John Dewey's Aesthetics

Neste trabalho se expõe de modo breve a concepção de John Dewey presente em seu livro “Arte como Experiência” de arte como modelo de experiência completa e pura. Além disso, traça-se uma relação entre o entendimento da arte como viva e a diferenciação conceitual desenvolvida pelo filósofo entre obras de arte e produtos de arte. A presente análise tem o propósito de chamar atenção dos diversos leitores para a divisão conceitual e a nova forma de conceber a filosofia da arte a partir da mirada deweyana.

L’arte collettiva deriva un adattamento dell’esperienza che è meno cosciente e più di massa, come la vita fisica non può esistere senza il supporto di un ambiente fisico cosi la vita morale non può procedere senza il supporto di un ambiente morale.

This is the Draft Table of Contents for my forthcoming book (Lexington--hopefully December 2016): Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.

I post it here to give my readers--for whom I'm tremendously grateful--a preview of the book's themes and argument.

The aim of this paper is to explore the potential of aesthetic experience for perspective-changing. According to the thesis presented here, it is the aesthetic experience, which as "aesthetic" implies the change of perspective, the reversal or alteration of accustomed, possibly false viewpoints and the pointing out of new ways of seeing tithe world. A decisive difference to our other practices, in which we (must) also engage with other perspectives, is that the aesthetic experience plays with perspectives, in which we as recipients and, in a certain sense, participants are epistemically and morally released. The medium film is discussed as a paradigmatic medium of such aesthetic change of perspective.

Keywords: aesthetic experience, perspectivity, change of perspective, film aesthetics, John Dewey

This chapter details a unique sensibility called the “artful rhizome,” a sensual, political, and queer sensorium of everyday aesthetics and affect that liberates sexuality, sensualizes ordinary affective experiences, and deterritorializes the aesthetic grounds of human achievement. Based on American pragmatist John Dewey’s theory of aesthetics and Deleuze & Guattari’s non-conforming mode of connecting with the world, the artful rhizome enables an important mode of playfulness that reshapes representations of gendered experiences and sexual encounters. This Deweyan approach is reparative in communication studies and rhetoric, which have shown a tendency to privilege rationality and neglect queer sensitivities with the potential to promote inclusive gender practices. Supplementing Dewey’s aesthetics with Deleuze & Guattari’s rhizome invites a queer modality of engaging the world as a complex organism. I illustrate this form of analysis through Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 filmic adaptation of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name, a contemporary text featuring a queer coming of age story depicting love and heartbreak. I argue that this film embodies the queer aesthetics and playful everyday politics of an artful rhizome in how the film’s plot and main characters display lavish attention to the ordinary-yet-sensual rhythms of food consumption, language, play, music, and naturecultures in its gorgeous summer-time Italian context. Moreover, this cinematic world does not invite audiences into a masculinist celebration of love as a toxic conquest, but renders the aesthetic vitality of human love as a vulnerable and ethical mode of masculinity.

The domain of Interaction Design (IxD) strives for rich interactions yet continues to work with both a shallow definition of gestalt experience and a meager palette of experiential variables from which to pull. The presence of the body in human experience is noted, but poorly understood or utilized when making design moves. Through a turning of attention to the visceral variables of experience, this thesis presents the first comprehensive definition and taxonomy of Soma Literacy to reveal an expanded palette of variables to the design fields. Interventions into worlds through such a tactile and personal lens challenge many entrenched beliefs and reframes the very nature of interaction and experience. This new framing and set of priorities applicable to designing for engagement of the felt-sense provides both a timely provocation, and a much-needed practical aid to designers and educators.
Influenced by interaction aesthetics, somaesthetics, pragmatic philosophy, and the theoretical and pedagogical principles of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics, I present the sentient body (soma) as the core of experiential perception. I introduce the soma tier of experience and discuss to what extents Design can offer interventions to reveal, nudge, magnify, or diminish experiential gestalts through the manipulatible variables of the soma tier, thus offering interaction design not just a renewed and expanded palette, but also a clarification of the fundamental palette of human interaction factors. The human experience is analog. It is the actual, visceral, flesh and bone, breathing, beating body that is the only translator of experience that we possess. It is only through this lens that we might come to know and thereby design meaningful interactions.
This thesis re-presents the feeling body as the single fundamental constant for IxD, a playground for all participation, engagement, and felt-experience. Soma Literacy is introduced as an encompassing and organizing field of study that frames this renewed attention and offers a path to analyze, interpret, reveal, and make meaning through the bodied content present in experience.

