II. Aesthetics and Imagination

One of my focal interests as a graduate student at the University of Chicago was aesthetics. My approach to aesthetics and the philosophy of art was developed under the tutelage of Ted Cohen, from whom I took courses in aesthetics, metaphor, J.L. Austin, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. At the same time I also had the good fortune to work with Paul Ricoeur in courses on Hermeneutics, Metaphor, and Kant’s Theory of Imagination. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on metaphor, and since at that time nobody took metaphor very seriously, it was decided that metaphor fit into aesthetics and other unimportant topics. Cohen and Ricoeur helped me appreciate the importance of imagination in all human meaning and thought. However, it was not until I turned to pragmatism, and especially to Dewey’s Art As Experience, that I began to fully appreciate the role of what was called “the aesthetic” in all aspects of human cognition. After many years of working through some of these issues, I came to see that aesthetic dimensions of experience – such as form, qualities, feelings, emotions, image schemas, and affect contours – lie at the heart, not just of “aesthetic” experience, but at the heart of all experience. My book The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007) is my attempt to articulate this orientation and to support it with empirical research from the cognitive sciences. The central focus of this project is the way the body gives rise to our possibilities for making and discovering meaning. I have become convinced that Dewey was correct when he argued that art is the consummation of experience, that is, art brings to fulfillment the dimensions of meaning and value that are operative in all our experience. Therefore, aesthetics, which was traditionally cast out, especially in analytic philosophy, as marginal, must now be seen as the foundation for any empirically adequate philosophical perspective.

Courses:

PHIL 407/507: Music and Meaning (with Steve Larson)

PHIL 433/533: Kant (Critique of Judgment)

PHIL 441/541: Philosophy of the Arts

PHIL 463/563: 20th-Century Philosophers: Dewey

PHIL 463/563: 20th-Century Philosophers: Dewey (Experience and Nature)

Books:

The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (co-author George Lakoff), Basic Books, 1999

The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Articles:

“The Stone that was Cast Out Shall Become the Cornerstone: The Bodily Aesthetics of Human Meaning,” Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 6, no. 2 (2007), 89-103.

Something in the Way She Moves: Metaphors of Musical Motion,” (co-author Steve Larson). Metaphor and Symbol, 18, No. 2 (2003): 63-84.

“Architecture and The Embodied Mind,” Translated into Dutch. OASE: Journal for Architecture, 58 (Summer 2002), 75-93.

“Embodied Musical Meaning,” Theory and Practice, 22-23 (1997-98), 95-102.

Book Chapters:

“The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition,” Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation, S. Küchler and W. Melion (eds.). Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 74-86.