On Dewey’s Trail. From Aesthetic Meaning to Aesthetic Meaningfulness

This papers aims at showing how Dewey’s legacy can contribute to better understand the correlation between the problem of meaning and the description of the aesthetic in the framework of a specifically enactivist approach to the model of the extended mind. My thesis is that Dewey’s characterization of this issue has a general theoretical import in that it makes it inappropriate to speak of “aesthetic meanings,” or even of “meanings of the aesthetic.” It instead highlights the aesthetic character of meaning as such, that is, how an experiential phenomenon can be meaningful insofar as it is characterized in an aesthetic sense. Accordingly, we will speak here of “aesthetic meaningfulness.” To this extent, after a comparison between Dewey and Quine about the “praxis of meaning,” a dialogue will be established with two recent perspectives openly informed by Dewey’s work: Mark Johnson and Shaun Gallagher’s.