Larry Shiner

An Intellectual Biography

The aim of this biography is to provide a background for understanding why I came to write the books and articles I have published. It divides my career into six periods tracing the shifts in the topical focus of my interests (from theology and philosophy of religion to philosophy of history and social science, to philosophy of art and aesthetics (especially the aesthetics of architecture and olfaction), and also the shifts in my general philosophical approach (from phenomenology to pragmatism to a kind of ordinary language analysis). The one constant in my academic works is that I have always approached topics from an interdisciplinary, rather than a purely philosophical orientation.

1. Existential Theology and Philosophy of Religion (1956-1967)

I was fortunate that both my parents were school-teachers who encouraged a broad array of intellectual interests, something that has characterized my entire career. My mother shared her love of classical music, literature, and painting and my father shared his deep interest in history and politics.   Not surprisingly, I chose to attend a liberal arts college (Oberlin) that included a famous conservatory of music.  The other shaping influence in my adolescent years was religion.  When I went to Oberlin, I was already committed to becoming a minister, but my first courses at Oberlin in philosophy (William Kennick) and religion (Clyde Holbrook) were not only intellectually exciting, but deepened my already lingering doubts about God and the ministry, as I read Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, James, Whitehead, Russell, and Dewey for the first time.  But a summer romance and conversations with my beloved minister-mentor, Eugene Frank, put those doubts on the back burner for a time and led me to transfer, in the middle of my junior year, from Oberlin to Northwestern University to be near my fiancé.  I was a history major at both Oberlin and Northwestern but the part of history I found most exciting was intellectual history; I remember my delight in reading my teacher Frederick Artz’s Mind of the Middle Ages and later Perry Miller’s The New England Mind. At Northwestern, I loved the lectures of the historian Ray Billington but the most memorable course I took was called Philosophy in Literature, taught by Eliseo Vivas, in which I read Dostoyevsky for the first time. 

After graduation, despite continuing religious doubts, I enrolled in Garrett Theological Seminary, which was located on the campus of Northwestern.  But a summer theological workshop during which I met the charismatic Carl MIchaelson of Drew Theological Seminary, who taught the existential theology of Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Friedrich Gogarten, led me to transfer to Drew University.  Once at Drew, in addition to Michaelson’s courses, I enjoyed the teaching of Will Herberg on Jewish thinkers and was especially moved by Martin Buber’s I and Thou.  Drew also offered a doctorate in philosophy of religion and I quickly formed friendships with two doctoral students, Richard Underwood and Fred Paddock, who helped me realize that my religious doubts and intellectual curiosity better fit me for college teaching than the parish ministry.

During my Drew years, I began to read Kierkegaard more seriously, especially the Journals, the Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments.  I also made a first stab at Heidegger’s Being and Time and I remember trying to teach myself something of the roots of analytic philosophy by struggling with Whitehead and Russell’s Principia. I can’t say I succeeded in understanding much of either Heidegger or Whitehead/Russell, but trying to grasp their arguments whetted my appetite for further study in philosophy which eventually led me to Gadamer and Wittgenstein.   Each year, Drew invited one of the leading theologians of Europe to speak or teach and during my last year I took a course from Friedrich Gogarten.  Yet, the greatest excitement that year was a week-long colloquium on the theological implications of the work of Heidegger.  Although Heidegger accepted an invitation to speak, he could not attend for health reasons, which may have been just as well since many of us were shocked when one of the colloquium speakers, Hans Jonas, mounted a blistering attack on Heidegger for having supported the Nazis.  (The extent of Heidegger’s support and his shameful acquiescence in the dismissal of Jewish professors, only became common knowledge many years later and has certainly cooled any enthusiasm I once had for Heidegger’s work , which I now recognize as often brilliant, but just as often pretentious and deeply flawed in its social and moral outlook. On graduation, I received a traveling fellowship and, with Carl Michaelson’s encouragement, instead of going to one of the German theology schools as most American protestants did, I went to the Université de Strasbourg, which had both a Protestant and a Catholic theological faculty (resulting from the Napoeonic Concordat).   Although Pierre Burgelin taught the philosophy of religion at Strasbourg, my dissertation on the theology of Friedrich Gogarten was written under the ethicist, Roger Mehl, and the historian of Early Christianity, Étienne Trocmé, the latter a brilliant scholar who later became a dear friend.  In what spare time I had from writing the dissertation, I also read in French phenomenology and existentialism which I didn’t realize were soon to be eclipsed by newer movements like Structuralism and Poststructuralism.