The year 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of John Dewey's birth and also the 75th anniversary of the publication of his aesthetic masterpiece "Art as Experience"--a book that has been extremely influential within the field of aesthetics, not only in philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic education but also in the arts themselves. In this essay, the author reexamines "Art as Experience" by briefly tracing some of its major themes and clarifying its generative context of production and philosophical roots, while also suggesting, in passing, how some of these themes and roots contribute to its continuing philosophical relevance. The author first offers two preliminary cautions: (1) Dewey's aesthetic magnum opus is obviously too rich and masterful in ideas and influence for any brief commemorative essay to hope to do it sufficient justice; and (2) as Dewey defined philosophy as "a criticism of criticisms," so the author's remarks will include a critical dimension. Then, the author illustrates how the essential unifying qualitative element in Dewey's philosophy of mind is transformed into the core of his aesthetic theory in "Art as Experience." The author comments on passages in the book that echo Dewey's formulations in "Qualitative Thought." Finally, the author shows how Dewey's views on the pervasive underlying unifying quality of immediate experience strongly echo William James's account of the immediate experience of thought as formulated in "The Principles of Psychology."

This article addresses the on-going debate between pluralistic and monistic approaches to dealing with critical disagreement. I return to the theory of world hypotheses advanced by Stephen C. Pepper, an understudied figure in aesthetics and pragmatism, to enunciate a version of pluralism that centers on the nature of critical evidence and its functioning in social settings of argument. I argue that Pepper’s expansive philosophy holds interesting implications for what can be called the metaphysics of criticism, a point missed by partisans of standard views of pluralism and monism. Building on his analysis of equally autonomous (but non-commensurable) world hypotheses, this study enunciates an explicit notion of rhetorical pluralism that goes beyond simple relativism. This account can be labeled as an evidentiary pluralism, since it internalizes standards for evaluation to world views and recognizes their changeable nature among critics.

On Peirce's Esthetics

CONTENIDO

SARA BARRENA. El sistema de Charles S. Peirce: conexiones clásicas y modernas de la estética peirceana

ROSSELLA FABBRICHESI. La radice estetica della filosofia: Peirce e l'attrazione verso le idee

NICHOLAS GUARDIANO. Peirce's Cosmology as Metaphysical Ground for an Aesthetic Transcendentalism

ROSA MAYORGA. The Fairy and the Aleph: On Peirce's Esthetics

GIOVANNI MADDALENA. "Non far violenza a nessuna parte dell'anatomia dell'anima". Peirce, l'estetica e la sintesi

NICOLE EVERAERT-DESMEDT. Le temps dans l'art: une éternité éphémère

ROBERT INNIS. Dewey's Peircean Aesthetics

Na intersecção entre o conceito de Primeiridade em Peirce e a distinção formulada por Dewey entre “estético” e “artístico”, propomos um diálogo entre os pensamentos de ambos para uma reflexão acerca da experiência estética. Embora “experiência estética” abarque muitas definições, enquanto for considerada uma relação íntima entre espectador e obra de arte, é possível entendê-la como uma experiência de primeiridade, i.e., como aquela experiência do sentir a imediatez do mundo, sem mediação, num momento caracterizado por uma singularidade, liberdade, e não temporalidade, por isso se define como pura presentidade. Igualmente para Dewey a experiência estética é entendida como uma experiência singular de unidade e completude possível dentre as experiências comuns do cotidiano, e ela se caracteriza como puro sentir e puro presente. Portanto, é lícito afirmar que há uma clara correspondência entre o conceito de experiência de primeiridade em Peirce e o conceito de experiência estética em Dewey. Entretanto, pode-se dizer que a experiência estética diz respeito não só à fruição do espectador diante da obra de arte em si, mas também diz respeito à experiência do artista ao produzir uma obra de arte - além disso, as obras de arte, enquanto coisas no mundo aparecem ao espectador não só na presentidade da primeiridade, mas também como experiência de segundidade, pois a obra de arte é um objeto, e como objeto tem alteridade. E é nesta duplicidade da definição de experiência estética que a distinção cunhada por Dewey entre o “artístico” (criação da obra de arte) e o “estético” (fruição da obra de arte) se fundamenta. Pois ele explica que para que um objeto possa se constituir como uma obra de arte, uma experiência plena precisa ter ocorrido no processo de produção da obra, e essa experiência, igualmente singular, é a chave que Dewey fornece para o entendimento da distinção entre o objeto comum e o objeto artístico. Logo, para ser considerado uma obra de arte, um objeto só o seria na medida em que possibilite uma experiência estética plena de fruição artística, i.e., esta experiência inclui, não apenas uma experiência de primeiridade, mas também inclui os aspectos “estético” e o “artístico” que se fundem numa experiência única, transformando o espectador em um artista momentâneo. Em outras palavras, para que haja a experiência estética é preciso que o expectador se aproprie da obra de arte como se ele fosse o seu criador, vivenciando-a de maneira imediata e singular, assim, aquilo que poderia ser banal, comum e pura alteridade na exterioridade, enquanto obra de arte, passa a ser único, original e continuum numa interioridade.

