-ethics. The dialogue between these important educational approaches is proposed in order to (...) highlight their relevance and the role they could play in today’s schools thanks to the concept of knowledge based on the senses and on doing, contributing to the sensitisation of educational action towards the social aspect of art, both as an opening towards the community, and as a reflection on the values of the human being. The dialogue between these two important educational approaches is proposed in order to highlight their relevance and the role they could play in today's schools thanks to the concept of knowledge based on the senses and on doing, contributing to the sensitisation of educational action towards the social aspect of art, both as an opening towards the community, and as a reflection on the values of the human being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatist Aesthetics and New Visions of the Contemporary Art Museum:The Tate Modern and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary ArtAngela Marsh (bio)John Dewey mandated the repositioning of our experience of art within the realm of the everyday, and recognized the importance of art objects principally with regard to how they operate within an experience as "carriers of meaning."1 In this quote from Art as Experience, Dewey illustrates (...) the segue between art and the perceiver, and his belief that within the profound art experience, lived dichotomies are healed:In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.2Although the ephemeral nature of Dewey's definition of art-as-experience — hinged upon immediacy and the subjective heuristics of the perceiver — may seem difficult to capture and apply, the practicality of the concept, Richard Shusterman argues, lies in its "transformative potential," as a way to reconceive the place of art and its function in our world:Defining art as experience, I argue, also has value in widening the realmof art by challenging the rigid definition between art and action that is supported by definitions that define art as mimesis, poiesis, or the narrow practice as defined by the institutional art world. In other words, I argue that Dewey's definition of art as experience has a very fruitful transformational potential.3By defining art as experience, Dewey also sought to dissolve the binary structures of aesthetic rifts: art and life, high art and low art, body and mind, subject and object, self and world, emphasizing the holistic action in our engagement with art.4 But according to Dewey, the divisor of art from life and thus to blame for the aesthetic barrenness of our lived reality is the museum institution, as Shusterman describes: [End Page 91]The compartmentalization and spiritualization of art as an elevated "separate realm" set "upon a far-off pedestal," divorced from the materials and aims of other human effort, has removed art from the lives of most of us, and thus impoverished the aesthetic quality of our lives.(PA, 19)However, we must keep in mind that Art as Experience was published in 1934. Today, new approaches towards encounter and engagement within public museums are taking form and gaining momentum, with unprecedented directorial visions and mandates designed to nurture and make accessible art-based experiences among diverse audiences — where art and life can meet via multiple approaches. Theoretical synchronicities between pragmatist approaches to aesthetics and fruitful museum experiences can be suggested upon consideration of various innovative programs and approaches initiated at the Tate Modern in London and the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The overwhelming success of both venues could signify a reengagement of the general public with contemporary art, fed by "democratic," participatory approaches to exhibiting and programming art that make the museum more accessible to the various mixed publics it serves. In light of these new museological developments, Dewey's polemic oppositions between his conceptualizations of the museum experience and "art-as-experience" should be reexamined and possibly redefined.Dewey was entirely opposed to the concept of "art for art's sake." By exonerating art of any functional value — deeming it "fine" — art was elevated to a position separate from life, and thus rendered impotent to effect a lived aesthetic experience (which is how, Dewey would argue, the arts function most powerfully — as the purveyors of heightened experience). As Shusterman describes:The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm of instrumental value...and this freedom from use would be its defining and ennobling feature.(PA, 9)Dewey (and Shusterman) thus maintained that the very power construct that put the "fine" in art did so by removing the aspect of function from it. As previously stated, Dewey blamed museum institutions for removing art from its... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatist Aesthetics and New Visions of the Contemporary Art Museum:The Tate Modern and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary ArtAngela Marsh (bio)John Dewey mandated the repositioning of our experience of art within the realm of the everyday, and recognized the importance of art objects principally with regard to how they operate within an experience as "carriers of meaning."1 In this quote from Art as Experience, Dewey illustrates (...) the segue between art and the perceiver, and his belief that within the profound art experience, lived dichotomies are healed:In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.2Although the ephemeral nature of Dewey's definition of art-as-experience — hinged upon immediacy and the subjective heuristics of the perceiver — may seem difficult to capture and apply, the practicality of the concept, Richard Shusterman argues, lies in its "transformative potential," as a way to reconceive the place of art and its function in our world:Defining art as experience, I argue, also has value in widening the realmof art by challenging the rigid definition between art and action that is supported by definitions that define art as mimesis, poiesis, or the narrow practice as defined by the institutional art world. In other words, I argue that Dewey's definition of art as experience has a very fruitful transformational potential.3By defining art as experience, Dewey also sought to dissolve the binary structures of aesthetic rifts: art and life, high art and low art, body and mind, subject and object, self and world, emphasizing the holistic action in our engagement with art.4 But according to Dewey, the divisor of art from life and thus to blame for the aesthetic barrenness of our lived reality is the museum institution, as Shusterman describes: [End Page 91]The compartmentalization and spiritualization of art as an elevated "separate realm" set "upon a far-off pedestal," divorced from the materials and aims of other human effort, has removed art from the lives of most of us, and thus impoverished the aesthetic quality of our lives.(PA, 19)However, we must keep in mind that Art as Experience was published in 1934. Today, new approaches towards encounter and engagement within public museums are taking form and gaining momentum, with unprecedented directorial visions and mandates designed to nurture and make accessible art-based experiences among diverse audiences — where art and life can meet via multiple approaches. Theoretical synchronicities between pragmatist approaches to aesthetics and fruitful museum experiences can be suggested upon consideration of various innovative programs and approaches initiated at the Tate Modern in London and the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The overwhelming success of both venues could signify a reengagement of the general public with contemporary art, fed by "democratic," participatory approaches to exhibiting and programming art that make the museum more accessible to the various mixed publics it serves. In light of these new museological developments, Dewey's polemic oppositions between his conceptualizations of the museum experience and "art-as-experience" should be reexamined and possibly redefined.Dewey was entirely opposed to the concept of "art for art's sake." By exonerating art of any functional value — deeming it "fine" — art was elevated to a position separate from life, and thus rendered impotent to effect a lived aesthetic experience (which is how, Dewey would argue, the arts function most powerfully — as the purveyors of heightened experience). As Shusterman describes:The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm of instrumental value...and this freedom from use would be its defining and ennobling feature.(PA, 9)Dewey (and Shusterman) thus maintained that the very power construct that put the "fine" in art did so by removing the aspect of function from it. As previously stated, Dewey blamed museum institutions for removing art from its... (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of (...) enchanted fantasy, and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

