Embodying Pragmatism

Embodying Pragmatism is the first monograph in English devoted to Richard Shusterman, an internationally renowned philosopher and one of today's most innovative thinkers in pragmatism and aesthetics. The book presents a comprehensive account of Shusterman's principal philosophical ideas concerning pragmatism, aesthetics, and literary theory (including such themes as interpretation, aesthetic experience, popular art, and human embodiment - culminating in his proposal of a new discipline called «somaesthetics»). As Shusterman's philosophical writings involve a dialogue with both analytic and continental traditions, this monograph not only offers a critical vision of contemporary pragmatist thought but also situates Shusterman and pragmatism within the current state of theory.

The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms’ interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.

This book endeavors to fill the conceptual gap in theorizing about embodied cognition. The theories of mind and cognition which one could generally call "situated" or "embodied cognition" have gained much attention in the recent decades. However, it has been mostly phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, etc.), which has served as a philosophical background for their research program. The main goal of this book is to bring the philosophy of classical American pragmatism firmly into play. Although pragmatism has been arguably the first intellectual current which systematically built its theories of knowledge, mind and valuation upon the model of a bodily interaction between an organism and its environment, as the editors and authors argue, it has not been given sufficient attention in the debate and, consequently, its conceptual resources for enriching the embodied mind project are far from being exhausted. In this book, the authors propose concrete subject-areas in which the philosophy of pragmatism can be of help when dealing with particular problems the philosophy of the embodied mind nowadays faces - a prominent example being the inevitable tension between bodily situatedness and the potential universality of symbolic meaning.

The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms’ interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.

This book endeavors to fill the conceptual gap in theorizing about embodied cognition. The theories of mind and cognition which one could generally call "situated" or "embodied cognition" have gained much attention in the recent decades. However, it has been mostly phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, etc.), which has served as a philosophical background for their research program. The main goal of this book is to bring the philosophy of classical American pragmatism firmly into play. Although pragmatism has been arguably the first intellectual current which systematically built its theories of knowledge, mind and valuation upon the model of a bodily interaction between an organism and its environment, as the editors and authors argue, it has not been given sufficient attention in the debate and, consequently, its conceptual resources for enriching the embodied mind project are far from being exhausted. In this book, the authors propose concrete subject-areas in which the philosophy of pragmatism can be of help when dealing with particular problems the philosophy of the embodied mind nowadays faces - a prominent example being the inevitable tension between bodily situatedness and the potential universality of symbolic meaning.

The question of the relativity of interpretations and the relevance of the author's intentions for interpretation has been at the center of controversy for the past century in different philosophical traditions, but there has been very little effort to examine the different ways this question has been addressed in contemporary philosophy within the space of a single book. Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation. Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism brings diverse philosophical viewpoints to bear on these issues, addressing them through analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, and pragmatism. Kalle Puolakka develops a view of interpretation drawing on Donald Davidson's late philosophy of language and mind defending the role of authorial intentions against criticisms intentionalist views have received particularly in hermeneutics and pragmatism. In addition to relativism and intentionalism, the book discusses such issues as the role of imagination and aesthetic experience in interpretation, and it presents a thorough critique of hermeneutic conceptions of interpretation which emphasize the essential historical nature of our understanding. Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation shows how it is possible to combine a pluralistic attitude towards art without resurrecting the role of the author's intentions in interpretation.

A student's guide to the historical context, key thinkers and central themes of pragmatism, a concept central to American philosophy.

American pragmatism has been arguably the first intellectual current which systematically built its theories of knowledge, mind and valuation upon the concept of a bodily interaction between an organism and its environment. This book investigates the historical as well as systematic relations between the philosophy of pragmatism and the current theories of mind, known as situated or embodied cognition.