n his 1934 book Art as Experience, John Dewey called for the reintegration of art with the processes of everyday life. According to Dewey, since the industrialisation of western society, art has become a compartmentalised sphere set apart from ordinary culture. This thesis asks, 'what might the reintegration of art and life look like, in the early twenty-first century in Australia?'

Utilising a practice-based research approach, I have developed and refined a new method of art practice – bilateral blogging – which works within the rhythms and spaces of everyday life. Inspired by the 'blurring of art and life' carried out by artists
such as Allan Kaprow, the projects developed in this thesis – Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham – extend twentieth century avant-garde art practice into the existing spaces of Australian neighbourhoods. This thesis shows how artworks like these, comprised of localised social relations, might also begin to document the specific interactive experiences which go into their own making.

I demonstrate that as a form of art practice, blogging can deepen engagement with everyday experience. It can produce a more dialogical relationship between artist and audience, and, importantly, it is able to generate rich documentation of situated experiences. Blogging is thus a research tool with the potential to bring to light aspects of everyday life which normally go unnoticed.

Through close reflection on the processes and outcomes of my own blog artworks, I have also developed a new way of identifying some of the aesthetic qualities of the
experiences from which my relational art projects are made. Building on the work of William James, John Dewey and Allan Kaprow, I propose that attention plays a crucial role in transforming social interactions into aesthetic experience. The method of bilateral blogging developed in this thesis uses attention as a framing device, catalysing seemingly incoherent events into an intelligible, expansive structure.

This thesis thus makes three substantial contributions: a new method for making relational artworks; the production of an experiential document of the particular environments in which these artworks are situated; and a new approach to
understanding the functioning of aesthetic experience. Taken together, these contributions bring a fresh perspective to discussions around the blurring of art and life, and the use of art as a mode of enquiry.

La obra del filósofo norteamericano John Dewey (1859-1952) es sistemática en la teoría y, en vida del propio Dewey, aspiraría a ser también sistemática en la práctica. En la práctica, un modo de tratar la profunda complejidad de la filosofía es atender a la antigua reciprocidad entre las palabras y las acciones, una práctica ausente o poco común en la continuidad que demanda naturalmente la vida humana, sobre todo en la actualidad. Tanto la naturaleza como la cultura serían un pretexto para la experiencia que, en ese sentido, podría significar todo o nada. Desde la perspectiva pragmatista de Dewey, la vida práctica de las ideas hace literalmente referencia a una realidad concreta que la profesora Calcaterra ha puesto de manifiesto paralelamente en relación con la biografía de Dewey en su libro 'Idee concrete. Percorsi nella filosofia di John Dewey' (que se puede traducir por 'Ideas concretas. Recorridos en la filosofía de John Dewey').

This article engages the understudied Indian reformer, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), in order to explicate pragmatism’s influence in non-western rhetorical situations.  By charting the influence of John Dewey on Ambedkar as a student at Columbia University, this study explores Ambedkar’s translation of pragmatism into an Indian context filled with religiously-underwritten injustice.  His form of pragmatist rhetoric focuses on conversion as a solution to the problems of untouchables in India, and represents a version of pragmatist rhetoric that is revolutionary in form and effect. Expanding our knowledge of how persuasion relates to religious conversion, I argue that Ambedkar constructs and employs a pragmatist rhetoric of reorientation.  Honed by Ambedkar in the pluralistic context of India, this process is comprised of three distinct steps: evaluation of existing religious commitments, renunciation of harmful worldviews, and conversion to beneficial alternative religious orientations.

