Richard Shusterman's idea in his latest book, Performing Live to make available a set of essays that sum up and tie together some of his central concerns during the last decade is excellent and welcome.1 Readers of the book get a complex blend of essays from one of the most interesting and interdisciplinary philosophers writing in the United States and abroad today. The last three essays of the book appear here for the first time. But even though the rest of these essays were previously published, they are here revised in the light of the context of the book and of Shusterman's persistent concern with some pressing topics in philosophy and cultural criticism. Thus the book attempts, in pragmatist fashion, to make the philosophical move of renewing and reworking ideas to keep them vibrant and fresh. And the essays, ranging from cultural analyses of rap and country music to the aesthetics and care of the body, are as much a response to the recent, recurrent, and bleak announcement of the end of the arts as pragmatism (Shusterman's thinking mode of choice) was a reaction to a similarly perceived historical moment. In Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Paul Jerome Croce discusses pragmatism as a reaction to what a group of thinkers identified as a paralyzing state of affairs in late nineteenth-century thought.2 No longer sure about the religious or scientific convictions that had sustained the life of Americans in the earlier part of the century, those same Americans now, in the 1880s or so, felt their assumptions gradually waning. Even though, as Croce puts it, "many popular believers retained confidence in the certainty of science or the absolute truth of religious beliefs, serious professionals and intellectual inquiry in those fields had almost totally abandoned certainty."3 Croce concludes with the anguished remark that "during the nineteenth century epistemic certainty largely disappeared from the intellectual and cultural landscape of America."4 Vexed about the fruitlessness of such a