Description
Pennsylvania State University Press John Dewey and the Artful Life Pragmatism Aesthetics and Morality 2011 Edition by Scott R. Stroud
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. Table of contents :- ContentsAcknowledgments1 The Problems of Art and Life 2 The Value of Aesthetic Experience3 Dewey on Experience, Value, and Ends4 Aesthetic Experience and the Experience of Moral Cultivation5 Reflection and Moral Value in Aesthetic Experience6 Orientational Meliorism and the Quest for the Artful Life7 Practicing the Art of Living: The Case of Artful Communication8 Beginning to Live the Artful LifeNotesBibliographyIndex