Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
Interests: American Philosophy, Pragmatism and Phenomenology, Philosophy and Literature, Phenomenology and Aesthetics
Dr. Kestenbaum is the author of:
The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning (Humanities Press, 1977)
The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent (The University of Chicago Press, 2002)
and the editor of:
The Humanity of the Ill: Phenomenological Perspectives (The University of Tennessee Press, 1982)
Dr. Kestenbaum is author of the Editor’s Preface to Dewey’s Theory of the Moral Life (Irvington Publishers, 1992). His research interests are in the areas of American Philosophy (principally William James and John Dewey), the relationship of Pragmatism to Phenomenology, and Philosophy and Literature.
Dr. Kestenbaum is beginning work on the phenomenology of attention in Robert Frost and Mark Rothko. It will seek to clarify how the natural and the transcendent function in poet and painter.
His graduate level teaching in the Department of Philosophy has included American Philosophy, Phenomenology, and Pragmatism and Hermeneutics.