Ways of World-making is a bold and imaginative combination of metaphysical speculation and logical analysis. Its author thinks of it "as belonging in that mainstream of modern philosophy that began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbol systems of the sciences, (...) philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse". It moves from unique truth and a fixed and found world to a multiplicity of "right and even conflicting versions of worlds in the making.". (shrink)

Taking habit as central, Professor Kestenbaum offers a fresh and suggestive interpretation of Dewey’s philosophy of experience. He attempts to clarify and expand Dewey’s concept of habit within the context of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the habitual body and finds it eventuating in a theory of had or lived meaning. Had meanings are prior to reflective concern with self and world, live creature and its environment. They provide the context for raising reflective questions, and it is in terms of them that (...) our world makes sense. Had meanings are broader and more inclusive than known ones, and the experienced world is broader than the known one. Thus, lived meanings, operating on the level of experience, the level of man’s original access or opening to the world, disclose the world and order the real. (shrink)