Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
Book Notes relationships. Among Brandom's many speculative inspirations is his new aim of developing a universal pragmatic metavocabulary, not to legislate what can be meaningfully said, but only to explain how humans manage to actually use any vocabulary. Larry A. Hickman. Pragmatism as Post-postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Pp. 288. Cloth ISBN: 0-8232-2841-6. The lessons from Dewey that Hickman selects are mostly for non-pragmatists and even non-philosophers. This book is assembled from talks and papers that Hickman has delivered to diverse audiences over the past dozen years. Taking pains to carefully quote and explain Dewey in every chapter, a quite thorough exegesis of much of Dewey's thought takes shape here. The general theme of "post-postmodernism" means that Dewey anticipated some postmodernist themes such as antifoundationalism, while already avoiding their relativistic excesses. In the course of explaining Dewey's approaches to specific issues arising in philosophical concerns about scientific method, naturalism, technology, environmentalism, aesthetics, religion, and politics, Hickman contrasts Dewey with notable twentieth century figures, including Jürgen Habermas, Albert Borgmann, and Max Scheler. Inspired by the cognitive neurosciences, Johnson explores the processes of subconscious thought and feeling in order to entirely reconstruct aesthetics. He views aesthetics very broadly as the human mode of meaning-making, and places aesthetics at the foundations of human understanding. Finding confirmations of claims by classical pragmatism, especially John Dewey, at every turn of his tale, Johnson builds a systematic pragmatist theory of human intelligence. The titles of the book's three sections are "Bodily Meaning and Felt Sense," "Embodied Meaning and the Sciences of the Mind," and "Embodied Meaning, Aesthetics, and Art." His primary conclusions: mind is embodied; feeling transcends thinking; feelings are essential to meaning and knowledge; aesthetics is hardly just subjective taste; and the arts are necessary conditions of human flourishing. Notable convergences with Johnson's Deweyan aesthetics are found in neuroscientist Jay Schulkin's Cognitive Adaptation: A Pragmatist Perspective (Cambridge, 2008) and philosopher Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury, 2008).
Contemporary Pragmatism – Brill
Published: Apr 21, 2008
You can share this free article with as many people as you like with the url below! We hope you enjoy this feature!
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.