ALTHOUGH OVERLOOKED, THE SUBJECT OF LOCKE’S "THE REASONABLENESS OF CHRISTIANITY" WAS JUSTIFICATION, WHICH HE WROTE ON BECAUSE OF CONTEMPORARY DEBATES ON THE SUBJECT. HE RESTATED THE VIEW OF BAXTERIAN PRESBYTERIANS AND LATITUDINARIAN ANGLICANS, THAT JUSTIFYING FAITH COMPENSATES FOR HUMAN FAILURE TO FULLY OBEY GOD’S LAW. LOCKE ALSO EXPRESSED A MORAL INFLUENCE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT, FOR WHICH STRICT CALVINISTS EXCORIATED HIM AS A SOCINIAN, EVEN THOUGH MANY LATITUDINARIANS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND HELD THE SAME VIEW. NEITHER ANTITRINITARIAN NOR (...) DEIST, LOCKE WAS A LIBERAL CHRISTIAN. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Arthur Efland's and Richard Siegesmund's Reviews of The Arts and the Creation of MindElliot W. Eisner, Lee Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of ArtWhen I was invited by the Editor of The Journal of Aesthetic Education to respond to two unidentified reviews of my latest book, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, I thought that I would encounter a bevy of negatively critical comments, which (...) would give me the opportunity to respond equally as critically to theirs. Fortunately — perhaps unfortunately — the reviews prepared by Arthur Efland and Richard Siegesmund are not in the least bit negative. This, of course, is a boon to the book's author, but a bane to the creation of lively debate. I am happy to say that though their purposes differ, both Efland and Siegesmund got it essentially right. Efland's comments put my work in a historical context, particularly the emergence of interest in cognition and, in general, in the higher mental processes as they were called during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It is true that interest in cognition was in the air at that time, in the field of philosophy, and in the fields of linguistics and psychology as well. My own work is a part of that particular zeitgeist in the twentieth century.I was not aware at the time that I was being influenced by such a broad movement, but, alas or alack, I was. In some ways, the writing that John Dewey did during the early and mid 1930s, particularly his work on art as rendered in Art as Experience, presaged the interest linguists, psychologists, and philosophers developed in the conditions of communication and its relationship to symbolic systems and thought.1 Dewey has been a major influence on my thinking as have Susanne Langer and later Nelson Goodman.2 [End Page 96] The historical perspective that Efland provides is a useful accounting of where ideas about cognition were and where they are now. I do not know whether I have extended the thinking that is being done on cognition, but I certainly have tried to provide a fulsome account of the connections between cognition and the educational mission of the arts, especially the visual arts. Efland's historical portrayal is a useful picture of the period and, I would say, the significance of this way of thinking for education.Siegesmund pushes farther than Efland, in my view, into the sources of human understanding, particularly the function of somatic knowledge in grasping, or better yet, framing meaning. His notion of what might perhaps best be called visual reasoning marries two concepts that are seldom related; the visual and the reasonable. Reason is often associated with matters of logic, and matters of logic pertain to connections between language in its formal sense and with the relationships among numbers within numerical systems. Qualitative relationships are not typically regarded as manifestations, even at their best, of rational forms of thinking. Emotional, yes. Rational, no. As readers of my works know, I reject that conception of the limits of human rationality and Siegesmund does as well. His focus on embodied knowledge, or what is sometimes called somatic knowledge, is a promising conception of the sources of choice and judgment. There is, after all, more known than what can be told, to paraphrase Michael Polayni.3What pleases me most about Siegesmund's account of my work is its receptivity to the students he teaches. The ultimate educational test of any piece of writing is the extent to which people see meaning in it and apparently, at least for the students that Siegesmund teaches, meaning for most is there. I am pleased. What I have always tried to do in my work is to avoid prescribing recipes or formulaic procedures because I do not believe either works very well when one is working with human beings, but rather to provide concepts through which the educational world can be viewed, practice reflected upon, options identified, and action taken. Apparently these aims are being met in some university classrooms in which The Arts and the Creation of Mind is being used. One caveat.Although it is true, as... (shrink)

Means-based harms are frequently seen as forbidden, even when they lead to a greater good. But, are there mitigating factors? Results from five experiments show that judgments about means-based harms are modulated by: 1) Pareto considerations (was the harmed person made worse off?), 2) the directness of physical contact, and 3) the source of the threat (e.g. mechanical, human, or natural). Pareto harms are more permissible than non-Pareto harms, Pareto harms requiring direct physical contact are less permissible than (...) those that do not, and harming someone who faces a mechanical threat is less permissible than harming someone who faces a non-mechanical threat. These results provide insight into the rich representational structure underlying folk-moral computations, including both the independent and interacting roles of the inevitability, directness and source of harm. (shrink)

Daniele Hervieu-Léger and Marcel Gauchet explain that today the hold that the religious dimension has always exerted over human societies is, of very recent date but definitely, slackening; that it is becoming ‘hollow’ and ceases to inspire collective action, leaving henceforth wide open the question of knowing in which name we should attempt to take our destiny in our hands and base the norms of collective being. This question at once summons up another, implicitly contained in the latter: is (...) every ethical norm (or moral norm, for we are not making a distinction between the two concepts here) ultimately religious in origin, as is most often supposed, or can one in fact conceive of sketching the outlines of a moral code that is immanent within the social relationship, a moral code that is sufficiently coherent and self-consistent to do without, at least in theory, a religious-type transcendence? Here, I should like to make a case for the second response by emphasizing that religion - whatever meaning one bestows on this notion, still undefined today - does not constitute the primary, irreducible social and historical fact that is most often supposed, but that it should itself be interpreted as the formulation of a more original and more universal formulation: the threefold obligation of giving, receiving, and repaying distinguished by Marcel Mauss in his famous Essay on the Gift. Of course, I shall not claim here to do more than sketch a few possible lines of argument. But even before formulating them, I must call to mind two prejudicial objections that my argument has encountered. (shrink)