Una larga historia de desencuentros tiñe las relaciones teóricas entre la teoría crítica y el pragmatismo. Pero también, una tradición abierta por Hans Joas ha intentado aproximar estas dos corrientes en aspectos fundamentales, entendiendo que hay allí un posible y fructífero diálogo. Este trabajo parte de la sospecha de que, pese a puntos de partidas radicalmente distintos, los trabajos y reflexiones sobre el arte de Adorno y Dewey comparten importantes momentos de confluencia, sobre todo en lo que respecta a la vinculación, siempre polémica, del arte con la praxis social y política. Esta problemática relación ha encontrado su núcleo de discusión en la categoría de autonomía, sobre la cual basaremos la indagación en nuestro texto.

This chapter gives an overview and description of the history and development of digital storytelling , beginning with its origins in community based arts practices and radical democratic culture  in the USA, to its establishment as a genre and practice by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California from the early 1990s onwards. The chapter then goes on to trace the subsequent diffusion of digital storytelling throughout the United States with specific examples from NGOs dedicated to disseminating new and innovative forms of democratic practice, such as the Right Question Project and Stories for Change, and from there the role of digital storytelling within global civil society of the new millenium, adopted across national boundaries. This  analysis is also underpinned by the ideas first set out by John Dewey in the early twentieth century concerning the nature of associative and participatory democracy, and the healing of the rupture between creative art and actual experience effected by both capitalism and nationalism.

Though studies of the different members of the classical pragmatist tradition exist in the literature, few of them place emphasis on the aesthetic leaning that the founders of the tradition had, let alone explore if there is a connection with and a continuous strand from this leaning. This paper boldly introduces Aesthetics as a prime aspect of the pragmatic tradition defending not only that there is a traceable aesthetic aspect in all of them, but that there is a connection between them that has an outcome of pragmatism understood as a new approach to aesthetics. We first start with a presentation of the meaning of pragmatism broadly and strictly conceived, then we move on the importance that Peirce gave to Aesthetics, then we understand how the conception of experience of James along with his conception of pragmatism resulted in Dewey’s revolutionary conception of art as experience.

The mission of this article is to unpack Dewey’s phenomenology of religious experience as it is found in both A Common Faith and Art as Experience, and to outline its promises and limitations. After first piecing together Dewey’s position on the nature and constitution of religious experiences, I explore the question of whether or not a Deweyan phenomenology can assimilate or account for some of the most forceful and intense sorts of spiritual intuition as described by several philosophers of religion. William James, Rudolf Otto, and Emmanuel Levinas are among the figures discussed.

This article explores classical pragmatism's resources for contemporary cognitive science by focusing on the arguments that Peirce, James, and Dewey bring to show the diverse affective and aesthetic factors that crucially shape cognition. Making the case that affect further provides the motor for action (including the action involved in perception), we see that the 4E pragmatist picture of cognition as embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended should be enhanced to recognize cognition's essential affective and aesthetic dimensions. The article concludes by
suggesting how the field of somaesthetics, which emerged from pragmatism and develops (in theory and practice) these six dimension of cognition, can contribute to contemporary cognitive research.

This article explores what the contours of a pragmatist theory of rhetoric would be like in its democratic instantiation. The threat of partisan thought and dogmatism in argument is examined as a threat to the sort of democratic community pragmatists such as John Dewey desired to create. Partisans fail to realize not only their own limitations in pursuing the true and the good but also the fact that solving problems
through overly partisan forms of reasoning or argument only creates future obstacles to community life. This provides an extended reading of what Dewey meant by free communication: communication not only free from legal constraints and censorship but also free from the binding habits of thought and interaction that can be identified as
“partisan perfect reasoning.”

In the Graveyard of Works of Art: Dewey and Adorno on Museum Conception of Art –This paper pursues two aims: First, to outline the paradox which consists in apparent, but contradictory presence of two aspects of museums and galleries. These are places of double transformation: Museums transform things from their being living parts of their habitats into dead remnants. Nevertheless, they also expose them to view, they are giving them a new life by heightening, isolating those aspects which make them objects of visual interest. Second aim of this paper is to compare the approaches of two authors – John Dewey and Theodor W. Adorno – who reflected on this ambivalence and tried to find non-reductive way out of it.

Experience and Structure: John Dewey’s and Jan Mukařovský’s Way to Aesthetic Theory.

