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The Critical Shusterman
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01 June 2025

Collecting sixteen key texts on a broad range of key philosophical topics enables readers to perceive the scope of Shusterman's philosophy and appreciate its systematic aspects.
Richard Shusterman is one of today's foremost philosophers. His influential and widely translated work is distinctive for its originality and its integration of multiple philosophical perspectives (analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and East Asian thought) to create a new transcultural pragmatist vision. Although most famous for his groundbreaking writings in aesthetics, somatic philosophy, and philosophy as an art of living, these texts are integrally connected with Shusterman's vital views on ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, ethics, and politics. Collecting sixteen key texts on this broad range of topics, The Critical Shusterman enables readers to perceive the scope of Shusterman's philosophy and appreciate its systematic aspects. Editor Crispin Sartwell's superb introduction highlights those aspects in assessing Shusterman's thought in the context of contemporary philosophy while suggesting ways that Shusterman's project could be developed in the future.
"This collection offers an accessible assemblage of Richard Shusterman's prolific philosophical, critical, and interpretive essays, prefaced by a very illuminating interpretative essay by Crispin Sartwell that conveys the coherence and power of Shusterman's larger project of cultivating embodied thinking and self-reflective living. The ever-expanding breadth and depth of Shusterman's oeuvre and wide transdisciplinary influence create a need for The Critical Shusterman, which will be a boon to anyone who has encountered one of the many axes of his multipronged body of work." — Chris Voparil, Lynn University
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Dance of Ideas: Richard Shusterman's Embodied Philosophy
Crispin Sartwell
I. Cognition, Interpretation, and Ontology
1. Beneath Interpretation
2. Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?
3. Organic Unity: Analysis and Deconstruction
4. Affective Cognition: From Pragmatism to Somaesthetics
II. Ethics and Politics
5. Postmodern Ethics and the Art of Living
6. Self-Knowledge and Its Discontents
7. Dialectics of Multiculturalism: Ethics and Politics
8. The Ethics of Democracy
III. Aesthetics
9. The End of Aesthetic Experience
10. Art as Dramatization
11. Entertainment: A Question for Aesthetics
12. Art and Religion
IV. Somaesthetics
13. Soma and Media
14. Thinking through the Body, Educating for the Humanities
15. Muscle Memory and the Somaesthetic Pathologies of Everyday Life
16. Somaesthetics and Politics
Notes
Books by Richard Shusterman
Books about Richard Shusterman
Films about Richard Shusterman
Index