Either beauty is the beholding of a fixed and final aesthetic essence discontinuous with the rest of nature, or it is an intuitive grasp and encompassing feel of a consummated movement of natural energies and elements through their inner relations into a single, qualitative unity, whose pervasive tonality is a situational emergent from the biologically active, temporally continuous, and reciprocally constituting-constituted transactional dialectic between a human creature and the world. If aesthetic-mystical experience is indeed something “eternalized” out of all (...) connection with ordinary experience and the flood of moving fact, then what is immediately entailed is a phenomenological profile conceived as.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningPentti MäättänenBethany Henning Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience London: Lexington Books, 2022. 182 pp. incl. indexBethany Henning examines Dewey's conception of aesthetic experience by looking for connections to several trends and traditions. Henning relates pragmatism to Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, wisdom from esoteric sources, erotic drive, and religion. "In (...) the American thought that we have surveyed thus far, the aesthetic, the religious, and the ethical stand as completions and realizations of one another" (p. 25). This variety of viewpoints is no doubt interesting and potentially fruitful, but there is a danger that the result may remain somewhat sporadic.One of the traditional problems and tasks in philosophy is to explain how the world is experienced as an organized, bounded whole. How are the various sensations and ideas of them related to each other? On what ground can we experience these relations between ideas? Henning refers to William James and says that these relations are directly experienced, we feel them (p. 46). According to Henning there is a unique force responsible for this, and it "can only be a kind of noncognitive, preverbal awareness, and for Dewey, it can only be the qualitative immediacy that is known to us only in aesthetic experience" (p. 25). How can we experience these relations? Here Henning appeals to Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) who provided his own view of habits, which account for "the relations between ideas by relating them through their spatiotemporal contiguity, causality, or through resemblances" (p. 21; italics in the original). This is how the American mind was firmly set on a theoretical path that distinguishes it from "the European conception" (ibid.).This is a surprising claim, indeed. Here is what David Hume has to say about the connexion or association of ideas: "The qualities, from [End Page 369] which this association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner convey'd from one idea to another, are three, viz. RESEMBLANCE, CONTIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT."1 It is quite inconceivable how this simple relabeling of Hume's principles of association as habits might have any effect on any theoretical path, especially on the emergence of pragmatism. Edwards wrote decades before Charles Peirce entered the scene. Edwards' habit is just a new name for old European ideas. It is obvious that Hume's principles of association, which deal with internal mental processes, have not much to do with Peircean habits of action, which are about overt bodily action in the world where we meet also hard facts involving brute force, muscular effort, and resistance.The starting point of Henning's analysis is immediate qualitative experience, affective sensual awareness, which also prefigures and is the ground of signification (p. 107). Qualitative immediacy is felt, had, and undergone. There is a need to experience the world as meaningful, to move from that world as had and undergone to the world as known. Knowledge about this immediate experience becomes possible with the emergence of mind, when "situations, in their qualitative tone, are also socially significant so that interactions are aided by the mediation of symbols" (p. 88). We can give names to qualitatively different feelings. This knowledge is different from qualitative immediacy in that it is discursive, cognitive, and syntactical (p. 38). But how does this kind of knowledge emerge? What is the origin of names and symbols? What is the notion of meaning applied here? According to Henning, meaning "must be felt, had and undergone, in a way that is primarily qualitative rather than primarily cognitive" (p. 107). There is also "erotic need for meaningful connection" (p. 113). Further, Henning appeals to Julia Kristeva's semiotic theory, but Peirce's semiotics is not mentioned. An explicit definition of meaning would be in place here, especially as Peirce and Dewey have one to offer.According to Peirce, "what a thing means is simply what habits it involves" (CP 5.400).2 Note that there are no restrictions on this. If it is a linguistic expression, then we have Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games... (shrink)

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.

The efforts to prove God's existence in the history of thought have been one of the fundamental problems of philosophy and theology, and even the most important one. The evidences put furword to prove the existence of God constitute the center of philosophy of religion’s problems not only philosophy of religion, but also the disciplines such as theology-kalam and Islamic philosophy are also seriously concerned. When we look at the history of philosophy, it is clear that almost all philosophers are (...) interested in the evidence in favour of and against the existence of God. Especially in recent times, religious experience has often been regarded as evidence of the existence of God. Studies in the field of religious and mystical experience have put forward many arguments concerning the use of religious experience as evidence. However, this study has been limited to experience of sense and pure consciousness claims rather than examining all of these arguments. In this study firstly, the analogy between experience of sense and religious experience will be deal with, and then claims that conciousness can be emptied by a number of methods which are defended by mystics. In addition, it will be tried to defend the opinion that the mystical experiences which are the common point of the two approaches are valid. The main emphasis of the article will be that these arguments can be used as evidence for the existence of God.Summary: Religious experience - which has not been considered as one of the classical evidences regarding the existence of God before being popular by recent studies – is started to be called one of the arguments. The most important reason for not arguing religious experience among the evidences of God’s existence is that it is a personal experience and therefore contains subjective perspectives. However, many researchers, who refuse to accept the criticism raised against religious experience with restricting to subjectivity, emphasized the importance of religious experience by highlighting the objective aspects of such experiences. This emphasis was not only on its significance, but also on the fact that it had a cognitive feature and thus it could provide evidence for the existence of God. The argument of religious experience is generally defined as an effort for demonstrating to existence of God with reference to several feelings such as spiritual experiences of human in face of creator and sacred Being, encounter with God, uniting, and annihilating selfness in Him. The emergence of such efforts, especially after the XVIIIth century, indicates that the history of the evidence does not go back much earlier. However, even if notas evidence, it is possible to extend the traces of religious and mystical experience to the history of religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Considering a great amount of the previous literature focused on religious experience in the West, It is easily seen that such research is still new. The main purpose in addressing such a controversial issue is to make the argument on the religious experience more current and to show whether the religious experience would be able to use as evidence for the existence of God.First title of this study comprises many different claims such as Walter T. Stace’s The Argument from Unanimity Richard Swinburne’s The Principle of Credulity, William P. Alston’s Perceiving God, John Hick’s Experience-as. However, instead of briefly giving out very different claims, the study chooses to focus on two arguments which are less discussed and can be given in more detail. The first is the argument based on the analogy between the religious experience and the sense experience. The fundamental point of this argument is sense experience. With reference to the similarities between the sense experience and the religious experience, it can be argued that religious experience is also cognitive and may function as an evidence for the existence of God. In other words, being perceptual and noetic, namely cognitive, of sense experience is addressed as a similar side of religious experience. Whether it is imaginary or real, eventually, it is necessary for an experience to have an object and being experience of something. Therefore, the religious experience includes the perception of a Transcendent Being that is beyond and in excess of the individual who experiences. Perception of the sense experience will definitely be different from the perception of religious experience. Researchers who think that the five sense organs do not run the perception of Sacred Beings, identified broader and various meanings for the perception. Thereby, in this approach, where the semantic field of perception is expanded, it was contended that human beings were able to perceive the transcendent, eternal, and unlimited God, and this can be explained in the epistemological sense. In order to use religious experiences as an evidence for the existence of God, it is necessary to determine whether such experiences are caused by God rather than something else. This raises the issue of the validity of religious experience. The researchers in this area have propounded various criteria to identify whether religious experience is existed or not. Experiences, which do not meet the criteria, are not considered existed even if they claim to be religious experience.The second is the argument that discusses whether it is possible to suggest an evidence for the existence of God by utilizing pure consciousness events. In general, this argument claims that the consciousness gets clear, and thus, mystic or Sufi experiences the Divine One with pure consciousness by discharging consciousness from all sensual contents and removing it from secular desire and wishes. The argument, which claims the experience of Divine One is direct, therefore uninterpretable, and experienced by pure consciousness, believes clearing the consciousness of mystics from sensual qualities such as seeing, hearing, and tasting. It is stated that it is possible for mystics to empty their sensory images and get rid of them, and thus, their desires and wishes could be lost. Especially, the thinkers who are connected with the philosophy of perennialism and defend this approach, thought that people, who have distinct religion, culture, and beliefs in different parts of the world and in various time periods, had the same experience and considered such experiences were universal by suggesting that this similarity could be called as common essence.Even though the claim which offers that the events of pure consciousness are the same everywhere have been criticized in many respects, the advocates of this approach have argued that the experience has the common essence, but the interpretation is different. This relationship, which was tried to be established between experience and commentary, caused a lot of work for both the thinkers who put forward the claims of pure consciousness and the researchers who opposed it. However, examining the relationship between experience and interpretation requires serious studies in socio-psychological, cultural and religious fields. Therefore, in order not to exceed the limits of the article, the relationship between experience and interpretation is briefly mentioned.While discussing two arguments, the main claims of the arguments were addressed, and the criticisms directed to this argument were not discussed as much as possible. However, some fundamental criticisms have been mentioned shortly for a better understanding of the discussion. Since such western-oriented claims mostly were deployed in a western context, the study excluded the comparison of the claims across different cultures. (shrink)

