Bertrand Russell versus John Dewey

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-133
Author(s):  
Kenneth Binmore
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
Bertrand Russell

Nagel, Ernest (1901–85)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Levi
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
External World ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire Career ◽  
The 1960S

Ernest Nagel was arguably the pre-eminent American philosopher of science from the mid 1930s to the 1960s. He taught at Columbia University for virtually his entire career. Although he shared with Bertrand Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle a respect for and sensitivity to developments in mathematics and the natural sciences, he endorsed a strand in the thought of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey that Nagel himself called ‘contextual naturalism’. Among the main features of contextual naturalism is its distrust of reductionist claims that are not the outcomes of scientific inquiries. Nagel’s contextual naturalism infused his influential, detailed and informed essays on probability, explanation in the natural and social sciences, measurement, history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. It is reflected, for example, in his trenchant critiques of Russell’s reconstruction of the external world and Russell’s epistemology as well as cognate views endorsed at one time or another by members of the Vienna Circle.

Scholars East and West

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-334
Author(s):  
Jesús Mosterín
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Han Dynasty ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Brute Force ◽  
Great Contribution ◽  
Examination System ◽  
Family Ties

The great contribution of China to politics was the development of a bureaucratic, meritocratic civil service, based on mastery of a well-defined canon of scholarship. Civil servants were scholars. Already under the Han dynasty, Confucianism (the Rújiā or school of the scholars) was made the official ideology of the State and the basis of the competitive examination system. Europe was less advanced in political organization than China. Rulers and their courts relied on family ties and brute force. The only working bureaucracy belonged to the Catholic Church. This paper follows the parallel development of both the Western and the Chinese traditions and emphasizes their points of intersection, such as the Jesuit missions to China in the 16th and 17th centuries and the visits of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey around 1920.

scholarly journals Valores, Verdade e Investigação: uma alternativa pragmatista ao não cognitivismo de Russell

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-268
Author(s):  
Ivan Ferreira da Cunha
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
Bertrand Russell

Resumo Este artigo apresenta um referencial pragmatista para compreender o estatuto epistêmico da valoração que é produzida na reflexão acerca das consequências sociais de propostas científicas e tecnológicas. O problema é posto, seguindo-se as considerações de Bertrand Russell sobre o impacto da ciência na sociedade. Russell argumenta que a valoração de arranjos sociais fica fora dos limites do conhecimento, porque valorações não podem ser verdadeiras ou falsas, em sentido correspondencial. Isso leva o pensamento social a um impasse, pois não se pode saber que dado arranjo social seria indesejável ou inadequado. Este texto esboça uma alternativa, a partir dos trabalhos sobre valoração de Clarence Irving Lewis, tomados em continuidade com a teoria da investigação de John Dewey. Esse referencial alternativo assume noções epistêmicas de verdade e justificação, o que permite que valorações possam ser concebidas em contextos de investigação e, assim, como objetos de conhecimento.

scholarly journals Person of the Issue: William James (1842-1910)

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankit Patel
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Scientific School ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
School Of Medicine ◽  
The World ◽  
Original Thinker

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought” and the baby’s impression of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP 462). It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific. “Some Remarks on Spencer’s Notion of Mind as Correspondence” (1878) and “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism and pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher’s temperament.

Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-160
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Henri Poincaré ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

The pursuit of a definitive explanation of how scientists produce knowledge and what kinds of knowledge they produce became more urgent in the early twentieth century as science became increasingly important to society in the form of society-transforming technologies. As the century proceeded, philosophy of science emerged as a subdiscipline within philosophy, coordinate with the elusiveness of the goal of explaining science. By mid-century, philosophers, many trained in the physical sciences, had displaced scientists as the dominant figures in this effort. Henri Poincaré proposed a Mach-like relationalist theory of science, Bertrand Russell defended a logical atomism theory indebted to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Percy Bridgman defended a theory he called operationalism. Concurrently, William James and John Dewey developed the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce into an action- and belief-based explanation of science. But the dominant philosophy of science from the 1920s through the 1950s was logical positivism/empiricism.

In Praise of Idleness?

2020 ◽  
pp. 190-223
Author(s):  
Helen Small
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Title Ix ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Professional Freedom ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The University

This chapter turns to the university, deepening the critical-historical focus on the institutional settings within which cynicism (for all its anti-institutionalism) resides as a modern critical practice. The primary concern here is with the university as a forum in which debate about the importance of, and the constraints on, free speech has in recent years generated unhappy and (in the USA) occasionally violent levels of conflict. Attending closely to advocacy for professional freedom of expression in the work of Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Laura Kipnis (the latter operating in the context of Title IX legal disputes and the #MeToo movement), the chapter examines the ways in which each of them has deployed cynicism in the course of advocacy for an ideal of the university as a place of free expression, while also anticipating and controlling charges of ‘mere’ cynicism.

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