Paul C. Taylor

The Two-Dewey Thesis, Continued: Shusterman's Pragmatist Aesthetics

I owe Richard Shusterman a great debt. As I struggled to take up John Dewey’s aesthetics for my dissertation topic, an encounter with Pragmatist Aesthetics inoculated me against the doubts of my colleagues and advisors. I had found in this Richard Shusterman a kindred spirit, someone who also wanted to bring Dewey into conversation with George Dickie and Arthur Danto, someone who also resisted the idea that, as I was being encouraged to realize, Dewey’s work was obsolete, that Art as Experience was a historical relic. And, what sometimes seemed best of all, this someone seemed eager to join the conversation on Dewey’s behalf without adopting the famous murkiness of Dewey’s prose. The conversation that Shusterman helped me to help Dewey join was a philosophical one, and since the favored way of registering gratitude for influential work in such conversations is with criticism, I’ll take this opportunity to explore a worry that I’ve had but left inarticulate almost since that first graduate-school encounter. It seems to me that Shusterman subscribes to a way of reading Dewey that we might trace to Richard Rorty, an approach that posits two Deweys, one good, one less so. On the good side, there is an edifying, therapeutic thinker who looks past, or seeks to expand, the limits of professional philosophical practice. But on the bad side, there is a systematic philosopher, a metaphysician-epistemologist-philosophical anthropologist who tries to solve philosophical puzzles on their own terms, more or less, rather

Making Niagara a Cataract: Cornel West, Greatness, and the Music of Ideas

There is an odd duality in Cornel West’s work. He is a generous thinker and voracious interlocutor, willing to learn from anyone on a sincere quest for insight. But he is also he is an unapologetic admirer of greatness, as stingy with ascriptions of genius as he is lavish with praise for the select few who qualify. “Making Niagara a Cataract” reflects on this duality. I try to explain what motivates West’s commitment to the importance of greatness, and how these motivations emerge from and shape his intellectual project.