This article provides a comprehensive overview of John Dewey's impact on education and aesthetics in Korea and Japan. While initially focused on education, the 1990s saw a growing interest in Dewey's aesthetics, with _Art as Experience_ partially translated in 1999. The Korean perspective on Dewey's aesthetics extends mostly to philosophy of education and art education, but there are also efforts to deepen the understanding of Dewey's aesthetics itself. Also, the interdisciplinary impact of Dewey's aesthetics can be found in fields such (...) as design and human-computer interaction. In Japan, Dewey's aesthetics received limited focus in spite of the "Dewey boom" from 1945 to 1970. Studies since the 2010s reconnect Dewey's aesthetics to his social and cultural context, highlighting its relevance to contemporary issues and emphasizing the public nature of Dewey's concept of democracy. The article also traces the historical development of Dewey studies in Japan, acknowledging the pioneering work of Tsurumi Shunsuke, who integrated Dewey's aesthetics into Japan's social fabric. While recognizing the biases and division of understanding in Dewey studies, the article concludes with a description of the renewed interest in _Art as Experience_ in both countries since the 2010s. (shrink)

Although the reception of John Dewey's _Art as Experience_ has not been totally ignored by secondary literature, the few works that have dealt with the subject have been restricted to the English-speaking context, and more specifically to the United States. This essay sought to consider the reception of Dewey's book on aesthetics in the context of Spanish-speaking countries, with special attention to Mexico, Spain, Colombia, and Argentina. The hypothesis put forward and supported here is that _Art as Experience_ had a (...) late reception due to political and cultural factors in these countries and that it is at present that we really find a deeper reception of this work, with an increasing number of publications about the subject. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the presence of selected themes of John Dewey's _Art as Experience_ mainly in Polish humanistic thought. Our focus is on frameworks in which art-related experience is not only a distinct field of aesthetic research but is also a factor in understanding of art as a process modeled upon all other experiences. We outline philosophical, aesthetic, and educational contexts inspired by Dewey's multifaceted aesthetics, particularly in connection with contemporary considerations on democracy, the humanities, and creative practices. (...) We give special attention to Dewey's explorations of literature, which substantiate the importance of the imagination as a preparation for ethical action. (shrink)

The expansion of art audiences and the creation of new forms, agents, and models of artistic practice have transformed the very definition of art, challenging elitist notions of "great art." Dewey's _Art as Experience_ was essential to this transformation. This understanding and defense of an art that has not lost contact with ordinary audiences, which was film at first, extends to widespread cultural practices (internet videos, video games, TV series, popular music, etc.). They are places where artistic and hermeneutic authority (...) is reappropriated and where agents are reempowered through the constitution of individual experiences. Yet the question of their status as art remains. My first aim here is to use Dewey's analyses in _Art as Experience_ to assert not only the importance of popular culture in human lives but also its status as art. I shall bring together Stanley Cavell and Dewey, often seen as opposites in their approach to pragmatism, as inventors and defenders of an ordinary aesthetics; then, starting from Robert Warshow and Richard Shusterman, I propose a new theoretical inheritance of _Art as Experience_. (shrink)

John Dewey's second chapter of _Art as Experience_, "Ethereal Things," captures in a nutshell a radically new approach to philosophy where the aesthetic takes center stage. The key is to see the aesthetic as something much broader than it is generally conceived. It covers not just art and nature, or even art, nature, and everyday life, but life itself, and in particular human life. But human life is seen as continuous with the life of the animal, the live creature interacting (...) with its environment. Experience begins with sense perception that is, itself, a negotiation of past and present, where things are imbued with meaning as cause and effect are turned into intention and consequence. Experience also has a range going from mere mechanical perception and labeling towards something much more complex. The highest culmination of experience is a mystic-like consummation, a point at which experience is a joyous reward of expanding and enriched life. Dewey speaks of "the power of sense to absorb the most highly spiritualized ideas." One can see him, in this regard, as the opposite of Plato, for whom the sensuous world, at best, imitates the world of Ideas. For Dewey, ethereal things are not eliminated but, rather, brought into the world of sense. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to briefly reconstruct the reception of Dewey's _Art as Experience_ and more generally of his aesthetics in Italy. In order to do so, my contribution will be divided into three parts, corresponding to the three editions that Dewey's book has had in Italy. In the first part, I will trace the early influences and the debate with Benedetto Croce, showing the "idealistic encirclement" suffered by Dewey's aesthetics, which led to the first Italian translation of (...) Dewey's book in 1951. In the second part, I will trace the influence of Dewey's aesthetics from 1951 to 2006, showing first the Marxist and Catholic critiques, then the first tentative attempts at a reinterpretation outside the idealist domain, and finally the second edition of _Art as Experience_ in Italy 1995. The third part considers the renaissance of Dewey's aesthetics in Italy after Giovanni Matteucci's new translation in 2006 and Luigi Russo's work in 2007. The article concludes with a brief consideration of Dewey's significance for the contemporary Italian aesthetic debate and an attempt to identify a specific Italian interpretation of Dewey's aesthetics that can be traced in the effort to bring Dewey into dialogue with other authors of the modern aesthetic tradition. (shrink)