John Dewey ranks as the most influential of America's philosophers. That in fluence stems, in part, from the originality of his mind, the breadth of his in terests, and his capacity to synthesize materials from diverse sources. In addi tion, Dewey was blessed with a long life and the extraordinary energy to express his views in more than 50 books, approximately 750 articles, and at least 200 contributions to encyclopedias. He has made enduring intellectual contributions in all of (...) the traditional fields of philosophy, ranging from studies primarily of interest for philosophers in logic, epistemology, and metaphysics to books and articles of wider appeal in ethics, political philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and education. Given the extent of Dewey's own writings and the many books and articles on his views by critics and defenders, it may be asked why there is a need for any further examination of his philosophy. The need arises because the lapse of time since his death in 1952 now permits a new generation of scholars to approach his work in a different spirit. Dewey is no longer a living partisan of causes, sparking controversy over the issues of the day. He is no longer the advocate of a new point of view which calls into question the basic assump tions of rival philosophical schools and receives an almost predictable criticism from their entrenched positions. His works have now become classics. (shrink)

In this clearly written and well argued book, Mark Johnson presents a theory of embodied cognition and discusses the implications it has for theories of meaning, language and aesthetics. His pragmatist foundations are on show when he writes that ‘The so-called norms of logical inference are just the patterns of thinking that we have discovered as having served us well in our prior inquiries, relative to certain values, purposes, and types of situations’ (p.109). Johnson’s particular contribution to theories of (...) meaning and language is that he grounds ‘inference’ even at the most abstract level in patterns of sensorimotor experience (p.279). He rejects traditional analytic theories of language on the basis that their central concept of reference is grounded in an erroneous and unfounded distinction between transcendent universals and bodily particulars (p.89-91). (shrink)

