John Dewey and the Artful Life

“Scott Stroud’s fine volume is the most complete and wide-ranging treatment of Dewey’s aesthetics ever to appear. In the best pragmatist spirit, it uses its comprehensive scholarship to help us reconstruct not only art but many dimensions of our shared human experience.”

—Crispin Sartwell, Dickinson College

“John Dewey and the Artful Life carefully reconstructs John Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience, links it to forms of moral cultivation, and extends pragmatism’s meliorist project. Joining philosophy and practice, Scott Stroud both advances our understanding of pragmatist aesthetics and points us toward ways of everyday living that would adjust us better to our circumstances and work, call us to greater mindfulness about the moral possibilities of our situated presents, and help us communicate in a fuller manner aesthetically and ethically.”

—Peter Simonson, University of Colorado at Boulder

“Scott Stroud’s John Dewey and the Artful Life is an attempt to respond to our contemporary lives of Thoreauvian quiet desperation. Though he trades heavily on the aesthetics of John Dewey, Stroud does more than present a historical analysis. He engages Dewey’s ideas in the work of bringing artfulness to the full range of our everyday experiences as a mode of self-cultivation. The upshot is that, for Stroud, philosophy can direct us to the sorts of aesthetic experiences that can help ameliorate our social inertia and cynicism. Through argument and example, Stroud builds a strong case for his pragmatic uses of Dewey’s thought.”

—Douglas Anderson, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

“Stroud’s book is admirable in stressing the importance of subjective melioration within one’s own life. Indeed, reading this book has led me to try to change some of my own habits: to be more present-oriented, for example. In sum, this is an exceptionally impressive book. It not only adds to contemporary reinterpretations of Dewey’s thought in aesthetics and ethics but also raises serious issues concerning fundamental assumptions predominant in contemporary aesthetics. Moreover, it provides new material in the growing field of everyday aesthetics, especially in the area of communication and in the role that everyday aesthetics plays in the good life. Anyone interested in aesthetics or ethics, and particularly in the relation between the two, will benefit from reading it.”

—Thomas W. Leddy Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

“Scott Stroud’s innovative investigations of the intimacies of aesthetic and moral experience invite his readers to engage a type of artful mindfulness that is at once integrative and melioristic.”

—Larry Hickman, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

“Educators interested in art and aesthetics, for example, will likely find his discussion of the importance of attentiveness and orientation intellectually stimulating. Similarly, readers interested in the relationship between education and moral cultivation will probably value his discussion of orientational meliorism. Finally, rhetoric and communications scholars should appreciate Stroud’s argument for the aesthetics of everyday communication. All in all, the book is a first-rate contribution to the literature on Dewey’s theory of art, art education, and his philosophy of art.”

—Eric A. Evans Education and Culture