The article argues that Dewey's _Art as Experience_ is one of just four foundational texts in Western aesthetics, which break down into two oppositions: Plato's _Republic_ versus Aristotle's _Poetics_ and Kant's _Critique of Judgment_ versus _Art as Experience_. It points out that Dewey's book, after decades of neglect, has helped give rise to a number of rich aesthetic subdisciplines, including everyday aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, somaesthetics, and political aesthetics.

This essay introduces a special issue devoted to studying the global impact and rich, ongoing legacy of John Dewey's aesthetic masterpiece _Art as Experience_, ninety years after its initial publication in 1934. After noting the role that the _Journal of Aesthetic Education_ played in assessing the book's influence, this introductory essay surveys the international reception of the book by exploring its history of translation and explaining the difficulties of its reception in certain countries. This survey demonstrates that the international reception (...) of _Art as Experience_ was largely retrospective, coming long after the book's initial appearance and apparently benefiting from the rise of neopragmatism and the international attention given to this new pragmatist expression. The translation and reception history of Dewey's book also reveals the economic and political factors that shape the international circulation of ideas. After five essays that focus on the reception of _Art as Experience_ in cultures where it was translated, the special issue concludes with three more essays that discuss how the book's ideas can be applied to contemporary issues in aesthetics and philosophy more generally, while suggesting ways where the book's goals could also be furthered by treating its limitations. (shrink)

Modern China's acceptance of Dewey's legacy of aesthetic thought is divided into three main periods. In 1906–49, Dewey's _Art as Experience_ was noticed, but due to the fact that China was more concerned with the social realities and national crisis at that time, its aesthetic thought appeared as an accessory to Dewey's social philosophy and educational thought, and its rich significance was properly realized only within the practice of aesthetic education. From 1949 to 1978, Dewey's aesthetics was effectively suppressed through (...) China's ideological storms. From 1978 to the present, benefitting through China's policies of reform and opening, Dewey's aesthetics gradually gained the attention of Chinese academics and found expression in considerable research that develops the book's legacy in distinctive forms of contemporary Chinese aesthetics: life aesthetics, somaesthetics, and ecological aesthetics. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer criticizes Friedrich Schiller for inaugurating a merely aesthetic disposition toward reality. Such an aesthetic disposition, on Gadamer's account, is overly subjective. It also robs one of a genuine encounter with beauty that contributes to one's understanding. In my view, Schiller's position is not reducible to Gadamer's critique of it. Indeed, following scholars like John Pizer and Nathan Ross, I affirm that Gadamer does not fully appreciate the practical, political, and theoretical aspects of Schiller's aesthetics. In the following, I (...) focus on Schiller's political thought as it is developed in response to the French Revolution. In addition to contextualizing his political thought, I illuminate his account of the mediating play impulse, his conception of the beautiful, and his systematic understanding of freedom to argue that Schiller resists Gadamer's charge of aesthetic differentiation. By returning to Gadamer's critique, we can more fully appreciate Schiller's political invocation of the aesthetic domain. (shrink)

Is education being disingenuous about arts education? When arts education is evaluated, the value of arts education is disputed. Arts education is judged to be of poor educational proof value. I believe a very different conclusion about arts education can be drawn. Pertinent to a good education in general is arts education. Why the arts are educationally troubling and how arts education can improve education is examined here. A brief account of arts education is given in an attempt to explain (...) why the arts in education are not a luxury but, instead, a genuine need. (shrink)