IN THE winter and spring of 1031,1 was invited to give a series of ten lectures at Harvard University. The subject chosen was the Philosophy of Art; the lectures are the origin of the present volume. The Lectureship was founded in memory of William James and I esteem it a great honor to have this book associated even indirectly with his distinguished name. It is a pleasure, also, te recall, in connection with the lectures, the unvarying kindness and hospitality of (...) my colleagues in the department of philosophy at Harvard. I am somewhat embarrassed in an effort to acknowledge indebtedness to other writers on the subject. Some aspects of it may be inferred from authors mentioned or quoted in the text. I have read on the subject for many years, however, more or less widely in English literature, somewhat less in French and still less in German, and I have absorbed much from sources which I cannot now directly recall. Moreover, my obligations to a number of writers are much greater than might be gathered from allusions to them in the volume itself. My indebtedness to those who have helped me directly can be more easily stated. Dr. Joseph Ratner gave me a number of valuable references. Dr. Meyer Schapiro was good enough to read the twelfth and thirteenth chapters and to make suggestions which I have freely adopted. Irwin Edman read a large part of the book in manuscript and I owe much to his suggestions and criticism. Sidney Hook read many of the chapters, and their present form is largely the result of discussions with him; this statement is especially true of the chapters on criticism and the last chapter. My greatest indebtedness is to Dr. A. C. Barnes. The chaptershave been gone over one by one with him, and yet what I owe to his comments and suggestions on this account is but a small measure of my debt. I have had the benefit of con versations with him through a period of years, many of which occurred in the presence of the unrivaled collection of pictures he has assembled. The influence of these conversations, together with that of his books, has been a chief factor in shapingmy own thinking about the philosophy of esthetics. Whatever is sound in this volume is due more than I can say to the great educational work carried on in the Barnes Foundation. That work is of a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not ex cepted. I should be glad to think of this volume as one phase of the widespread influence the Foundation is exercising. I am indebted to the Barnes Foundation for permission to reproduce a number of illustrations and to Barbara and Willard Morgan for the photographs from which the reproductions were made. J. D. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Complexities of Aesthetic Experience:Response to JohnstonRichard J. ShustermanI am grateful for this opportunity to clarify my views on aesthetic experience and somaesthetics that Scott Johnston discusses. Combining two very vague and contested ideas ("experience" and "the aesthetic"), the concept of aesthetic experience is an extremely ambiguous notion some of whose principal different conceptions I have carefully tried to outline.1 It is therefore rash for Johnston to presume that what (...) I mean by aesthetic experience is simply "the [Deweyan] sort of experience that connotes an immediate, qualitative whole" that is "consummatory." Though I deeply appreciate John Dewey's view, I have also criticized it on several counts. I insist, for example, on the existence and value of aesthetic experiences of fragmentation and rupture that have neither the unity of coherence nor that of completion that Dewey demands. In fact, as I have often pointed out, part of my interest in rap music was connected to its aesthetic of fragmentation.2Dewey and I both affirm (in sometimes different ways) some sort of primacy of the immediate in aesthetic experience. But primacy and immediacy are polysemic notions whose meaning is very context-dependent and shifting. Insufficient attention to these multiple meanings and contexts seems to confuse some of Johnston's discussion and leads to his puzzlement about how I can emphasize both immediacy and reflection and whether I consistently accord primacy to the former. The first step toward clarifying matters is to note that affirming immediacy in aesthetic experience is not to deny two important dimensions in which aesthetic experience is importantly mediated. First, aesthetic experiences are rarely, if ever, immediate in the sense of being instantaneous; they require some time of processing. Even with allegedly nontemporal arts such as painting (and even with paintings that do not demand complex decoding), there is, in aesthetic experience, a process of focusing on the work, of reacting to it, and of deepening appreciation or absorption. Second, at least in the arts, an aesthetic experience should be mediated by some prior (typically extensive) training in what is necessary to understand and appreciate such art. My aesthetic experience of French poetry required a sustained training in French language, literature, and culture, a training that required reflective thinking.However, despite these crucial mediations, aesthetic experience is usefully characterized as distinctively immediate in that its meanings and values are perceived and savored directly in our experience of the work rather than being only revealed, understood, or appreciated at a later time. I appreciate [End Page 109] the poetry of Baudelaire as I hear or read it, and not only after it is explained to me or after I subsequently reflect on or recollect this poetic experience. Aesthetic experience is immediate in the sense of being immediately enjoyed and valued rather than being an experience in which gratification and appreciation is deferred to a later time. An aesthetic experience of climbing a mountain (which obviously takes time and requires some training) means enjoying the climb while one is climbing, not when one's enjoyment is postponed till one has reached the summit and enjoys its view. When I emphasize the immediacy of aesthetic experience, I am celebrating this character of direct, undeferred, imminent appreciation or sense of value, which is what makes such experience enjoyed or valued for its own sake.3 Such immediate enjoyment is all that is usefully meant by saying that aesthetic experience is appreciated intrinsically or as an end in itself rather than a mere means to some further end, even though there are obviously many good ends to which aesthetic experience can usefully serve as means.This sense of immediacy — of direct, undeferred appreciation of meaning, enjoyment, and value — does not deny a role for reflection. Not only can prior reflection prepare the way for immediate enjoyment but reflection itself offers its own aesthetic pleasures of immediacy. We can enjoy the process of reasoning, speculating, interpreting in a direct or immediate way without postponing our satisfaction to a subsequent appreciation of the results of our reflective process, that is, when we (meta-)reflect, at a later time, on what that initial reflective experience has engendered. Moreover, subsequent reflection on an... (shrink)

In this dissertation I indicate a source of harmony between the respectively sociable, and solitary accounts of human individuality in the work of John Dewey and George Santayana. Each account, I argue, emphasizes one side of the same, aesthetic coin, emphases that correspond to certain conspicuous forms of life found in contemporary culture. Four such forms of life, two negative and two positive, correspond to these different emphases: passive versus active, sociable individuality, and passive versus active, solitary (...) individuality. These distinguished forms of life, I conclude, are helpful heuristic tools towards conceiving human individuality aesthetically. This examination ultimately provides the framework for a more focused and sustained analysis of the many fundamental social-cultural-political issues that beset individuals in contemporary life. (shrink)

In The Public and Its Problems, a classic of social and political philosophy, John Dewey exhibits his strong faith in the potential of human intelligence to solve the public's problems. In his characteristic provocative style, Dewey clarifies the meaning and implications of such concepts as "the public," "the state," "government," and "political democracy." He distinguishes his a posterior reasoning from a priori reasoning, which, he argues permeates less meaningful discussion of basic concepts. Dewey repeatedly demonstrates (...) the interrelationships between fact and theory. (shrink)

In my dissertation "Kant, Wordsworth, and the Aesthetic Experience," I explore the poetic and political implications of the Kantian aesthetic experience, and use them implicitly for a new reading of Wordsworth's poetry. The dissertation begins by considering Kant's view that beauty and sublimity are what may potentially occur inside each and every one of us in our interaction with any given object rather than what exists outside us in the external world. Emphasizing the reading activity of the spectator rather (...) than the creative endeavor of either divine or secular genius, Kant's depiction of art as a certain subjective and universal experience seems to make possible an analogical discussion of the democratic right and responsibility. Guided by this insight, I examine Wordsworth's similar preference of feeling developed in his poetry over the action and situation, and trace his innovation in both the Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude to instances where the literal text fails to make sense but where that very failure paradoxically produces the possibility of meaning through a certain self-critical inward turn of the narrator/poet/reader outside the narrative. Through the movement from sound , to silence , and to the concurrent possibility of new sound , Wordsworth seems to express his ambivalence toward the conception of poetry as a fixed linguistic construct. Transforming the failure of the literal text into the success of the reading activity, Wordsworth also seems to produce a new kind of reader-oriented poetry which both resembles the French Revolution in its egalitarian aspirations and differs from it in directing its energy not toward any external object but to the moral and cognitive capabilities of the poet himself and his readers. But the ambiguity of sound and silence also tempts Wordsworth at times into championing a certain mythical return to the silence of nature and human infancy, and this self-sacrificial impulse of his poetry and his awareness of it seem to be responsible for the complications and ironies of his creative aspiration and achievement. (shrink)