2. Phenomenology and Philosophy of History (1968-1978)

My first teaching position after finishing the dissertation was in the Religion Department at Cornell College in Iowa and lasted from 1962 to 1971 where I learned much from my wonderful colleagues and life-long friends, Thomas Mikelson and Shigeo Kanda. I continued to pursue an interest in the philosophy of history as well as the philosophy of religion and enjoyed teaching in the interdisciplinary Humanities core with colleagues from History and Literature, most memorably a seminar I team taught with the Jewish refugee historian Eric Kollman on Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche.  I was also eager to share my knowledge of phenomenology and existential philosophy with students and even translated portions of Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art for one of my courses, but as many young faculty members fresh out of graduate school discover, one’s graduate topics may too esoteric for the average undergraduate.  Although I spent the first few years at Cornell turning my dissertation on Gogarten into a book (The Secularization of History, 1967), I also conceived of the project of writing a book on a phenomenological approach to the nature of historical reality and how historical events and experiences are transformation into written narrative and analysis.  I was fortunate enough to receive a post-doctoral fellowship from the Danforth Foundation that allowed me to return to France for the academic year 1967-1968, this time to Paris, to do further work on the theme of a phenomenological approach to the critical philosophy of history and the social sciences.  

I decided that I should go back to the beginnings of the phenomenology movement and spent long hours in the Husserl Archives (whose Director was Paul Ricoeur) taking notes on Husserl’s many unpublished manuscripts dealing with historicity and historical science. I also read further in the classic texts on phenomenology by Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Ricoeur, and followed Ricoeur’s lecture courses (one of which tried to set up a dialogue on the philosophy of language with both Structualists and the British analytic tradition).   The other major intellectual current in France that I explored at that time was Structuralism (I was especially drawn to the work of Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes).  But 1967-68 was also the year of the emergence of what came to be called “Post-Structuralism” and eventually led to “Post-Modernism,” with the publication of major works by Jacques Derrida (Grammatologie) and Michel Foucault (Les Mots et les Choses), to be followed in 1970 by Roland Barthes’ S/Z.  Although I was fascinated by these post-structuralist writings, I still persevered with my project for a book on the philosophy of history from a phenomenological perspective and published four articles related to that project between 1969 and 1974.  British and American analytic philosophy of history in those days focused on the issue of historical explanation, whereas I wanted to use a phenomenological approach to explore ontological issues such as the historicity of human existence and the nature of historical time and historical space. Of course, one of the most stimulating intellectual experiences at the end of my year in Paris was watching, reading about and discussing the great student rebellion and general strike that paralyzed France for weeks in the late Spring of 1968 (and whose theoretical aspects included the ideas of Herbert Marcuse whom I read with my students when I got back).

A few years after I returned from France, my book project for a phenomenological philosophy of the historical sciences began to get less of my attention due to a move in 1971 from Cornell College to a brand new university in Springfield, Illinois: Sangamon State University (now the University of Illinois at Springfield).  This new university was designed to be upper-division (offering courses only at the junior, senior and masters level).  The point of this arrangement was to accommodate the many community college students who, at that time, were often made to spend a semester or more taking remedial courses if they wanted to finish a B.A. at one of the existing state universities.  Although I was able to keep up my research and writing toward the book on the philosophy of history for the first couple of years at Sangamon State, I was soon totally absorbed by the challenges and excitement of participating in the creation of the new university’s self-defined mission of “innovation,” “interdisciplinary study,” and “teaching first,” i.e. the primary criterion for tenure was to be excellence and innovation in teaching rather than the quantity of publications. 

