John Dewey and the Artful Life

Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality Scott R. Stroud

Publish Date: 9/30/2011
Dimensions: 6 x 9
Page Count: 240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-05007-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-271-05008-9
Series Name: American and European Philosophy

Hardcover Edition: $69.95Add to Cart

Paperback Edition: $34.95Add to Cart

“Scott Stroud’s fine volume is the most complete and wide-ranging treatment of Dewey’s aesthetics ever to appear. In the best pragmatist spirit, it uses its comprehensive scholarship to help us reconstruct not only art but many dimensions of our shared human experience.” —Crispin Sartwell, Dickinson College

“John Dewey and the Artful Life carefully reconstructs John Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience, links it to forms of moral cultivation, and extends pragmatism’s meliorist project. Joining philosophy and practice, Scott Stroud both advances our understanding of pragmatist aesthetics and points us toward ways of everyday living that would adjust us better to our circumstances and work, call us to greater mindfulness about the moral possibilities of our situated presents, and help us communicate in a fuller manner aesthetically and ethically.” —Peter Simonson, University of Colorado at Boulder

“Scott Stroud’s John Dewey and the Artful Life is an attempt to respond to our contemporary lives of Thoreauvian quiet desperation. Though he trades heavily on the aesthetics of John Dewey, Stroud does more than present a historical analysis. He engages Dewey’s ideas in the work of bringing artfulness to the full range of our everyday experiences as a mode of self-cultivation. The upshot is that, for Stroud, philosophy can direct us to the sorts of aesthetic experiences that can help ameliorate our social inertia and cynicism. Through argument and example, Stroud builds a strong case for his pragmatic uses of Dewey’s thought.” —Douglas Anderson, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

“Scott Stroud’s innovative investigations of the intimacies of aesthetic and moral experience invite his readers to engage a type of artful mindfulness that is at once integrative and melioristic.” —Larry Hickman, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.

Scott R. Stroud is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 The Problems of Art and Life

2 The Value of Aesthetic Experience

3 Dewey on Experience, Value, and Ends

4 Aesthetic Experience and the Experience of Moral Cultivation

5 Reflection and Moral Value in Aesthetic Experience

6 Orientational Meliorism and the Quest for the Artful Life

7 Practicing the Art of Living: The Case of Artful Communication

8 Beginning to Live the Artful Life

Notes