Ebook: The human eros eco-ontology and the aesthetics of existence

Machine generated contents note: pt. I Nature and Experience -- 1. The Aesthetics of Reality: The Development of Dewey's Ecological Theory of Experience -- 2. Dewey's Denotative-Empirical Method: A Thread through the Labyrinth -- 3. Between Being and Emptiness: Toward an Eco-ontology of Inhabitation -- 4. The Being of Nature: Dewey and Buchler and the Prospect for an Eco-ontology -- pt. II Eros and Imagination -- 5. The Human Eros -- 6. Pragmatic Imagination -- 7. John Dewey and the Moral Imagination: Beyond Putnam and Rorty toward an Ethics of Meaning -- 8. Educating the Democratic Heart: Pluralism, Traditions, and the Humanities -- pt. III Aesthetics of Existence -- 9."Love Calls Us to Things of This World": Santayana's Unbearable Lightness of Being -- 10. Mountains and Rivers without End: The Intertwining of Nature and Spirit in Emerson's Aesthetics -- 11. Creating with Coyote: Toward a Native American Aesthetics -- 12. Tricksters and Shamans: Eros, Mythos, and the Eco-ontological Imagination -- pt. IV Spirit and Philosophy -- 13. Santayana's Sage: The Disciplines of Aesthetic Enlightenment -- 14. Beauty and the Labyrinth of Evil: Santayana and the Possibility of Naturalistic Mysticism -- 15. The Spirituality of the Possible in John Dewey's A Common Faith -- 16. Eros and Spirit: Toward a Humanistic Philosophy of Culture.;This book explores themes in classical American philosophy, primarily the thought of John Dewey, but also that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Santayana, and Native American traditions. It argues that human beings have an inherent need to experience meaning and value, a 'Human Eros'. Our various cultures are symbolic environments or 'spiritual ecologies' within which the Human Eros seeks to thrive. This is how we inhabit the earth. Encircling and sustaining our cultural existence is nature, yet Western philosophy has not provided adequate conceptual models for thinking ecologically.