I had been hired to start a program in philosophy, but, given the fact that in the early 1970s practically no community colleges in Illinois offered any courses in philosophy, and also knowing from experience at Cornell College that students in four-year institutions choose a philosophy major after becoming excited by their first course in philosophy, I proposed that rather than burden our new program with proving to administrators that we could attract enough majors, we should offer applied philosophy courses in conjunction with other program majors.  Thus, the next two philosophers we hired (Peter Wenz and Ed Cell, both trained in the analytic tradition) were to teach courses such as medical ethics for the university’s nursing program and business ethics for the management program.  I taught courses related to the philosophy of history and social science, philosophy of art, and interdisciplinary courses such as “Communication Ethics.”  As you can see from this list, we did not include philosophy of religion, one reason being because the university had no program in religious studies to which it could relate, although Ed Cell later offered such a course as a general elective  Given the interdisciplinary and innovative atmosphere of the university, we philosophers were well received by colleagues in other departments and several programs such as Nursing and Arts Management made one or another of our courses part of their degree requirements.  By 1975, however, I had become Dean of Academic Programs, overseeing some twenty-eight degrees, although I continued to teach one course per semester in applied philosophy (Philosophy of Art for students in Arts Management and Visual Art) as part of my commitment to the university’s “teaching first” policy.  As a result of these changes, my research and writing on the projected phenomenology and philosophy of history book virtually stopped, although I had at that point published four articles that could have become chapters in such a book.

3. Post-Structuralsim, Literary Theory and Historiography (1978-1988)

By 1978, when I concluded that I was not cut out for administrative work and returned to full time teaching, not only had the phenomenology and history project cooled, but I was curious to read more in Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism (although I never gave up my appreciation for Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur).  Among the post-structuralists or post-modernists, I had little enthusiasm for Derrida, although I worked through a couple of his books, but I was strongly drawn to Roland Barthes and to Michel Foucault, even publishing three articles on Foucault (I had the privilege of attending a session of one of his seminars at Berkeley).  By 1980, I had married Catherine Walters who was a psychologist and psychotherapist as well as a feminist who taught a course on the Psychology of Women at the university. Thanks to her influence, I began to catch up on some of the major feminist writers and became more attuned to issues of gender and race in my professional work. I joined the Feminist Caucus of the American Society of Aesthetics when it was first formed and followed the work on feminist aesthetics of my friends Carolyn Korsmeyer and Peg Brand. A feminist perspective also affected The Invention of Art which I was working on throughout the 1990s, most obviously in the inclusion of a section on Mary Wollstonecraft).

Another new direction of thought that caught my attention in the early 1980s was the rhetorical and literary analysis of historical narratives that had been developed by the historian, Hayden White in the 1970s.  This led me to create a course on narrative theory for the university’s literature and communication programs that I taught for several years.  I also conceived the project of writing a literary analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, his memoir of the events of 1848-1850.  A sabbatical leave during 1983-84, which I spent at the University of California at Santa Cruz where Hayden White taught and the literary theorist, Frederick Jameson, was a visiting professor, furthered work on the project.  My book, The Secret Mirror: Literary Form and History in Tocqueville’s ‘Recollections,’ was finally published in 1988.  It relies more on structuralist-influenced writers like Tzvetan Todorov and Gerard Genette along with a number of British (Frank Kermode), and American (Peter Brooks) literary theorists outside the so-called “post-modernist” camp, than it does on Foucault, although I do make use of Barthes version of the structuralist notion of codes to interpret Tocqueville’s set of binary contrasts in the Recollections.

In writing The Secret Mirror, I not only had the help of my Sangamon State colleagues J. Michael Lennon in literature and Charles B. Strozier in history, but the members of an interdisciplinary study group (later nicknamed CIPG, Central Illinois Philosophers Group) that included not only Peter Wenz, but humanities faculty from nearby Illinois College and MacMurray College who were interested in reading philosophical texts together. Among the members who have influenced my thinking over the years are the late Richard Palmer, a leading writer on hermeneutics and specialist in the work of Hans Georg Gadamer and, more recently, the historian Robert Kunath, whose work on Hanah Arendt led me to a deeper appreciation of her thought.

