Performing Live

Richard Shusterman is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University and the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. His other works include Pragmatist Aesthetics and Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life.

The essays are lively and engaging in many ways. Not only is Shusterman informative about topics relating to mass-media arts and self-fashioning, his reflections consistently raise important philosophical issues concerning our postmodernist condition and the cultural and sociological factors fostering it. Furthermore, Shusterman's arguments are fecund and provocative, his style vigorous, and his critique of current analytical and continental philosophical approaches adroit.... We cannot but admire the skill and verve of Shusterman's attempts to bring philosophy back to its original goals of teaching us how to live more fully and wisely.- Trevor Whittock (British Journal of Aesthetics) Shusterman's new book is a collection of mutually complementary essays which encompass a decade of writing. It represents his pragmatist aesthetics critically applied to a range of issues, theories, and methods foregrounded by recent work in both analytic and continental philosophy. Interestingly, the contemporary vitality of some of these issues is in part due to the influence of Shusterman's previous writings.... Shusterman's text is enormously sophisticated not only in the range of philosophical and cultural sources which he is able to draw upon, but also in the probing and succinct way in which these are applied.(Mind)