Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

In the past few years, commentary literature on the work of Richard Shusterman, the foremost contemporary representative of pragmatist aesthetics, has steadily grown. Symposia on Shusterman’s theory have been published in various journals, and about three years ago the first monograph-length study examining Shusterman’s views on aesthetics was released. Now alongside these pieces a collection of articles edited by Dorota Koczanowicz and the author of the book on Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics Wojcieh Malecki has appeared. The anthology consists of twelve essays devoted to different parts of Shusterman’s pragmatism, as well as two articles by Shusterman himself, an intellectual [End Page 566] biography that begins the article section of the anthology and a commentary piece on the articles of the collection.

In the first essay, Shusterman traces the path of his philosophical development from his early work on analytic philosophy of literature to the multidisciplinary field of somaesthetics that Shusterman has lately devoted most of his intellectual efforts on developing. As disconnected as these two parts of Shusterman’s philosophical output may seem, he nevertheless argues that they are connected by an attempt to test and transcend established intellectual boundaries. Otherwise, the essay does not provide that much new information, particularly to those readers already familiar with Shusterman’s critique of analytic aesthetics.

Even though the articles of the collection approach Shusterman’s pragmatism from a broad range of questions and perspectives, somaesthetics emerges as the book’s most important theme, for issues relevant to this discipline are considered in many articles besides those included in the section of the book explicitly devoted to somaesthetics. This choice of emphasis could perhaps have deserved some more thought, for as Shusterman notes in his response to the articles, because of the background of the collection—most of the book’s essays originate from a conference held in Poland in 2008—it was not possible for the authors to take more substantially into account his most systematic work on somaesthetics, namely the book Body Consciousness (2008). Nevertheless, as Shusterman also observes, some of the articles manage to raise good points regarding somaesthetics that he needs to think about in the future in more depth.

The first section of the book dealing with Shusterman’s aesthetics and philosophy of literature is somewhat of a disappointment. This is mainly because only in one of the four articles this part consists of—in that by Wojcieh Malecki on the question of whether autobiographical facts can be legitimately relied on in arguing for a particular philosophical position—Shusterman is clearly the main figure, while in the remaining three the views of other philosophers and intellectuals like T.S. Eliot, Richard Rorty, and John Ashbery are given more space than Shusterman’s ideas. This is not to say that the articles of the first part would not be worth reading on their own right. On the contrary, they are all rather engaging. The articles would, however, have deepened the picture the book presents of Shusterman’s pragmatism, had the authors integrated Shusterman’s views more firmly into them. For example, in Dorota Koczanowicz’s article, where she compares conceptions presented in pragmatist aesthetics on the power of art to fuel meaning into our lives with Iris Murdoch’s well-known account of art’s capacity to enhance a phenomenon Murdoch calls “unselfing” that is the core concept of her ethics, Shusterman’s role seems to be limited to a mere commentator on Dewey’s aesthetics. It is also unfortunate that some [End Page 567] parts of Shusterman’s aesthetics, like the great work he did on philosophy of interpretation some twenty years back, are not touched at all.

The articles of the two preceding parts are more focused on Shusterman’s work. The first of these concern issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, while the latter focuses on somaesthetics. In the beginning essay of the second part, Sami Pihlström critically engages with the...