We opened this course with two American philosophers, John Dewey, whose work and writing comes from the first half of the 20th century, and Maxine Greene, who was actively writing and teaching until her death in 2014 at the age of 96. Both Dewey and Greene deal with the topic of aesthetic experience and the possibilities contained within experiences of art. Dewey was part of a group of philosophers in the early 20th century that considered their practice to be different from the previous philosophical traditions. Instead of deriving their theories from abstract principles, doing this group focused on the common experiences that people have, and use these examples to build theories that could be directly relevant to the world around them. Because he felt there was this ongoing relationship between ideas and experience, Dewey felt that certain dichotomies were unhelpful and unnecessary, like that between knowledge and action or theory and practice. For Maxine Greene and Dewey, a discussion about art and its meaning therefore goes beyond this idea of art for art's sake, and instead, considers how art is a component of human experience, essentially knowable and accessible. As people, both Maxine and Dewey immersed themselves in art and artistic activity. Their theories come very significantly from their own lived experience. In Dewey's case, he was profoundly influenced by his relationship with Albert Barnes, this deep friendship where Barnes was an art collector and also a physician and entrepreneur. And they shared these artistic experiences, both of sort of the European masters and Barnes' collection included the first major African American art collection, and the museum's programming included this regular series of concerts by African American singing groups. So his theories of art emerged from this premise that we need to understand art not simply as an intellectual pursuit, but for the possibility that art can be as Dewey and Barnes would say in their letters, soul thrilling. We're completely engaging from an emotional and intellectual and spiritual perspective. As I'll discuss in this class, Maxine picks up on a lot of Dewey's threads, including this clear conviction that we can't attend to a work of art passively. But then in order to fully experience the soul thrilling quality, the person perceiving it needs to bring an energy, an awake energy and an open receptiveness to the possibilities that might be contained within the work. In her book, Releasing the Imagination, Maxine says, Aesthetic experiences require conscious participation in a work, a going out of energy, an ability to notice what there is to be noticed in the play, the poem, the quartet. Knowing about, even in the most formal academic manner, is entirely different from constituting a fictive world imaginatively and entering it perceptually, affectively, and cognitively. Maxine as a person really brought this to life. To speak with her about an arts experience that she had was a marvel. She was always voracious in her appetite for all kinds of artistic experiences in different genres, in different forms, from different time periods. And her descriptions and her writing and in speaking with her really reflected both this sort of learned, but also very personal response to every work of art. So we start the course with these philosophers in part because Dewey and Greene eloquently bring art into the realm of being accessible to everyone. They both define aesthetic experience in ways that suggest it can be transformative. And therefore set us up for an inquiry into how we may eventually take social action through the arts.