The Journal of Aesthetic Education

There are few contemporary thinkers in the tradition of American pragmatism as prolific or as creative as Richard Shusterman. His thought and work range from analytic aesthetics to political philosophy, from ethics to the importance of bodily habits in modern society. The volume edited by Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Malecki highlights the remarkable international reception of Shusterman’s ideas. The majority of the contributors to this volume are Polish academics, a fact that stems from its origin in a 2008 conference in Poland on Shusterman’s work. A few additional essays were solicited from scholars in the United States and other parts of Europe to round out the diversity of this collection’s offerings. Overall, the contents consist of a brief introduction to the volume’s offerings from the editors, a recounting of his work by Shusterman himself, twelve essays by contributors grouped in three thematic areas, and a response to these essays by Shusterman.

Finding form and organization in such an array of responses to the diverse and rich work of Shuster-man was surely a monumental task for the editors. The tripartite organizational scheme adopted, however, does give some direction to the reactions to Shusterman’s thought: “Literary Theory and Philosophy of Art,” “Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics,” and “Somaesthetics.” Each of these sections has its gems for those working on pragmatism to admire and use, but here I will briefly review each section’s contents in the hope of doing justice to this volume’s engagement with Shusterman’s wide-ranging thought.

The first section deals with Shusterman’s professional and historical starting point—the philosophy of literature. Starting with his early work on T. S. Eliot and literature, Anna Budziak details Shusterman’s account of emotion and its affinities to Eliot’s reading of affect. Concerns with the decision to master or express emotion, Budziak argues, are also central to Shusterman’s later work on somaesthetics and the body. Taking a more modern, appropriative take, Kacper Bartczak engages the debates surrounding Richard Rorty’s ideas of the ironist and strong poet and expands on Shusterman’s approach—emphasizing Emersonian self-creation. Bartczak makes the argument that Shusterman’s thought finds genius to be opaque to one’s self and as involving the central feature of anxiety over self-change and self-creation. Literature is not solely fictional writing, of course. Wojciech Malecki’s chapter focuses on the often-overlooked genre of autobiographical writing and asks about the relationship between one’s philosophy and one’s biography. Malecki finds Shusterman’s thought to be an [End Page 123] excellent test case for such questions about the import of autobiographical writing since Shusterman often reflects on the experiences that instigated certain philosophical ruminations in his work. Malecki reconstructs the argument for including biography in one’s argumentative endeavors: if philosophy involves and centers on a social, historical self with a specific path of lived experience, then one has a reason for including one’s own biography in philosophical work that involves theorizing and abstract argument. Malecki, however, unlike some of the other contributions in this volume, directly challenges Shusterman’s approach; Malecki believes that those who see philosophy as pure theorizing would find such a defense of autobiography unmoving—they would still think we can theorize contingent, individuated human life in abstract terms if we wanted to do so. Malecki, seeing the value if not the necessity of Shusterman’s approach, ends with an account of the different ways autobiography plays into Shusterman’s philosophical work. Dorata Koczanowicz’s piece concludes the first section by addressing the question of how art can help us in a therapeutic fashion. This account largely employs Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience to argue that art can create spaces for contemplation related to issues of truth and goodness. By dealing with these crucial factors, such a Deweyan account of art is said to connect to concerns of...