Dr Steven Fesmire

Home institution

Green Mountain College, Vermont, USA

Biography

Steven Fesmire is Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Green Mountain College in Vermont. He is the author of Dewey (Routledge Press, 2015), winner of a 2015 Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” award.  He is also the author of John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Indiana University Press, 2003), winner of a 2005 Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” award. He is editor of the Oxford Handbook of Dewey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017) and is preparing a manuscript titled Ecological Imagination: Essays in Practical Ethics and Education. He was a 2009 Fulbright Scholar at Kyoto University and Kobe University in Japan and is a 2015-16 Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College.

Project

The Scottish Roots of Moral Imagination in American Pragmatism

I propose to lay bare roots in Edinburgh of America’s greatest philosophers of the moral imagination by tracing pragmatism’s notion of imagination through permutations back to the Scottish moral sentiment theorists (especially Hume, Smith, and Hutcheson). John Dewey incorporated Scottish sympathy within a more encompassing theory of imagination.