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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Dewey should have held that there is no such thing as aesthetic experience as a discrete category.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Dewey held that there is no such thing as religious experience as a discrete category.
      ?

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    • 2.The same reasoning that rules out a discrete religious experience should rule out a discrete aesthetic experience.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Dewey's own naturalism commits him to rejecting any experience-type that cannot be grounded in a specific, identifiable biological or social function.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.Aesthetic experience, unlike hunger or fear, picks out no single adaptive function but instead names a quality diffused across all consummatory experience.
      ?

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    • 3.Therefore, by Dewey's own functional-naturalist criteria, 'aesthetic experience' designates a quality of any experience, not a discrete experiential kind.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Dewey explicitly argues in 'Art as Experience' that the aesthetic is the culmination of ordinary experience whenever it achieves integration and completeness.
      ?

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    • 2.If aesthetic quality is constitutively present in any fully realized experience, it cannot simultaneously demarcate a bounded category separate from other experiences.
      ?

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    • 3.Wittgenstein's family-resemblance analysis of 'aesthetic' similarly shows that the term tracks no essential common property, supporting Dewey's own anti-essentialist commitments.
      ?

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