The vast majority of theologians accept true news, sound senses and healthy working mind as sources of knowledge. Due to the fact that the mind is counted among the sources of knowledge, reason-based evidence has been used in many subjects. It is known that Māturīdī was the first theologian who dealt with the mentioned sources of knowledge in his work. At the very beginning of his Kitāb al-Tawhīd, he determined the ways of acquiring knowledge as correct news, sound senses and (...) reason, and elaborated them in detail. Māturīdī mostly prefers the term inference to describe the use of reason. He has proven his views on theological issues with many types of inference as well as true news and sense knowledge. These include matters related to the hereafter, too. The visible over the invisible, which is a type of inference, was used as evidence by Māturīdī to prove almost every subject. Many definitions of the method of the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible have been made. However, it is possible to understand the structure on which it is built as follows: There are areas that human beings cannot comprehend and have will no definite knowledge about. These areas called as al-ghaib “the invisible” may be related to ontological differences or may be due to differences in time and space. The difference between humans and Allah is ontological difference, and Allah is an ontological invisible for humans. While events that have not yet happened are invisible in terms of time, happenings what beyond the mountain for example, are invisible in terms of spatial difference. It is not possible for human beings to fully understand (perceive) the attributes of Allah, who is ontologically invisible. For this reason, many theologians have used the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible especially in making the attributes of Allah understandable and have tried to explain the divine attributes with this method. Belief in the hereafter is also related to the realm of the unvisible. There are a lot of revelations (true knowledge) about the hereafter. However, because of the conditions of the hereafter are different from this world, it is necessary to make the revelations about that place comprehensible. Accordingly, it is interesting how Māturīdī uses the aforementioned method to understand the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which is the area of the unvisible. Māturīdī sometimes understood the verses about reward and punishment in the hereafter with their real meanings, and sometimes attributed different meanings to these verses. In this context, while dealing with the verses about the afterlife, he listed the possibilities regarding what they might mean, and included interpretations based the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible. Thus, Māturīdī tried to make the hereafter, intelligible based on human being’s experiences in this world. According to Māturīdī, the mind also has a function in understanding the hereafter. The mind has the capacity to go beyond the senses and gives us information about that field. Our mind, based on what we can perceive and understand, can go beyond itself and make inferences about the issues that are incapable of understanding. Knowing the pleasures and tortures of the world in order to understand the reward and punishment that will be given to humans in the hereafter happens in a similary way. In addition, he makes inferences based on events, situations, characteristics, etc. (visible) that people know from worldly life in order to better understand the expressions in such verses, which is quite remarkable for our study. In this context, while interpreting many verses, Māturīdī bases on the aspects of the realm of the visible similar to the realm of the hereafter. He explains the similarities of the hereafter to the worldly life, mostly through human nature, the Arabs’ perception of reward and punishment, and people’s perception of color and direction. In addition to these, he takes our knowledge, which has increased to the knowledge of observation, as a basis even though we learn through news, and evaluates the divine narrations for the hereafter on these principles. For the hereafter can be understood through things known, visible, lived and experienced in the life of this world. Māturīdī emphasizes the similarity of the world and the hereafter as well as the different aspects of the hereafter and uses these differences as a basis for his inferences. Our study is aimed at understanding how Māturīdī brings evidence to what people know from worldly life while explaining the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter. In this context, methods such as interpretation, comparison, concept analysis, and literature review were used, and the study was limited to the books of Kitāb al-Tawhīd and Ta’wīlāt of Māturīdī. (shrink)

I start from a relatively simple idea: the human being is constantly making a multiple experience of truth (once again, in reference to Gadamer's statement), both scientifical and technical, as well as religious or aesthetic. Still, what is the relationship between those experiences of truth? Can they express somehow, precisely by their multiplicity, a neutral ethos of today's man, or do they manage to take part in a larger and more elevated experience of truth? In the following paper I (...) will try to bring into focus precisely such issues. I return to the meaning given by Gadamer to the experience of truth. Then I make the distinction between the common sense and the proper sense of alternative. The later concerns the correlation - sometimes paradoxical - of different experiences of truth. For instance, the correlation between the technical and the religious experience. So one can understand that religious experience is above all an experience of human finitude. (shrink)

This article highlights the distinction between the ‘art of nursing’ and ‘fine art’. While something in the nature of nursing can be described as ‘the art of nursing’, it is not to be misunderstood as ‘fine art’ or craft. Therefore, the term ‘aesthetic’ in relation to nursing should not be linked to the aesthetic of modern art, but instead to a broader and more general meaning of the word. The paper's main focus is the aesthetic experience, which is treated (...) in a hermeneutic way and elucidated from classical sources and the philosophy of nursing and from Art. The paper argues that the pioneers used the term ‘art of nursing’ in a metaphorical way to say something more specific on the nature of nursing. The term illustrates the nurse's ability to practise at the highest possible level of excellence. (shrink)

