An Aesthetics of Resistance: Deweyan Experimentalism and Epistemic Injustice
1 : Departments of Philosophy and African American Studies, Pennsylvania State University
In The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina argues that it is impossible to understand or ameliorate the problems of epistemic injustice while also approaching them as one-dimensional affairs. Medina argues that these problems are not simply epistemic, any more than they are simply ethical or political: they are all of these at once, and must be approached from that perspective. I will push this plea for theoretical breadth one step further and suggest, by appeal to the kinds of considerations that Dewey enshrined in his experimentalist phenomenology, that these problems are also importantly aesthetic, and that the resources of aesthetic criticism and practice are vital to their amelioration.