Can art illuminate life or is it just so much irrelevant illusion (or delusion)? Certainly, Plato—the great founding father of Western philosophy—seems to have been largely drawn to the latter view. From Plato onwards, however, this more sceptical perspective seems bedevilled by a range of conceptual conflations and confusions regarding the language and purposes of art. Proceeding by way of critical attention to distinctions between (for example) imagination and fantasy and the artistic and the aesthetic and to the different cognitive (...) and affective functions of literal and figurative usage, this article also draws upon diverse insights of poets and artists to argue that the ultimate purpose of the deliberate or “artificial” separation of significant art from “real” human life is nevertheless to enable deeper perception and appreciation of that life. (shrink)

This article focuses on the experience of unsettling art and its psychological impact. Although it is widely recognized that works of art can be highly unsettling and disturbing, there seem to be no studies revealing the psychological importance of such experiences. Through a selection of interviews conducted according to phenomenological principles, a few essential features of the unsettling art experience are identified. These features include a strong negative emotional response, feelings of attraction, and pictorial vividness. Furthermore, these experiences form memory (...) traces that are powerful, persistent, and long-lasting. The present study shows that when experiencing an unpleasant emotional response to a work of art, the emotion is linked to the sensate form of the picture and thereby objectified, allowing contemplation of the existential importance of the experience. Furthermore, this study uncovers a possible relation between prior traumatic episodes and an intense emotional response to unsettling art, and it is suggested that experiences with unsettling works of art allow the individual to reconcile with their prior trauma. (shrink)

Students come into contact with the natural world and nonhuman others in a variety of scenarios. Of the embodied experiences with the nonhuman available to educational endeavors, the nature-based edutainment venue is growing in popularity. This article examines how such spaces work as ontological orderings—frames—for the human viewers and what the implications might be for an ecological sensibility. Through an exploration of Kant's and Dewey's philosophies of art, this article posits the implications of viewing nature as art, taking into consideration (...) the harmful and helpful implications of aesthetic viewing. Ultimately, this article is interested in the ways nonhuman beings and landscapes are situated in our visual perception and the implications for an education for ecological consciousness. (shrink)

What is the pedagogical place of silence in the Anthropocene classroom? Should we as teachers—particularly as teachers involved in the education of aesthetic sensibilities—understand our classrooms as sites in which awareness of our Anthropocene predicament is spread, sites in which a general sense of the urgency of our times is disseminated? And is this awareness not best spread via explicit facts and data, the key story of climate change and biodiversity loss, with these themes serving as the background against which (...) we interpret the symbolic abstractions of aesthetic objects? This article follows Ursula Le Guin's example to a conclusion that perhaps differs from the consensus. Our overall argument is that cultivating a certain sort of silence relative to the Anthropocene can be profoundly educational for our students, if—of course—that silent teaching is done artfully. (shrink)

The relevance of the presented research is due to the importance of familiarizing modern children with the culture of reading, in the context of which illustrations for children's books play an especially important role. Book illustrations attract the attention of a child and create the necessary focus in the perception of the information presented in books. The purpose of this article is to analyze the creativity of illustrators of children's literature and to study the modern trends in the art of (...) children's book illustration. During the study, the methods of theoretical and comparative analysis were used; in addition, special attention was paid to the study of the basic concepts of creating a children's book and the analysis of available research publications. The main trends in the development of the art of illustration of children's books were determined. The main vectors of illustration development were also defined. The applied value of this research work lies in identifying the main directions of the development of the art of children's book illustrations with the aim of the subsequent introduction of progressive methods for creating such illustrations that meet the requirements of the present day. In general, this study contributes to the formation of a coherent picture of the perception of the main trends in the work of modern illustrators and the formation of the art of book illustration. (shrink)

This article aims to defend the value of art museum audio guides. Modern guides have many functions, but I will focus on two that pertain directly to art appreciation. First, audio guides offer tours that direct visitors' attention to museum highlights. Second, they have individual stops that offer commentary and criticism about individual works of art. I will concede that the tours do not serve the interests of all visitors. However, I will defend the merits of the individual stops. In (...) particular, I will argue that they provide information about the associated works that it would be difficult for us to learn just by looking at them for ourselves. In so doing, the guides put us in a better position to appreciate the works. Crucially, this benefit obtains even if art appreciation turns out to be subjective, must be undertaken autonomously, or has to be grounded in empirical observation. (shrink)