Daniele Hervieu-Léger and Marcel Gauchet explain that today the hold that the religious dimension has always exerted over human societies is, of very recent date but definitely, slackening; that it is becoming ‘hollow’ and ceases to inspire collective action, leaving henceforth wide open the question of knowing in which name we should attempt to take our destiny in our hands and base the norms of collective being. This question at once summons up another, implicitly contained in the latter: is (...) every ethical norm (or moral norm, for we are not making a distinction between the two concepts here) ultimately religious in origin, as is most often supposed, or can one in fact conceive of sketching the outlines of a moral code that is immanent within the social relationship, a moral code that is sufficiently coherent and self-consistent to do without, at least in theory, a religious-type transcendence? Here, I should like to make a case for the second response by emphasizing that religion - whatever meaning one bestows on this notion, still undefined today - does not constitute the primary, irreducible social and historical fact that is most often supposed, but that it should itself be interpreted as the formulation of a more original and more universal formulation: the threefold obligation of giving, receiving, and repaying distinguished by Marcel Mauss in his famous Essay on the Gift. Of course, I shall not claim here to do more than sketch a few possible lines of argument. But even before formulating them, I must call to mind two prejudicial objections that my argument has encountered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 78-98 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Understanding as Informed Experience:The Role of Knowledge in Our Art Viewing Experiences Richard Lachapelle, Deborah Murray, and Sandy Neim [Figures] Thinking calls for images, and images contain thought. Therefore, the visual arts are a homeground of visual thinking. 1A common misconception about the nature of art and of aesthetic appreciation is that these activities are essentially (...) a question of "feeling," as if tuning in to the right feeling will automatically lead to a full understanding of the work of art. Another widespread misunderstanding essentially reduces art viewing to a simple question of perception, as if looking long and hard isalways enough to apprehend the work of art's message. Fortunately, a growing body of research into adults' art viewing experiences is debunking these widely held beliefs as oversimplifications of the art viewing process. We can now assert, with a good degree of certainty, that our art viewing experiences solicit four key areas: the affective, perceptual, communicative, and cognitive dimensions of human experiencing. 2 Therefore, we would be hard-pressed not to agree with Rudolph Arnheim's reflections, presented above, on the important role of thought in shaping our artistic and aesthetic experiences.While acknowledging at the outset the essential roles of affect, perception, and communication in our art viewing experiences, this paper focuses more specifically on aspects of the intellectual dimension of this experience. First, we will present and discuss a model that we have developed over the last several years. This model identifies the kinds of knowledge and learning involved in art viewing activities. Second, we will present the results of an empirical study conducted to provide support for the model. Finally we will briefly discuss the model's usefulness for the purposes of aesthetic education. [End Page 78] The Model of Aesthetic Understanding as Informed Experience The Model of Aesthetic Understanding as Informed Experience provides an explanation of the process of understanding and appreciating a work of art from an educational perspective: it identifies the types of knowledge involved and it also pinpoints the kinds of learning at each stage in the process leading to an understanding of the aesthetic object.In this model, the process of viewing and understanding a work of art is visualized as a two-phased type of informed experience. Through a process of experiential learning, the viewer first encounters the work of art and formulates an initial interpretation. Then, through a process involving theoretical learning, the viewer compares his or her first interpretation with a related body of external, scientific information. This second step in the learning process leads to a reconstruction of knowledge about the work of art. Tandem use of the two processes assists the viewer in furthering his or her understanding of the art object; it also promotes growth in his or her art viewing skills. In the course of each new encounter with an aesthetic object, the interplay of experiential and theoretical learning leads to additional development of the viewer's background knowledge in art, resulting in better preparedness to successfully engage the next work of art. 4 Theoretical Foundations of the Model Three different theories informed the development of the model. 5 By using anecdotal evidence obtained from a group of fifty-two museum professionals, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E.Robinson were able to identify the four major dimensions of aesthetic experience: intellect, communication, perception, and emotion. Each one of these dimensions constitutes, to some extent, a challenge that the work of art addresses to the viewer. According to these researchers, the intellectual dimension of aesthetic experience consists of all aspects of the viewer's attempts to use knowledge in order to find meaning in the work of art (TAS, 27-71). Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson also propose a model that describes the aesthetic encounter in terms of an interaction between the viewer, the work of art, and the artist. To this encounter, the viewer brings his skills in aesthetic appreciation; these may be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 78-98 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Understanding as Informed Experience:The Role of Knowledge in Our Art Viewing Experiences Richard Lachapelle, Deborah Murray, and Sandy Neim [Figures] Thinking calls for images, and images contain thought. Therefore, the visual arts are a homeground of visual thinking. 1A common misconception about the nature of art and of aesthetic appreciation is that these activities are essentially (...) a question of "feeling," as if tuning in to the right feeling will automatically lead to a full understanding of the work of art. Another widespread misunderstanding essentially reduces art viewing to a simple question of perception, as if looking long and hard isalways enough to apprehend the work of art's message. Fortunately, a growing body of research into adults' art viewing experiences is debunking these widely held beliefs as oversimplifications of the art viewing process. We can now assert, with a good degree of certainty, that our art viewing experiences solicit four key areas: the affective, perceptual, communicative, and cognitive dimensions of human experiencing. 2 Therefore, we would be hard-pressed not to agree with Rudolph Arnheim's reflections, presented above, on the important role of thought in shaping our artistic and aesthetic experiences.While acknowledging at the outset the essential roles of affect, perception, and communication in our art viewing experiences, this paper focuses more specifically on aspects of the intellectual dimension of this experience. First, we will present and discuss a model that we have developed over the last several years. This model identifies the kinds of knowledge and learning involved in art viewing activities. Second, we will present the results of an empirical study conducted to provide support for the model. Finally we will briefly discuss the model's usefulness for the purposes of aesthetic education. [End Page 78] The Model of Aesthetic Understanding as Informed Experience The Model of Aesthetic Understanding as Informed Experience provides an explanation of the process of understanding and appreciating a work of art from an educational perspective: it identifies the types of knowledge involved and it also pinpoints the kinds of learning at each stage in the process leading to an understanding of the aesthetic object.In this model, the process of viewing and understanding a work of art is visualized as a two-phased type of informed experience. Through a process of experiential learning, the viewer first encounters the work of art and formulates an initial interpretation. Then, through a process involving theoretical learning, the viewer compares his or her first interpretation with a related body of external, scientific information. This second step in the learning process leads to a reconstruction of knowledge about the work of art. Tandem use of the two processes assists the viewer in furthering his or her understanding of the art object; it also promotes growth in his or her art viewing skills. In the course of each new encounter with an aesthetic object, the interplay of experiential and theoretical learning leads to additional development of the viewer's background knowledge in art, resulting in better preparedness to successfully engage the next work of art. 4 Theoretical Foundations of the Model Three different theories informed the development of the model. 5 By using anecdotal evidence obtained from a group of fifty-two museum professionals, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E.Robinson were able to identify the four major dimensions of aesthetic experience: intellect, communication, perception, and emotion. Each one of these dimensions constitutes, to some extent, a challenge that the work of art addresses to the viewer. According to these researchers, the intellectual dimension of aesthetic experience consists of all aspects of the viewer's attempts to use knowledge in order to find meaning in the work of art (TAS, 27-71). Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson also propose a model that describes the aesthetic encounter in terms of an interaction between the viewer, the work of art, and the artist. To this encounter, the viewer brings his skills in aesthetic appreciation; these may be... (shrink)

In this essay, the relation between art and religion is explored using the concepts experience and imagination as understood by the American philosopher John Dewey. In Dewey’s view, experience involves both the experiencer and the experienced: it is a phenomenon of the in-between. When we are really touched by what we meet in interacting with our physical and social surroundings, experience acquires an aesthetic quality that opens us to the value and the potential of what we perceive. We (...) can see the factual in light of the possible, thus enriching it with new layers of meaning. We experience this as resonance between us and the world. It is the work of the imagination. Due to their imaginative capacity, humans can aspire to a ‘good life’. This aspiration is discussed in terms of invitation and response. Can we experience ourselves as being invited to respond to this unruly world with attachment and care? Here art and religion come into play. Art is understood as the domain of the possible: it explores the world behind or beyond what we usually accept as fact. An aesthetic experience acquires religious quality when it evokes in us an ideal that guides our sense of self and world, stimulating us to realize our ideals in daily actions. If inspired by imagination, art and religion may evoke intense experiences of resonance and invite us to new ways of connecting and transformative action. This is explored with the help of a hermeneutical circle, a ‘cycle of imagination’. (shrink)

