Known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics, currently he is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.
The interest carried over with his doctoral dissertation at Oxford University; The Object of Literary Criticism which he wrote at St. John's College under the supervision of J. O. Urmson and defended in 1979.
The book's original approach to the problems of definition of art, organic wholes, interpretation, popular art, and the ethics of taste brought him international fame as the book was translated into 14 languages (French, German, Finnish, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Slovakian, Hungarian, Romanian, Italian, and Russian) and several editions were published.
[13] Shusterman's position was further strengthened by three subsequent publications: Practicing Philosophy in 1997,[14] Performing Live in 2000,[15] and Surface and Depth in 2002;[16] in which he continued the pragmatist tradition, raising significant interest, provoking numerous critiques and stimulating debates not only among professional philosophers, but in the areas of literary and cultural studies as well.
[20] He is a member of many editorial boards and has been allocated important grants and fellowships for his research; from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission,[17] and the Humboldt Foundation.
For instance, his work in France with Pierre Bourdieu, the Sorbonne, and the College International de Philosophie has allowed his pragmatism to engage and deploy the contemporary French philosophical tradition.
Similarly, his years as a visiting research professor in Hiroshima, Japan and in Beijing and Shandong in China facilitated his study of Asian philosophy and Zen practice.
[21][22] In 2012 he prepared a project commissioned by UNESCO that aims to use the internet to stimulate international youth to immerse in dialogue about peace and violence, through the medium of art.
[23] In 2002, he received his professional certification as a Feldenkrais practitioner,[24] and he has worked since as a professor, researcher, lecturer, director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture, somatic educator, and therapist.
Deconstructionists, assuming their protean vision of language as "systematic play of differences", claim it is not, and hence deem every reading a "misreading", while analytic aestheticians think otherwise, usually construing the objective work-meaning as "metaphysically fixed in the artwork" and identifying it with the intention of the artist or "semantic features of the work itself".
[42] To avoid both these extremes Shusterman proposes a conception of textual meaning inspired by Wittgenstein (and his notion of language games) in which meaning is thought of as a correlate of understanding, the latter term being conceived as "an ability to handle or respond to [something] in certain accepted ways"[43] which, although shared and legitimized by the community, can be quite different and constitute many diverse "interpretation games".
Since there are many different incommensurable games existing at the same time and since some of them have undergone some significant changes over history (and some may even have disappeared from use), we can speak of a plurality of correct interpretations of the same text both in synchronic and diachronic dimensions.
Another consequence of this theory is Shusterman's logical pluralism which claims not only that there can be different (even contradictory), yet equally true interpretations (that would be only a cognitive pluralism), but also that there are legitimate forms of approaching texts which do not even aim at interpretational truth or plausibility, but rather aim at other useful goals (e.g., providing pleasure or making an old text more relevant to contemporary readers).
[44] Another of Shusterman's contributions to the theory of interpretation is his critique of a widely held view he calls 'hermeneutic universalism', and attributes to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alexander Nehamas and Stanley Fish, among others.
Agreeing with basic anti-foundationalist thrust of the hermeneutic universalists' position, Shusterman simultaneously rejects their thesis that "to perceive, read, understand, or behave at all intelligently ... must always be to interpret" and seeks to refute it with many original arguments.
[45] Among Shusterman's achievements in the theory of interpretation, there are also the accounts of literary criticism he created in his earlier, analytic period, as well as his pragmatist arguments against interpretational intentionalism and his genealogical critique of deconstructionist (Harold Bloom's, Jonathan Culler's), analytic (Joseph Margolis') and neo-pragmatist (Richard Rorty's, Stanley Fish's, Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp's) literary theories which, as he claims, are all governed at their core by an ideology of professionalism.
[48] Putting his meliorism into practice, Shusterman seeks to win aesthetic legitimation for popular art in two ways: Somaesthetics is a term coined by Shusterman to denote a new philosophical discipline he has invented as a remedy for the following problems: The above-mentioned conditions have determined the nature of somaesthetics as a grounded-in-philosophical-aesthetics yet interdisciplinary project of theory and practice which can be defined as: "the critical, meliorative study of the experience and the use of one's body as a locus sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning ..., devoted [also] to the knowledge, discourses and disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it.".
[58]To clarify the terminological issues, one needs to mention that Shusterman has intentionally put the term 'soma' (instead of the more familiar 'body') in the name of his disciplinary proposal to emphasize one important feature of his conception of corporeality.
For Shusterman, who is a true disciple of Dewey in this regard, bodily and mental (as well as cultural and biological) dimensions of human beings are essentially inseparable, and to signify this unity (this "sentient perceiving "body-mind"") he prefers to use the term 'soma' which, unlike 'body', does not automatically connote passive flesh contrasted to dynamic soul or mind.
The camera itself is relevant because in the simplicity and instantaneousness of capturing a posing subject with a button press, the individual posing is locked in a tense relationship with the camera, as it “thematizes this self-presentation, making it explicit by focusing on framing a particular moment of such self-presentation and fixing it in a permanent image that objectifies and defines the self in terms of that experiential moment, an image that can be indefinitely reproduced and circulated as a representation of what the self really is.”[70] With dance, Shusterman identifies an educational aspect, saying “It is an education in disciplined, skilled movement, expressive gesture, and elegant bearing whose experience in performance can afford the dancer the joys and healing harmony of somaesthetic pleasure and whose mastery also has beneficial uses in real life off stage.”[71] Shusterman has also drawn on non-western art like Nō theatre and the theories of Zeami Motokiyo.