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标题：The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence, New York, Fordham University Press, 2013 (reviewed by C. Morris)
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作者：T. M. Alexander
期刊名称：European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy
电子版ISSN：2036-4091
出版年度：2015
卷号：7
期号：1
出版社：Associazone Pragma
摘要：Like most scholars of Dewey’s aesthetics, Thomas Alexander (who may be countedforemost under that banner), has a tendency to see in Dewey’s work an inextricabletendency toward unity. Aesthetic experience in Dewey’s Art as Experience, turns onthe concept of ‘fusion’ in which meanings are ‘fused’ into aesthetic wholes which canbe embodied in art. Aesthetic experiences, taking in hand Dewey’s understanding of‘experience’ as objective process involving the interplay of nature and culture, is nolonger a subjective or mystical kind of experience that can be safely differentiatedfrom other kinds of experience, e.g. scientific, moral, religious, etc. Indeed, one ofthe things which the essays collected in this book shows with remarkable clarity, isjust how far Dewey was willing to go in reconstructing the concept of experience;experience is not simply passive reception, but active engagement in projects ofreconstruction in which concepts and the world itself are (often radically) developedand remade according the purposes of the inquirer (or better yet, artist) through theworld in which she lives, and that this reconstruction is carried out in the aim ofsecuring a world rich in meaning and value. Thus, we see, through Alexander, thetrue thrust of Dewey’s incredibly rich naturalism: nature and culture are one, despitethe differences between the two, and only because of this underlying continuity canculture (in the form of artistic inquiry) remake itself and nature through processes ofdeliberative inquiry.