One of the most interesting scholars I met at Santa Cruz in 1983 was James Clifford, an anthropologist who was doing for anthropological writing something similar to what Hayden White was doing for history.  But Clifford’s work had a sharper political edge than White’s, especially with regard to the ways in which small-scale traditional societies are portrayed by Western writers vs. the ways in which contemporary members of those societies portray themselves and exhibit their artifacts.  I had always been interested in and even collected African carvings and had long questioned the way they have been appropriated and exhibited by Westerners who think they are paying them some kind of compliment by calling them “fine art” and isolating them in art museums.  I found it highly ironical and revealing of a blind ethnocentrism that dealers, collectors, art critics, and many aesthetic theorists considered African carvings that where primarily intended for ritual use (and often stored out of sight when not in use) to be “authentic” fine art works to be collected and exhibited in art museums, but dismissed any African carvings that were intended to be “art” in the Western sense, and sold to make a living, as mere “tourist crafts” or “fakes.”  Years later (1994), my research in this area resulted in my first article in aesthetics, “‘Primitive Fakes,’‘Tourist Art,’ and the Ideology of Authenticity,” published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and it led to some spirited exchanges with other philosophers of art such as Dennis Dutton and Steven Davies.

A parallel and very different sort of intellectual activity during the late 1980s and throughout most of the 1990s emerged from serving a dozen years as editor of The Psychohistory Review, which had been founded at Sangamon State in 1972 by Charles B. Strozier. When he left 1986 to take up a position with Robert J. Lifton’s Center on Violence and Human Survival at the City University of New York, Strozier asked me to take over and I edited the review until 1999 when we decided to end it as funding was about to run out. Although not a practicing psychohistorian myself (as just noted, I was more interested in the rhetorical/literary analysis of historical texts), I profited from having to handle various editorial tasks and enjoyed interacting with such fine writers in the field as Peter Gay of Yale, and learned much from the French psychiatrist, Micheline Guiton, and the American seventeenth-century specialist, Elizabeth Marvick, both of whom I recruited for the Editorial Board.

4.  A Turn toward Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy and the Philosophy of Art (1988-2001)

Once the Tocqueville book was out of the way in 1988, my teaching and research turned increasingly to the philosophy of art and aesthetics.  By the early 1980s the University of Illinois at Springfield had a small but thriving Arts Management masters degree program and my course on aesthetics was a graduation requirement.  As I continued to read widely in the field of aesthetics and to attend the annual American Society for Aesthetics meetings (where the first person I befriended was Kevin Sweeney who had an analytic background and shared my interdisciplinary outlook), I increasingly began to work with pragmatic and analytical arguments rather than phenomenological ones.  A major influence in the direction of pragmatism was Louis Mink of Wesleyan University who once told me that what I had been looking for in phenomenology (a focus on lived experience) was already there in pragmatism in a more direct and down to earth versions. The move toward pragmatism and a broadly analytic approach during this same period was also abetted by my colleague Peter Wenz and the interdisciplinary study group (CIPG) in which we both participated. The group read and discussed among other things, several works of Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. One of my earliest publications had been a critical study of the concept of secularization as used in empirical research and my slow drift away from phenomenology now led me into a regular practice of conceptual analysis with a more analytic bent. As I tried to fill in the gaps in my understanding of conceptual analysis using the tools of the analytic tradition, I was especially drawn to the later Wittgenstein and to the ordinary language work of J. L. Austin in which I discerned a kinship with some of the aims of Merleau-Ponty, although the philosophy of language is not well developed in Merleau-Ponty’s own work. Ricoeur, whose writings I continued to follow, had already been engaging in a dialogue with the British and American analytic tradition when I spent time with him in Paris.

In the general area of aesthetics, the analysis of concepts like “primitive fakes” and “tourist art” continued to interest me, but that interest was now complemented by an interest in the way in which handmade functional works in Western societies were often dismissed as “mere craft.”  The adjective “mere” simply intensifies a long-standing depreciation of “craft” that was certainly widespread in the 1970s and 80s, and among philosophers it can be traced back to R. G. Collingwood (and can also be found in Gadamer).  Since I happened to admire well-made pottery of high aesthetic achievement, I resented the sneering attitude of many artists, critics and art theorists toward “craft” and one of the motivations of a new book project I conceived in the late 1980s, was to rectify the depreciation of those arts conventionally classified as “craft” or “decorative arts,” and considered as the inferior other of “fine art.”  More ambitiously, I intended the book project to help rescue of the concept of craft by intervening in the intense debates on the definition of art in philosophical aesthetics that was going on in the 1980-90s.

