Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (review)

Abstract

In a terrific essay entitled "Somatic Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction," Richard Shusterman discusses John Dewey as the figure most responsible for freeing philosophy from its search for foundations. 1 Such freedom is important, according to Shusterman, as it allows philosophy to be put to other, perhaps more urgent, tasks like resolving social and cultural problems. Because these social and cultural problems are themselves the result of such old-fashioned philosophical views, they have become hardened, in need of loosening up before such an attempt at resolution can even begin. Thus philosophy has the double task of undoing the problems it itself previously created and of recasting them in a different light so that they can then be resolved. In this view, doing philosophy is always doing at least two things at once.