John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics

✍ Scribed by Steven Fesmire

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 184
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

While examining the important role of imagination in making moral judgments, "John Dewey and Moral Imagination" focuses new attention on the relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions that moral character, belief, and reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal of possibilities Fesmire shows that moral imagination can be conceived as a process of aesthetic perception and artistic creativity. Fesmire's original readings of Dewey shed new light on the imaginative process, human emotional make-up and expression, and the nature of moral judgment. This original book presents a robust and distinctly pragmatic approach to ethics, politics, moral education, and moral conduct.

✦ Table of Contents

acknowledgments......Page 10
list of abbreviations......Page 12
Introduction: Revitalizing Ethics......Page 16
1. Habit and Character......Page 24
2. The Pragmatic Turn......Page 42
3. Pragmatism’s Reconstruction of Reason......Page 53
4. Imagination in Pragmatist Ethics......Page 70
5. Dramatic Rehearsal......Page 84
6. The Deweyan Ideal......Page 107
7. The Moral Artist......Page 122
notes......Page 146
bibliography......Page 168
index......Page 176