The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments  There are a great many people to whom I owe a debt of personal and intellectual gratitude, but several deserve mention here. First of all I am grateful for the persistence of my colleague (and an editor of the series in which this volume appears) Douglas Anderson, who encouraged me to gather some of my essays in book form. I am also indebted to Helen Tartar of Fordham University Press for her warm support of this project and for her gracious, supportive patience, a bodhisattva for authors. I have been fortunate in communities of colleagues with whom to discuss and share the life of philosophy, especially those in my department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and the members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. I owe special gratitude to my former colleagues, Mark Johnson, an inspiration from the start, and Genie Gatens-Robinson, whose informed feeling of the natural world has been a touchstone. You opened my eyes. I owe Tao Jiang and Douglas Berger many thanks for their patient help in my efforts to understand Asian thought. I also deeply appreciate the close, insightful , critical discussion of my work by Jim Garrison and Bill Myers. They were especially helpful with the material that went into this book. David Hildebrand and Gregory Pappas also deserve heartfelt thanks for their critical encouragement over the years: un abrazo. Words fail in expressing all I owe, intellectually and emotionally, to Felicia E. Kruse, philosopher, editor, and beloved wife. Thank you all. Some of these essays, in their original form, appeared in various forums: “Pragmatic Imagination,” “The Moral Imagination,” “Santayana’s Sage,” { xi } xii acknowledgments and “The Being of Nature” were published in The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. “Love Calls Us to Things of This World” and “Beauty and the Labyrinth of Evil” appeared in Overheard in Seville: The BulletinoftheSantayanaSociety.“ErosandSpirit”appearedinThePluralist. “Dewey’s Denotative-Empirical Method” appeared in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. “The Human Eros” appeared in Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture, ed. John Stuhr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). “Educating the Democratic Heart” appeared in The New Scholarship on Dewey, ed. Jim Garrison (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer, 1885). “The Aesthetics of Reality” appeared in Dewey’s Logical Theory: New Studies and Interpretations, ed. Tom Burke et al. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003). “Between Being and Emptiness” appeared in In Dewey’s Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction , ed. William J. Gavin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). All have been revised. The standard reference for John Dewey’s work is the critical edition, The Collected Works of John Dewey 1882–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–91), published as The Early Works (EW), The Middle Works (MW), and The Later Works (LW). References to these works will include volume and page number. the human eros  ...