another nice Dewey sentence

It’s not so much that I agree with this sentence (or even know exactly what it means). I’m just delighted that such a sentence was ever formulated. From p. 239 of Art as Experience:

“For this reason, buildings, among all art objects, come the nearest to expressing the stability and endurance of existence.”

I don’t think Dewey is a great philosopher of art, but how many great philosophers of art are there? Not too many.

Santayana makes a great point: beauty is a major factor in day-to-day life. Many of our choices are aesthetic choices. Yet aesthetics has remained a sideshow in philosophy.

An interesting experiment would be to construct all of philosophy on aesthetics for 20 or 30 years and see what happens. It would certainly beat constructing it on brain science.