In this article, I will try to show that (1) one of the more compelling reasons for advocating for aesthetic normativity comes from an axiom that suppositionally underlies aesthetic educational endeavors and (2) by framing aesthetic judgments contextually and hypothetically we may be able to deal effectively with one of the more compelling reasons for antinormativity, namely the fact of irreconcilable differences between judgments of two equally competent judges. I will try to show that framing judgments contextually is common practice (...) in aesthetic education. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a new philosophical interpretation of Virgil's _Aeneid_, dually centered on the queens of Olympus and Carthage. More specifically, I show how the philosopher-poet Virgil deploys Dido's Junonian _furor_ as the Aristotelian matter of the unjust Roman _imperium_, the feminist counterforce to the patriarchal force disguised as peaceful order. The first section explores Virgil's political and biographical background for the raw materials of a feminist, anti-imperial political philosophy. The second section, following Marilynn Desmond, situates the continuing (...) misogynist condemnation of Virgil's two goddess-queens in the context of their honored centrality in Roman and Carthaginian culture. The third section reinterprets Virgil's goddess-queens as agents of _furor_ as (apparently mad) feminist counterforce to the (actually mad) unjust force of the Roman empire via its agents Jupiter and Aeneas. The fourth section translates these poetic-philosophical interpretations into prose, arguing that Dido's Junonian _furor_ is the Aristotelian matter constituting the unjust forms of Roman _imperium_. And the conclusion applies the latter analysis to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's _Empire_, suggesting Dido as a model for the "multitude" in the fight against the imperial injustice of today's globalized empire. (shrink)

Every doctoral thesis requires contextualization within its specific discipline's theoretical bases. For a visual arts practice-based thesis, the relevant bases include those of aesthetics and visual perception. This article reviews a Western history of the domain of visual aesthetic theory, addressing both the _analytical_ philosophical efforts to define art and the _continental_ approaches, which construe art as social construction. It then reviews a third, normative stance that foregrounds cognitive value before definition or sociological context—an _aesthetic cognitivist_ position, art practice as (...) a means of acquiring and sharing experiential knowledge and understanding. Contemporary concerns about environmental aesthetics and somaesthetics are also addressed in the Introduction. Aesthetic theories are related to visual perception theories as an aid to fulfilling the scholarly requirements for a practice-based thesis. (shrink)

The idea with which Rabindranath Tagore established Visva-Bharati is different from that of the grounding of Immanuel Kant's "university with condition" or that of Jacques Derrida's "university without condition." The thinking that finally materialized into Visva-Bharati, or rather the "fore-thinking," is an uncanny complex of aesthetics, politics, topolitics, pedagogy, and Tagorean philosophy of the "home" and the "world." There is neither the "conflict" of Kant's essay _The Conflict of the Faculties_ nor Derrida's absolute radicality and radical absoluteness: there is neither (...) Kant's "freedom of the Enlightenment" nor Derrida's "freedom from the Enlightenment." Ranjan Ghosh captures this so-called dichotomy engrossingly in his book _Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore_. In Tagore's idea of university, we find a "traffic," an exchange of some sort, between nativism and cosmopolitanism, colonial and postcolonial, singularity and plurality, root and rootlessness. Ghosh not only controls the "traffic" in his work but also gives his close reading of the institution and, most importantly, the underlying principle that led to the establishment of the institution. Visva-Bharati was not built upon the principles of a modern university. It did not have the moral responsibility of following the already established norms and regulations or the society at large but had what Ghosh calls a sense of "no-responsibility." Tagore's idea of university was thus built upon the "no-responsibility" toward the old Eurocentric model of pedagogy and the "responsibility" toward creating a new and more reflective model. He employed one set of responsibilities to "counter" another set of responsibilities. This article in a way is a reimagining, a commentary on Ghosh's work on the pedagogical aspects of Visva-Bharati. (shrink)

Zhejiang's aesthetic education has developed rapidly in recent years, especially in the context of global aesthetic education that promotes the integration of noble culture with popular culture and emphasizes diversity, compromise, and reproducibility. In light of this year's high reexamination of aesthetic education by the country, provinces, and cities, aesthetic education has been elevated to a new level. However, existing aesthetic education still has problems, such as the indistinguishability of aesthetic education and art education concepts, the one-sidedness of aesthetic education (...) content, and the shortage of aesthetic education teachers. These problems have long affected the development of Zhejiang's aesthetic education. The issue of promoting aesthetic education has become a major concern for aesthetic education teachers throughout the province and even the country. Therefore, this article focuses on the current situation and problems of Zhejiang's aesthetic education. A comparison of the current status and achievements of Taiwan's aesthetic education with Zhejiang, drawing on each other's experience, learning from each other's strengths and weaknesses, and in-depth research on teachers' performance in aesthetic education, aesthetic education training programs, and campus cultural construction, and other aspects is put forward. A series of implementation plans for the promotion of aesthetic education, such as "synergy training" and "education of people with a view," was provided as a practical experiment and a theoretical reference for promoting the rapid development of aesthetic education in the country. (shrink)

