Overview
While examining the important role of imagination in making moral
judgments, John Dewey and Moral Imagination focuses new attention on the
relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads
of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's
distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and
judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions -- that moral character, belief, and
reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is
an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal of possibilities -- Fesmire shows that moral
imagination can be conceived as a process of aesthetic perception and artistic
creativity. Fesmire's original readings of Dewey shed new light on the imaginative
process, human emotional make-up and expression, and the nature of moral judgment.
This original book presents a robust and distinctly pragmatic approach to ethics,
politics, moral education, and moral conduct.