- Department of Philosophy
San Jose State University
San Jose, CA 95192-0096
Thomas Leddy
San Jose State University, Philosophy, Faculty Member
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... Arnold Berleant, Re-Thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts Reviewed by. Thomas Leddy. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported... more
... Arnold Berleant, Re-Thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts Reviewed by. Thomas Leddy. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. ...
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Drawing on the experientialism of Lakoff and Johnson, I develop some metaphysical implications of metaphor theory. Not only do we understand the world in terms of conceptual metaphors, but fundamental constituents of our experienced world... more
Drawing on the experientialism of Lakoff and Johnson, I develop some metaphysical implications of metaphor theory. Not only do we understand the world in terms of conceptual metaphors, but fundamental constituents of our experienced world are metaphoric. I call these structures of experience essences. However, by essence I am not referring to eternal, unchanging entities. Essences are culturally emergent, both ontologically and historically. They are the referents of essentially contested concepts, and they emerge dialectically from practices and institutions in which those concepts are contested. Essences exist at an ontological level prior to the subject/object split and prior to clear distinctions among substance, attribute, and function. I relate this concept of essence to Ricoeur's notion of being as. I then argue that strong philosophical metaphors, which are often expressed in philosophical definition, reveal these metaphoric essences.
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I should admit from the start that I am deeply sympathetic to Shusterman'sperspective. I, like Shusterman, consider myself a pragmatist committed to a critique of analytic aesthetics from a revived Deweyan perspective. I, too, favor... more
I should admit from the start that I am deeply sympathetic to Shusterman'sperspective. I, like Shusterman, consider myself a pragmatist committed to a critique of analytic aesthetics from a revived Deweyan perspective. I, too, favor Hegelian themes of holism, historicism, and ...
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Research Interests: Philosophy, Ontology, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Art, and 3 moreMetaphor, Realism, and Representation Politics
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... Why is the book The Will to Power unhelpful in answering these questions? ... Selections from The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. ...
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In the literature of aesthetics there are numer-ous lists of aesthetic qualities.' These lists al-most invariably leave off an entire set of items which will be the topic of this paper. The items in their adjectival form are... more
In the literature of aesthetics there are numer-ous lists of aesthetic qualities.' These lists al-most invariably leave off an entire set of items which will be the topic of this paper. The items in their adjectival form are "neat," "messy," "clean/unclean,)" "dirty,)" "sloppy,)" "6filthy, " "ordered/ ...
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... ME Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered: Truth and Error in Theories of Art, Literature, and History Reviewed by. Thomas Leddy. Keywords. philosophy; book reviews. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the ...
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Most of John Dewey’s early work on educational theory was directed to K-12 education, and his later ground-breaking work in aesthetics, particularly in Art as Experience, never directly discusses liberal arts education. However, he did... more
Most of John Dewey’s early work on educational theory was directed to K-12 education, and his later ground-breaking work in aesthetics, particularly in Art as Experience, never directly discusses liberal arts education. However, he did sometimes address the nature of liberal arts education: in his discussion of Aristotle’s concept of “liberal” in Democracy and Education, in his critique of the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, in a debate with educator Robert Maynard Judson, and in his small piece, published in 1944, “The Problem of the Liberal Arts College.” Moreover, the impact of his theories on arts education was profound, mainly by way of his influence on Black Mountain College. However, it is Art as Experience that provides the basis for placing the studio arts at the very center of such an expansion. The role of making and materiality in the liberal arts can only be fully understood once we grasp the full implications of Dewey’s closely related concepts of experience and medium. His ...
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Clive Bell’s Art, published in 1913, is widely seen as a founding document in contemporary aesthetics. Yet his formalism and his attendant definition of art as “significant form” is widely rejected in contemporary art discourse and in the... more
Clive Bell’s Art, published in 1913, is widely seen as a founding document in contemporary aesthetics. Yet his formalism and his attendant definition of art as “significant form” is widely rejected in contemporary art discourse and in the philosophy of art. In this paper I argue for a reconsideration of his thought in connection with current discussions of “the aesthetics of everyday life.” Although some, notably Allen Carlson, have argued against application of Bell’s formalism to the aesthetics of everyday life, I claim that this is based on an interpretation of the concept that is overly narrow. First, Li Zehou offers an interpretation of “significant form” that allows in sedimented social meaning. Second, Bell himself offers a more complex theory of significant form by way of his “metaphysical hypothesis,” one that stresses perception of significant form outside the realm of art (for example in nature or in everyday life). Bell’s idea that the artist can perceive significant form in nature allows for significant form to not just be the surface-level formal properties of things. It stresses depth, although a different kind than the cognitive scientific depth Carlson wants. This is a depth that is consistent with the anti-dualism of Spinoza, Marx and Dewey. Reinterpreting Bell in this direction, we can say we are moved by certain relations of lines and colors because they direct our minds to the hidden aspect of things, the spiritual side of the material world referred to by Spinoza and developed by Dewey in his concept of experience. Bell hardly “reduces the everyday to a shadow of itself,” as Carlson puts it, since the everyday, as experienced by the artist or the aesthetically astute observer, has, or potentially has, deep meaning. If we reject Bell’s dualism and his downgrading of sensuous experience, we can rework his idea of pure form to refer to an aspect of things detached, yes, from practical use, but not from particularity or sedimented meaning, not purified of all associations.
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... Why is the book The Will to Power unhelpful in answering these questions? ... Selections from The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. ...
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ONE OF THE MAIN RESPONSES to Weitz's claim that art cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and the institutional theory's counter that art can be defined in these terms, but only if it is defined as... more
ONE OF THE MAIN RESPONSES to Weitz's claim that art cannot be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and the institutional theory's counter that art can be defined in these terms, but only if it is defined as anything the artworld considers to be art, has been the ...
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Imagine that aesthetics had been designed with children's picture books as paradigmatic. The idea is not inconceivable. Plato deals with children's lit-erature in Book III of the Republic, long before his somewhat better-known... more
Imagine that aesthetics had been designed with children's picture books as paradigmatic. The idea is not inconceivable. Plato deals with children's lit-erature in Book III of the Republic, long before his somewhat better-known Book X. Imagine that Aristotle had responded, in his ...
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In large part Analytic aesthetics arose as a critique of the Idealist aesthetics of Croce and Collingwood. 1 This can be seen particularly in the critique of Idealist theories of creativity and the creative process. But these figures were... more
In large part Analytic aesthetics arose as a critique of the Idealist aesthetics of Croce and Collingwood. 1 This can be seen particularly in the critique of Idealist theories of creativity and the creative process. But these figures were not the only targets of the Analytic critique. It ...
Research Interests: Philosophy, Pragmatism, Applied Ethics, Art, Creativity, and 4 moreProduction, Evaluation, Process, and Object
I should admit from the start that I am deeply sympathetic to Shusterman'sperspective. I, like Shusterman, consider myself a pragmatist committed to a critique of analytic aesthetics from a revived Deweyan perspective. I, too, favor... more
I should admit from the start that I am deeply sympathetic to Shusterman'sperspective. I, like Shusterman, consider myself a pragmatist committed to a critique of analytic aesthetics from a revived Deweyan perspective. I, too, favor Hegelian themes of holism, historicism, and ...
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In the literature of aesthetics there are numer-ous lists of aesthetic qualities.' These lists al-most invariably leave off an entire set of items which will be the topic of this paper. The items in their adjectival form are... more
In the literature of aesthetics there are numer-ous lists of aesthetic qualities.' These lists al-most invariably leave off an entire set of items which will be the topic of this paper. The items in their adjectival form are "neat," "messy," "clean/unclean,)" "dirty,)" "sloppy,)" "6filthy, " "ordered/ ...
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GARDENS HAVE been the subject of aesthetic investigation since the origins of the discipline. In a recent article Stephanie Ross showed how gardening could, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, be seen as a fine art comparable to... more
GARDENS HAVE been the subject of aesthetic investigation since the origins of the discipline. In a recent article Stephanie Ross showed how gardening could, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, be seen as a fine art comparable to painting and sculpture. ...
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Volume 12 of Contemporary Pragmatism features an author-meets-critics symposium on Richard Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body, with articles by Thomas Leddy, Curtis L. Carter, Pradeep A. Dhillon, James Garrison, and Mathias Girel.