 Hello, students, and welcome to Philosophy 4327, Great Texts, a course devoted to the in-depth study of a major philosophical text. In this case, John Dewey's Art as Experience. This is the version of our textbook that's preferred here. As you can see, my copy, Dewey's got this lovely headband. So well-loved that it's taped up and held together with rubber bands. Your book will look essentially like this. The newer versions have a different lighter blue color for the cover, but same basic design. There are other versions of the book that you might find. This is a popular one here. This is the Penguin Edition. It's got the nice little cover art. It's fine, but it has two problems with it. One is that it lacks the page numbers of the book that we'll use. The other is, if you open up my version of the book, you'll find these lovely pieces of art reproduced in the text. These were originally selected by Dewey for inclusion in the book, and they don't appear in most of the other available versions. Just FYI. So just a little bit by way of introduction. John Dewey was born in 1859, not long before the start of the Civil War. He died in 1952, seven years after the devastation of World War II. Obviously, in the span of his life, American society and the world at large changed quite a bit, radical transformation, social and technological and otherwise. Dewey was the foremost figure in the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism, its most important figure, not one of the originators, but he really sort of brought the tradition together. Dewey is most well known for his philosophy of education, for his social and political philosophy, but during his long career, he wrote important works in nearly every field of philosophy you can think of. If you can think of it, he wrote a book on it, or at least a number of important essays. His collected works run some 38 long volumes covering 70 years of publications and taking up almost two full library shelves. This book, Art is Experience, provides a theory of art in relation to both the role of the artwork in creating an aesthetic experience, as well as the work of the artist in crafting the work of art and the relationship between the experience of the artist and the experience of the person enjoying the artwork. It also relates art as a practice or a part of human life to a larger philosophical framework that Dewey developed throughout his career. Dewey himself was not an artist, he was not an historian, he was a philosopher, but he was an art lover and he was a close collaborator with a man named Albert C. Barnes, who was an avid art collector, a wealthy businessman, the founder of a major educational foundation, the Barnes Foundation. Barnes was a supporter of avant-garde artists at the time, an advocate for non-Western art and a pretty significant supporter of the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. So that's all for now, welcome to the class. Please take a moment to look at the syllabus, check out the eLearning and Microsoft Teams setups for the class, I'll record another couple of videos here in a bit, one about the syllabus and those online components, and then the second a brief little introduction to Dewey and to the first chapter of the book. So I'll see you soon, virtually anyway, and I'm looking forward to this semester with you.