In this essay author examines the apparent convergence of thought between two important figures of the 20th century philosophical aesthetics – John Dewey and Jan Mukařovský Both thinkers share, as Richard Shusterman points out, several important insights: both proposed way to re-establish continuity between art and life, both tried to overcome the dualism of subject and object by developing the concept of community of experience, or community of norms respectively, and both developed a dynamic conception of structure. In the first part of this essay, the author compares different ways by which both thinkers reached these common insights. In the second part, the overcoming of dualism of art and life is examined in terms of possible conflict between isolationism and contextualism. In the third part, the author argues that Dewey and Mukařovský were both successful in overcoming the dualism between subject and object. Finally, as far as dynamic conception of structure is concerned, the main points of intersection between both theories are localized.

Sažetak: U radu se estetičke postavke Džona Djuija iz knjige "Art as Experience" sagledavaju iz perspektive osnovnih motiva njegove pragmatističke filozofije, sa posebnim osvrtom na Djuijevo učenje iz "Logike, teorije istraživanja". Djuijevi stavovi o umetnosti analiziraju se uz pomoć njegovih teza o kvalitativnom iskustvu i odnosa između iskustva svakodnevnog života i estetskog iskustva. Nakon razmatranja određenih aspekata Djuijeve kritike tradicionalne estetike, u radu se Djuijevo odbacivanje teze o samosvrhovitosti umetnosti izdvaja kao posebno relevantno za promišljanje odnosa između Djuijeve estetike i pragmatističkih pretpostavki njegovog filozofiranja, a zatim se traga za svrhama koje Djui namenjuje umetničkim delima.

In this paper I explore the diverse means by which we understand the term aesthetics and how we perceive meaningful endeavours for children in the elementary art classroom. Drawing on a myriad of approaches to teaching and to viewing the child-artist we come to understand the complex ways students situate the world around them. Exploring the nature of fictive play and children's imagination and creativity, drawing on ten years of experience in the classroom, I examine the contemporary views of visual culture to advocate a focus on a social aesthetics through the work of John Dewey. Thus I provide a site for students to be human innovators pertinent to the " creative economy " of our times through the voices they bring through image and story.

C. S. Peirce is often credited as a forerunner of the verificationist theory of meaning. In his early pragmatist papers, Peirce did say that if we want to make our ideas clear(er), then we should look downstream to their actual and future effects. For many who work in philosophy of mind, this is enough to endorse functionalism and dismiss the whole topic of qualia. It complexifies matters, however, to consider that the term qualia was introduced by the founder of pragmatism himself. Peirce was adamant that only triadic relations can support language and cognition. Even so, he insisted on purely logical grounds that, when we analyze triadic signs all the way, we are left with a qualitative residue he called Firstness. Such an isolated relatum could never be studied experimentally. Yet, given that this primitive state can be confirmed by means of a formal or prescissive distinction, I believe the Peircean account can do justice to many of the intuitions that generate the so-called hard problem of consciousness. My goal, then, is to show that Peirce's semiotic commitment to qualia is compatible with his foundational statements about pragmatism.

Though there are plenty of excellent works that introduce Dewey’s philosophy of education, this paper presents Dewey’s philosophy of education in a rather novel way: we call it a ‘holistic reading’, meaning that our reading of Dewey’s philosophy of education is not only selective of the specific works Dewey wrote about the topic, but is understood under the light of his most important ideas that vertebrate his whole philosophical approach. We think and defend that the leading insight of his philosophy is his particular branch of pragmatism, and hence a holistic approach to Dewey’s philosophy of education will be a pragmatist holistic reading. The outcome of such reading is a more powerful and insightful connection across all of his ideas, as well as a very fertile proposal for educational research. Our proposal aims to show the relevance of Dewey’s work for contemporary educational and social challenges.

The paper, which is the result of the aesthetics seminars I gave at The University of Physical Education in Budapest during this spring semester, investigates the aesthetic potentials of sporting experiences from a Deweyan point of view, also drawing on Richard Shusterman's somaesthetics, a perspective surprisingly missing from the discussion on the aesthetics of sport, even though it could offer a fertile ground for thought.

The aesthetics developed by John Dewey relies on the philosopher's effort to re-establish the broken bonds between life and art, thus demonstrating that aesthetic experience and everyday experience are intertwined and not completely different experiences. From this, Dewey also criticizes cultural institutions and museums as they were conceived, as they are responsible for strengthening this separation between art and life. This paper aims to clarify and show how Dewey re-establishes this bond and how it appears in his philosophy.