Dewey’s Aesthetics of Body-Mind Functioning

Abstract

My chapter provides a genetic trace of the embodied actions (the “deeds” or pragma) of the live creatures we call Homo sapiens from the primacy of the aesthetic encounter with the precognitive qualitative situation that initiates inquiry, to the role of embodied feelings involved in selective attention that determine data for inference, to the cognitive role of embodied habits in establishing logical universals and carrying out thoughtful deliberation in artistically creating the consummatory aesthetic forms of techno-scientific inquiry. The results will be an illustration of the embodied unity of thought, feeling, and action in Dewey’s aesthetics of the embodied mind.