Richard Shusterman - Biography and Career

Biography and Career

Richard Shusterman was born December 3, 1949, to a Jewish family living in Philadelphia, USA. At age 16 he left his home and went to Israel, where he continued his education, studying English and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from which he received his B.A. degree in English and Philosophy, and M.A. degree in philosophy (all awarded magna cum laude). He also served in Israeli Military Intelligence (1973–1976) achieving the rank of first lieutenant. During his Israeli education he got interested in analytic philosophy and this stage of his intellectual development culminated in the doctoral dissertation The Object of Literary Criticism which he wrote under the supervision of J. O. Urmson at St John's College, Oxford and defended in 1979 (it was published under the original title in 1984). After teaching at different Israeli academic institutions, receiving tenure at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (with an episode as a visiting fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford University during academic year 1984/85) in 1986 he became an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University (tenured in 1988), where he was promoted to full professor in 1991 and became a chair of the Philosophy Department (1998–2004). In 1988, as a result of both the evolution of his philosophical interests (as evidenced in his second book T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 1988) and personal experiences, Shusterman made a conversion from analytic philosophy to pragmatism and started his own project of developing John Dewey’s aesthetics. The third book he authored, Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992) was a big breakthrough in his academic career. The original approach to the problems of the definition of art, organic wholes, interpretation, popular art and the ethics of taste he presented there brought him international fame (which is clearly evidenced by the fact that Pragmatist Aesthetics has already been translated into 12 languages). Shusterman’s position was only strengthened by his next works: Practicing Philosophy (1997), Performing Live (2000) and Surface and Depth (2002) in which he continued the pragmatist tradition, raising significant interest, provoking numerous critiques and stimulating debates not only among professional philosophers. In 2004 Richard Shusterman left Temple University to become the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton.

Richard Shusterman is a member of many editorial boards: e.g. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Metaphilosophy, Poetics Today, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Theory, Culture, and Society, Body and Society, Akademie Verlag (Berlin) series in Philosophische Anthropologie. He has also received important grants and fellowships, e.g. Senior National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright Fellowships; and his research in somaesthetics was previously supported by an Alexander Humboldt Foundation Transcoop Grant (2006–2009).

One of the important factors influencing Shusterman's philosophy has been his internationalist career: for instance, his work in France (with Pierre Bourdieu and with the College International de Philosophie) has allowed his pragmatism to engage and deploy the contemporary French philosophical tradition, while his Fulbright Professorship in Berlin enabled his pragmatism to intersect more closely with contemporary German philosophy. Similarly, his year as a visiting research professor in Hiroshima helped introduce him to Asian philosophy and Zen practice.

Shusterman’s activity is not confined to the professional academic life: in 1995 he was a delegate member of the UNESCO project Philosophy and Democracy in the World and for several years he directed the UNESCO project MUSIC: Music, Urbanism, Social Integration and Culture; in the period 1998–2004 he hosted “Dialogues on the Square”, a philosophy discussion series at Barnes and Noble, Rittenhouse Square Philadelphia. As a somatic educator and therapist, he is also a certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais method.

He lives in South Florida with his second wife and a daughter. He has two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.