This article highlights the distinction between the ‘art of nursing’ and ‘fine art’. While something in the nature of nursing can be described as ‘the art of nursing’, it is not to be misunderstood as ‘fine art’ or craft. Therefore, the term ‘aesthetic’ in relation to nursing should not be linked to the aesthetic of modern art, but instead to a broader and more general meaning of the word. The paper's main focus is the aesthetic experience, which is treated (...) in a hermeneutic way and elucidated from classical sources and the philosophy of nursing and from Art. The paper argues that the pioneers used the term ‘art of nursing’ in a metaphorical way to say something more specific on the nature of nursing. The term illustrates the nurse's ability to practise at the highest possible level of excellence. (shrink)

In _The Meaning of the Body_, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic _Metaphors We Live By_. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including (...) images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of _Moral Politics_. (shrink)

These two short, influential books, which grew out of Dewey’s hands-on experience in administering the laboratory school at the University of Chicago, represent the earliest authoritative statement of his revolutionary emphasis on education as an experimental, child-centered process. In The School and Society, he declares that we must “make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated with the spirit of art, history, and (...) science.” In The Child and the Curriculum he stresses the importance of the curriculum as a means of determining the environment of the child, and allowing the teacher to guide children in asserting themselves, exercising their capacities, and fulfilling their own nature. 8 black-and-white illustrations. (shrink)

This paper argues that the cognitive sciences need to incorporate aesthetic study of the arts into their methodologies in order to fully understand the nature of human cognitive processes, because the arts reflect insights into human experience that are unobtainable by the methodologies of the natural sciences. These insights differ from those acquired by scientific exploration because they arise not from the conceptual logic of reason but from the precategorial intuition of imagination. Aesthetics provides a methodology whereby we (...) are able to understand how art enables us to experience emotions caused by sense impressions. This methodology lies at the heart of Giambattista Vico’s Principi di scienza nuova (1725-44), which attempts to account for the way we live and participate in cultural, social, and civic communities. Vico’s theory challenges certain Western philosophical presuppositions that still inform much of cognitive science, such as the relation of language to our experience of the natural world, the nature of subjective and objective representations, and the role of the arts in the evolutionary development of the human mind. In basing my approach to literature on Vico’s, Susanne K. Langer’s (1953, 1967) and Merleau-Ponty’s (1962[1945], 1968) theories, I argue that the language of literature is distinguished from conventional language use by its imaginative use of aesthetic patterns that make manifest the inherent character of the external world as we experience it. By introducing the concepts of minding, metaphor, and icon as structures of the imagination, I show how the language of poetic expression in Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach,” enables us to apprehend the ways in which we intuitively participate in the reality that underlies our conscious experience. Such participation occurs because sensory impressions of the world we experience cause modifications in the human mind that result in affective responses. Current research in the cognitive sciences increasingly indicates that such modification occurs; aesthetic study of the arts provides a means whereby we can know what it is like to experience such modifications. (shrink)

Despite a prevalence of articles exploring links between sport and art in the 1970s and 1980s, philosophers in the new millennium pay relatively little explicit attention to issues related to aesthetics generally. After providing a synopsis of earlier debates over the questions ‘is sport art?’ and ‘are aesthetics implicit to sport?’, a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience will be developed. Aesthetic experience, it will be argued, vitally informs sport ethics, game logic, and participant meaning. Finally, I will argue (...) that embodying pragmatic conceptions of art as its ideal metaphor re-opens space to best realize the deep potential of sport as a meaningful human practice. (shrink)

Foreword, by S. Ratner.--Freedom and education, by H. M. Kallen.--Dewey's theory of the nature and function of philosophy, by A. E. Murphy.--Dewey's reconstruction of logical theory, by E. Nagel.--Method in aesthetics, by A. C. Barnes.--The religion of shared experience, by J. H. Randall, Jr.--A Deweyesque mosaic, by W. Hamilton.--Pragmatism as a philosophy of law, by E. W. Patterson.--The political philosophy of instrumentalism, by S. Hu.--Creative democracy, the task before us, by J. Dewey.

This study examines the sources of human divergence as arise from Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings. While Dilthey assigns a central role to the human subject, he never synthesizes his major ideas on subjectivity into a unified theory of subjective uniqueness. I will show that such a theory can be derived from his writings through the combination of three ideas that appear in them. These ideas are: (1) the thesis that human understanding is possible because of psychological content that (...) is shared by both the creator and the interpreter; (2) the belief that this shared content is the only content that exists within human beings, meaning that there is no unique psychological content; and (3) the perception of this inner universal content as an accumulation of life-possibilities. When joined together, these ideas create an inspiring theory of human divergence, according to which the uniqueness of an individual is determined through partial realization of universal possibilities. (shrink)

John Dewey's Experience and Nature has been considered the fullest expression of his mature philosophy since its eagerly awaited publication in 1925. Irwin Edman wrote at that time that "with monumental care, detail and completeness, Professor Dewey has in this volume revealed the metaphysical heart that beats its unvarying alert tempo through all his writings, whatever their explicit themes." In his introduction to this volume, Sidney Hook points out that "Dewey's Experience and Nature is both the most (...) suggestive and most difficult of his writings." The meticulously edited text published here as the first volume in the series The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953 spans that entire period in Dewey's thought by including two important and previously unpublished documents from the book's history: Dewey's unfinished new introduction written between 1947 and 1949, edited by the late Joseph Ratner, and Dewey's unedited final draft of that introduction written the year before his death. In the intervening years Dewey realized the impossibility of making his use of the word 'experience' understood. He wrote in his 1951 draft for a new introduction: "Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and Nature and the treatment of specific subject-matters would be correspondingly modified. I would abandon the term 'experience' because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of 'experience' are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable. I would substitute the term 'culture' because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully and freely carry my philosophy of experience.". (shrink)

This volume brings together sixty items from 1933 and 1934, including Dewey's Terry Lectures at Yale University. With the publication of the lectures as A Common Faith, Dewey encouraged his readers to see religion as human experience in a naturalistic and humanistic setting. He proposed that institutional religions would do well to focus on ideal possibilities in the present time and place rather than relying on the supernatural and the hereafter. Book jacket.