Many people appear to attach great value to sad music. But why? One way to gain insight into this question is to turn away from music and look instead at why people value sad conversations. In the case of conversations, the answer seems to be that expressing sadness creates a sense of genuine connection. We propose that sad music can also have this type of value. Listening to a sad song can give one a sense of genuine connection. We then (...) explore the nature of this value in two experimental studies. The results suggest a striking relationship between music and conversation. People see something distinctively musical in works that express precisely those emotions that they think most create connection within conversation. (shrink)

The “classic” is a vexed term in the work of William Carlos Williams. He uses the category to describe both the stale classicism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and, conversely, the authentic, “aberrant” classic of James Joyce and surrealism. Analyzing unpublished archival manuscripts alongside the posthumously published collection of essays, The Embodiment of Knowledge, I approach the classic through Williams's theories of pedagogy. Williams parodies and rejects academic modes of reading that cling to the “malignant rigidities” of the (...) past. Yet Paterson and The Embodiment also theorize the reader's interpretive power to disrupt any homogenizing conformity latent in the literary tradition. This dissonant hermeneutics can recuperate the classics and represents a form of resistance to a binary logic of past versus present, or European versus American literature. (shrink)

For almost 300 years, five different art forms have used the same instructional method. This Common Arts Instructional Method (CAIM) can be explained using a variety of theories. The CAIM also offers the opportunity to understand instructional methods under the banner of design: instances of types rather than applications of laws or principles. The differences between theory and design are explored, and some recommendations are offered for striking new instances of this common type.

Art works provide a unique and influential way to teach human virtues because they can place individuals (or particular artistic expressions) within the ambiguities, complexities, and forces of the human experience. I use four art works to teach about the virtue of kindness: Giotto di Bondonie's Scene 2: St. Francis Giving His Mantle to a Poor Man; Bishop Charles Francois in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Adam in William Shakespeare's As You Like It; and Sonya in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. (...) In these four examples, we see necessary characteristics of being a kind person: supererogatory behavior, altruistic behavior, a display of the way the world ought to be, and the presence of a kind soul. (shrink)

After showing how pragmatist aesthetics and Marcuse's critical theory affirm aesthetic education as key to transforming society toward greater freedom, equality, pleasure, and fulfillment, I compare the ways these two approaches differently perceive the scope and role of aesthetics in such transformation. Whereas Marcuse identifies the aesthetic dimension with the realm of high art, pragmatism understands this dimension far more broadly to include the popular arts and somaesthetic arts of living. Because Marcuse identifies art's critical function through its oppositional transcendence (...) and autonomy from ordinary reality and practical life, he insists that aesthetics cannot directly contribute to transformative praxis in the real world but can operate only indirectly by transforming our sensibilities. Pragmatist aesthetics, particularly though somaesthetics, resolves the dilemma in Marcuse's aesthetics of liberation by bridging the alleged gap between aesthetics and praxis by reeducating our sensibilities in a more direct, practical, embodied way. The article further exemplifies the overlaps and differences between Marcuse's critical theory and pragmatist somaesthetics by focusing on erotic experience, which is essential to Marcuse's liberational program and increasingly present in somaesthetics’ concern with aesthetic reeducation of our senses and sensibilities. (shrink)

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) came to fame in 1798 with the first volume of her Plays on the Passions, which included her theoretical account of drama, including tragedy. This article reconstructs Baillie's theory of tragedy and shows how the theory informs the design of the Plays on the Passions. For Baillie, all human beings have powerful and dangerous passions that we need to learn to regulate. Tragedy can help with this and can serve an educative purpose by presenting us with narratives (...) in which the protagonists repeatedly fail to check the growth of a particular passion, such as jealousy or hatred. We witness this passion gain more and more hold over the character's mind until they are destroyed. This offers a warning and motivates us to watch out for the growth of our own passions and keep them in check. Baillie's theory of tragedy is original and combines a moral orientation, a voluntarist belief in free will, and optimism about the human condition. For her, the sufferings undergone by tragic characters could have been avoided had the characters made better choices. Thus the message of tragedy is not that suffering is inescapable but that suffering can be minimized if we cultivate self-knowledge and emotional self-control. (shrink)