Richard Shusterman

Disambiguate from a different Richard Shusterman who was convicted of an investment fraud scheme.

Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher. Known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics, currently he is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.

Richard Shusterman was born on December 3, 1949, to a Jewish family living in Philadelphia, USA. At the age 16 he left his home and went to Israel, where he continued his education, studying English and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There he received a B.A. degree in English and Philosophy, and later an M.A. degree in philosophy (both degrees awarded magna cum laude). After teaching at different Israeli academic institutions, and receiving tenure at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev with an episode as a visiting fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford University during academic year 1984/85, Shusterman became an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA in 1986. He was granted tenure in 1988 and promoted to full professor in 1991. He then served as chair of the philosophy department between the years of 1998–2004. In 2004 Richard Shusterman left Temple University to become the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, where he also holds the rank of Professor in the departments of Philosophy and English. Richard Shusterman has been married twice. From his first marriage in Israel, he has two sons and a daughter. He has one daughter from his second marriage, which ended in 2013.

During his years at the University of Jerusalem, Shusterman focused on analytic philosophy. The interest carried over with his doctoral dissertation at Oxford University; The Object of Literary Criticism which he wrote at St. John’s College under the supervision of J. O. Urmson and defended in 1979. It was published under the original title in 1984. 1988 saw the publication of Shusterman’s second book, T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, and with it came a turn in his philosophical focus as well. Influenced by the work that produced the book and personal experiences, Shusterman’s attention moved from analytic philosophy to pragmatism. He also began work to develop his own theory of pragmatist aesthetics; based on John Dewey’s aesthetics but augmented by the argumentative methods and tools of analytic philosophy. His third book published, Pragmatist Aesthetics in 1992, brought a big breakthrough in Shusterman’s academic career. The book’s original approach to the problems of definition of art, organic wholes, interpretation, popular art, and the ethics of taste brought him international fame as the book was translated into 14 languages and several editions were published. Shusterman’s position was further strengthened by three subsequent publications: Practicing Philosophy in 1997, Performing Live in 2000, and Surface and Depth in 2002; in which he continued the pragmatist tradition, raising significant interest, provoking numerous critiques and stimulating debates not only among professional philosophers, but in the areas of literary and cultural studies as well. In Practicing Philosophy, Shusterman introduces his concept of ‘somaesthetics’, which he elaborates in greater detail in Performing Live. Somaesthetics is the focus of Shusterman’s two subsequent books, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (2008) and Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (2012). The first of these books, translated into seven languages, helped establish somaesthetics as an international, interdisciplinary project involving scholars from fields beyond philosophy, while the second book consolidated this movement toward the interdisciplinary approach by applying somaesthetics to various arts, and cultural practices.

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