In those debates, I tended to side with those like Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Jerrold Levinson, or Noel Carroll who developed different versions of a contextual, historical, or narrative approach to defining or at least characterizing (fine) art.  In this period, I was particularly drawn to Danto’s elegant writing and broad outlook. As I taught the philosophy of art to students majoring in art or arts management, I also began to develop my own more socially oriented version of the widely embraced thesis of Paul Oscar Kristeller that the category of “fine art” or “Art with a capital ‘A,’” is not a human universal or even present in Plato and Aristotle, but only emerges in the eighteenth century.   Like several other scholars, such as Lyda Goehr, Paul Mattick, and Martha Woodmansee, I felt Kristeller’s approach was too narrowly focused on the history of ideas, whereas economic and social (the latter especially including gender and racial) factors were equally important in the emergence of the category of fine art.  Within the profession of history, the old history of ideas and intellectual history, which had been my first love academically, had been displaced by the “new social history,” which dismissed any concern for intellectual history as elitist, focusing instead on long overdue histories of class, race, and gender. But, by the early 1990’s there had been a reaction to the social historians’ blanket dismissal of intellectual history, led by historians like Lynn Hunt, who proposed a “cultural history” that would integrate social history and intellectual history, with a concern for the role of literature, art and music in social change.  Over the decade of the 1990s, I did extensive research on the history of the concept of art from the general perspective of cultural history. I wanted the book I was writing to be of interest not only to philosophers, but accessible to artists, students and lay readers.  The book that came out in 2001, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, differed from Kristeller’s purely intellectual history in a number of respects, such as placing the culmination of the development of the concept of fine art in the 1830s rather than the 1740s, giving a far more important role to parallel changes in the concept of the artist, and, most importantly, emphasizing the crucial role of the emergence of a market economy and the rise of a middle class for whom social aspirations were intertwined with the new ideas and institutions of fine art.  The book was particularly well received by artists, but the general claim that the concept of fine art is a modern construction has been contested by some other historians and philosophers.  I responded the these criticisms with an article in the British Journal of Aesthetics in 2009 and have a chapter coming out expanding on those arguments in the Routledge Handbook of Painting and Sculpture (forthcoming in 2021).

A few years after The Invention of Art was finished, Arnold Berleant approach several members of the American Society for Aesthetics, including John Carvalho, Ivan Gaskell, David Goldblatt, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Yuriko Saito, and Mary Wiseman with the proposal that we join him in creating an on-line journal to be called Contemporary Aesthetics. Berliant was especially concerned that the journal be open to all philosophical orientations (his own work reflected an appreciation of phenomenology) and afford scholars from non-Western countries a forum for exchange without the cost of a subscription or the waiting time for publication that occurs with a print journal. Through working with the members of the board of Contemporary Aesthetics over the last decade and a half, I have learned much. For example, I would have no doubt been drawn to Yuriko Saito’s writings on everyday aesthetics or Ivan Gaskell’s writings on material culture studies by my interest in the issue of the crafts and applied art, but there is nothing like working with others on a common project to offer opportunities for fruitful exchanges and draw one into a more careful attention to their writings.

5. The Aesthetics of Art Museum Architecture (2001-2018)

Since the publication of The Invention of Art in 2001, my intellectual work has focused on two areas of aesthetics: art museum architecture and the olfactory arts. In the case of architecture, spectacular art museum designs like those of Frank Gehry or Daniel Libeskind and others in first decade of this century provoked considerable controversy, with some architecture critics enthusiastically celebrating these building for their daring designs, others condemning them for upstaging or even interfering with the appreciation of the art inside.  I wrote a series of essays on the issue that were published in various journals and as chapters in books from 2007 to 2018. I drew on a variety of sources ranging from Bruno Zevi’s classic, Architecture as Space, to the recent writings of the architects Juhani Palasmaa and Steven Holl (both influenced by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty), in order to work out a basis for judging spectacular architectural designs. I wanted to established a perspective that would neither condemn spectacular architecture outright, nor accept uncritically designs that end up interfering with the showing and appreciation of art.   A key principle in these writings is that architecture is both multifunctional (embodying practical, social, symbolic, and aesthetic functions intertwined) and multisensory (requiring our movement through a building with all our senses alert).  Too much architectural theory and criticism, in my opinion, has been focused on purely aesthetic functions on the one hand and on the sense of sight on the other, ignoring the importance of practical functions as well as the role of sound, touch, smell, proprioception, etc. The attention I began paying to the non-visual aspects of architecture helped prepare me for the next major intellectual project I undertook, the aesthetics of smell and the olfactory arts, although even after I began to work on the issues surrounding the olfactory arts, I continued to write on art museum architecture.

