John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has been a long while in the making. Thomas Alexander (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale) and Mark Johnson (University of Oregon) inspired this project over a decade ago during my graduate education . I am profoundly grateful for their longstanding support, encouragement , and friendship. I thank reviewers for Indiana University Press, particularly Douglas Browning (University of Texas-Austin), for irreplaceable assistance with both form and content. The project benefited substantially from the editorial attentiveness of Dee Mortensen, as well as the copyediting of Carol Kennedy. Many of these ideas were initially presented at meetings of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. Along with the annual Summer Institute in American Philosophy, SAAP continues to be a source for my rejuvenation. I am grateful to all members of the Society. Some who have assisted in one way or another with portions of this book include Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Vincent Colapietro, Larry Hickman, Michael Eldridge, John McDermott, Peter Hare, John Lachs, Gregory Pappas, Micah Hester, Casey Haskins, Lewis Hahn, Mary Magada-Ward, Todd Lekan, David Seiple, Joe Betz, Herman Saatkamp, Andrew Light, Erin McKenna, Shannon Sullivan, Phillip McReynolds, John Shook, and Randall Auxier. I am also grateful to the late Ralph Sleeper for his encouragement of my early work on James. Much of Part II of this book was drafted during my year as a Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. I am especially grateful to James Moor and Bernard Gert for their generosity, and to the staff of Baker Library for their skilled assistance chasing down articles. Many students and colleagues have been instrumental in honing this manuscript. I benefited enormously from the critical feedback and support of Ray Boisvert and Paul Santilli of Siena College, and I extend my thanks to Richard Gaffney, Jennifer McErlean, John Burkey, and Silvia Benso for their collegial support. Hugh Lafollette and John Hardwig offered helpful critiques of earlier incarnations of some chapters during my time at East Tennessee State University, where I also benefited from interactions with John Zavodny, Keith Green, Niall Shanks, Jeff Gold, Paul Tudico, Gail Stenstad, Jim Spence, and Marie Graves. fm 8/22/05 4:13 P Page ix I extend my warm thanks to Ken Keith and Connie Keith for their friendship, inspiration, and assistance throughout this project. I am also very grateful to Ken Vos, Jon Jacobs, the late Lyle Eddy, the staff of the Center for Dewey Studies, and my parents Wayne Fesmire and Jayne Fesmire. For putting me on the scent of wisdom, I thank Rusty McIntire, Michael Mitias, Steven Smith, and Ted Ammon. I am grateful to William Throop, Rebecca Purdom, Meriel Brooks, Philip Ackerman-Leist, Michael Blust, and many others for the growing friendships and intellectual vitality I have found in my new position at Green Mountain College. As poet David Budbill says of Vermont: “[T]here is solitude here and quiet, a kind of modesty in the landscape, an unassuming grandeur.” From Heather Keith I have learned what it means, both practically and theoretically, to identify my own good with that of another who reciprocates . I dedicate this book to her, my dearest friend and companion. I also gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint, in substantially revised form, material from the following articles: “Ecological Humanism: A Moral Image for Our Emotive Culture,” The Humanist 61, no. 1 (2001): 27–30. “Philosophy Disrobed: Lakoff and Johnson’s Call for Empirically Responsible Philosophy,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 14, no. 4 (2000): 300–305. “Morality as Art: Dewey, Metaphor, and Moral Imagination,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35, no. 3 (1999): 527–550. “The Art of Moral Imagination,” in Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey Haskins and David Seiple (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 133–150. “Remaking the Modern Mind,” Southwest Philosophy Review 14, no. 2 (1998): 65–81. “The Social Basis of Character,” in Ethics in Practice, ed. Hugh Lafollette (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1997), 282–292. “Dramatic Rehearsal and the Moral Artist: A Deweyan Theory of Moral Understanding,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 31, no. 3 (1995): 568–597. x | Acknowledgments fm 8/22/05 4:13 P Page x ...