Pragmatist Tools for Exploring the "Fabric of Experience". John Ryder's "Knowledge, Art, and Power. An Outline of a Theory of Practice"

Abstract

The essay is a critical notice on John Ryder's book, "Knowledge, Art, and Power. An Outline of a Theory of Practice", published by Brill in 2020. Sharing Ryder's cultural naturalism as well as his relational ontology, the author considers some important issues at stake within the volume. A first claim is that Ryder's characterization of the aesthetic should be explicitly connected with affective, qualitative or "esthetic" significances as pervasive features of experienced situations, grounded in the bio-social dependence of human life on the environment. A second suggestion is integrating John Ryder's conception of the political as a basic feature of experience through an explicit emphasis on the Pragmatists' thesis of the essentially social character of human life. A final criticism regards Ryder's deflating strategy about the role played by language in human experiencence, denying it to be one of its structural dimensions together with the aesthetic, the cognitive, and the political.