John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality

Description

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. Front Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1 The Problems of Art and Life Chapter 2 The Value of Aesthetic Experience Chapter 3 Dewey on Experience, Value, and Ends Chapter 4 Aesthetic Experience and the Experience of Moral Cultivation Chapter 5 Reflection and Moral Value in Aesthetic Experience Chapte 6 Orientational Meliorism and the Quest for the Artful Life Chapter 7 Practicing the Art of Living: The Case of Artful Communication Chapter 8: Beginning to Live the Artful Life Notes Bibliography Index Back Cover