His father, an aspiring poet, left the humanities and arts after World War II to become a founding partner in the country's first consulting firm to provide strategic planning for colleges and universities.

in philosophy from Carleton College, studying with philosophers Roy Elveton, Gary Iseminger, Maury Landsman, and Perry Mason, classics scholar David H. Porter, and economist Robert E.

Under the direction of John Lachs, he wrote a dissertation, Experience as Activity: Dewey’s Metaphysics, focused on pragmatism and its historical roots in the thought of Aristotle and Hegel.

At the University of Oregon, the Humanities Center grew rapidly (fueled by major private fundraising) and engaged a highly diverse group of scholars on campus and intellectual leaders across the state.

[13] And, at Emory, under Stuhr's watch overhauls of both the undergraduate and graduate programs greatly increased diversity and pluralistic approaches to philosophy, as did appointments of new faculty including John T. Lysaker, Marta Jimenez, Melvin Rogers (now at Brown University), Susan M. Bredlau, Dilek Huseyinzadegan, and George Dewey Yancy.

His work has been supported by many other institutions, agencies, grants and awards, including: the American Philosophical Society, the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Oregon Council for the Humanities, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, and Emory University's Institute for the History of Philosophy.

His graduate students and undergraduate students (more than two dozen of whom have received Ph.D.s in philosophy) include: professors and educators Rachel Dresbeck, Jeff Edmonds, Mark Fagiano, Tom Hilde, William S. Lewis, Michael Sullivan (now an Emory colleague), and Jamie Ross; business leaders and attorneys Sarah Bowers, Stephanie Dorgan, Wes Felix, Terrence R. McInnis, Brian Rabinovitz, Jibran Shermohammed, and Peter Viehl; and musicians and artists Marcus Amerman, C.J.

[27] In particular, Stuhr suggests that the work of writers such as Deleuze, Adorno, and Foucault are crucial resources for pragmatist thinkers who find in earlier pragmatism “an account of inquiry insufficiently attuned to issues of power, struggle, and multiplicity; a radically democratic ideal in need of response to threats from new technologies and the defects of liberal governments and societies; a pluralism in tension with pragmatism’s understanding of its own values, methods, and future, and a view of philosophy as criticism that needs to become more critically self-reflective about its own history and effects, and about challenges to its very existence in possible post-critical societies.”[28] Stuhr's vision here is thoroughly democratic—he spells out a notion of democracy as a way of life (and one in the face of terrorism)—and thoroughly this-worldly—he concludes with “no consolation” by providing an account of ‘life without spirituality” and “philosophy without transcendence.” In Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy, Stuhr characterized his genealogical pragmatism as a “critically pluralistic way of thinking” and “a way of living of great, ordinary love and sadness.” And he noted that philosophy is less a matter of argument and proof than of suggestion and evocation.

These two themes—pluralism (across politics, morals, epistemologies, and ontologies) and philosophy as personal vision and creative, evocative art—are developed thoroughly in Pragmatic Fashions: Pluralism, Democracy, Relativism, and the Absurd.

[29] Stuhr writes that this expressivist view of philosophy “is intimately attuned to key sensibilities of pragmatism—attuned to a deep fallibilism and experimentalism, pluralism and a thoroughgoing temporalism, a radically empirical relationalism or relativism, a commitment to methods of experimental intelligence and democratic practice, and an orientation to this world and the finitude of human life.”[30] Stuhr shows how this view illuminates philosophical disagreements in accounts of reality, knowledge, values, and political issues such as democracy, terrorism, and war.