6. The Aesthetic of Smell and the Olfactory Arts (2002-2020)

During the time I was beginning to write about the multifunctional and multisensory aspects of architecture, a graduate student in arts management, Julia Kriskovets, asked me to be her thesis adviser on the topic of contemporary olfactory art, an area new to me.  This led me into an intensive study of the nature of the sense of smell and its various uses in the arts: from sculpture and installation to theater, film, and music, as well as to design, architecture, cuisine and, of course, perfume and incense. (The work by Otobong Nkanga illustrated here has a dark brown slash running around it that is filled with aromatic examples of the colonial exploitation of Africa, coffee beans, dried tobacco leaves, cloves and other spices. As visitors walks along smelling the every changing mixture, they are given a palpable olfactory experience of Nkanga’s anti-colonial message.)

I eventually decided to write a book-length study on smell and the olfactory arts, encouraged by the example set by my friends Carolyn Korsmeyer (Making Sense of Taste, 1999) and Kevin Sweeney (The Philosophy of Food: The Philosophical Debate About What We Eat and Drink, 2019) whose books do for the sense of taste what I was seeking to do for smell.  I also profited greatly from the one comprehensive philosophical study of the sense of smell and its aesthetic implications, Philosophie de l’odorat, by the French historian of philosophy, Chantal Jaquet. 

Before I could write about the actual aesthetic issues raise by olfactory arts, however I had to refute two negative traditions regarding the human sense of smell, one in philosophy, the other in the biological and social sciences.. Philosophers from Kant and Hegel to Roger Scruton and Dennis Dutton in this century have denied that odors can be used to make genuine works of art or that the sense of smell can participate in genuinely aesthetic experiences and judgments because they believe that smell lacks sufficient cognitive powers to rise above merely subjective responses. Biologists and psychologists such as Darwin and Freud dismissed the sense of smell as of little importance, treating it as a kind of vestige from a pre-human ancestor, and many natural and social scientists since them have either ignored smell or taken a dim view of smell’s cognitive capacities. Against the negative philosophical tradition, I developed some arguments based on purely conceptual-intuitive reasoning (drawing in part on Frank Sibley); but I also tried to show that those arguments are consistent with or even supported by empirical evidence. The latter task necessitated a biocultural approach to writing the book, leading me into the study of the biology, neuroscience and psychology of smell as well as into anthropology, history, linguistics, and literature both Western and non-Western dealing with olfaction.  Although it was a demanding task, the book was a pleasure to write since working in so many different fields meant constant discovery, and, because I wanted my synthesis to be accessible to a broad audience, I used a more personal and informal style of writing. Of course, such an approach meant I could not go into great depth on any one facet of the issues surrounding smell and the olfactory arts, but I believe Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetic of Smell and the Olfactory Arts (2020) offers a cogent and convincing survey of the possibilities and problems of an olfactory aesthetics.

In terms of the development of philosophical method, the process of researching and writing Art Scents has confirmed my commitment to interdisciplinary work. I agree with Dominic Lopes (Aesthetics on the Edge, 2018), whose recent writings on the concept of art and aesthetics strongly influenced my thinking in Art Scents, that henceforth more and more problems in philosophy will require philosophers to enter into dialogue with the relevant empirical disciplines. Another thing that writing this little account of my shifting topical interests and changing intellectual influences on my work has made me aware of is what a slow worker I am. It seems to take anywhere from ten to twenty years to produce a book.