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.

A thorough, definitive account of Dewey's ethics

The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed “the ideal of moral imagination,” emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science.

John Dewey (1859 - 1952) was the dominant voice in American philosophy through the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the nascent years of the Cold War. With a professional career spanning three generations and a profile that no public intellectual has operated on in the U.S. since, Dewey's biographer Robert Westbrook accurately describes him as "the most important philosopher in modern American history." In this superb and engaging introduction, Steven Fesmire begins with a chapter on Dewey’s life and works, before discussing and assessing Dewey's key ideas across the major disciplines in philosophy; including metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, educational philosophy, social-political philosophy, and religious philosophy. This is an invaluable introduction and guide to this deeply influential philosopher and his legacy, and essential reading for anyone coming to Dewey's work for the first time.

Who says that all possible social and political systems have already been invented? Or that work—or marriage, or environmentalism, or anything else—must be just what they are now? This book is a conceptual toolbox for imagining and initiating radical social change. Chapters offer specific, focused, and shareable techniques: Seeking a Whole Vision: Creating a pull and not just a push toward change Generative Thinking: Looking for “Seeds” and “Sparks”, Stretching and Twisting Ideas, and Going Two Steps Too Far Looking for Unexpected Openings: “Weeds” and “Wild Cards,” Inside Tracks, Leverage Points, and Hidden Possibilities Working at the Roots: Reconstructing the built world, cultural practices, even worldviews Building Momentum: Playing to our Strengths, Reclaiming the Language, “Allying Everywhere,” Doing it Now, Going for Broke Leap-frogging new kinds of cars and better mass transit in turn, why not a world in which “transportation” itself is unneeded? What about remaking New Orleans as a floating city, or putting only extreme surfers in the path of hurricanes? And why not dream of the stars? The question is not whether radical change is coming. It is already well underway. The only question is who will make it. Why not us? Anthony Weston is a professor of philosophy at Elon University in North Carolina, where he teaches ethics, environmental studies, and “Millennial Imagination.” He is the author of ten other books, including Back to Earth, Jobs for Philosophers, and Creativity for Critical Thinkers.

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection.