Dewey’s Objections to Traditional Doctrines

This chapter suggests that an awareness of the weaknesses and errors John Dewey finds in the traditional doctrines is crucial in piecing together the constructive doctrine he propounds. It looks at the objections Dewey has to earlier ontologies, beginning with an analysis about a traditional distinction—that between techne and physis—which is essential to an understanding of Dewey, especially in relation to earlier naturalistic thinkers. The chapter also examines Dewey’s works to elucidate his objections to other theories of form. These will come mostly from Experience and Nature and Art as Experience. Finally, the chapter deals with certain sections of The Quest for Certainty which provide a good link with both the discussions of idealism and its subsequent constructive analyses.

Darwin, Change, and the Transition to Experimentalism

This chapter looks at how the beginning of John Dewey’s experimental phase is marked by his first public presentation of a new logical position in Studies in Logical Theory, published in 1903. This is a logic based on the experimental methodology of the sciences, and as such is fully in line with the emphasis on change which dominates this period of his development. The chapter analyzes the impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution on Dewey, for it was this theory which most influenced his view of change. The latter part of the chapter describes the kind of ontology Dewey developed, in which it seems that he never really altered his original Kantian outlook. Critics of Dewey maintain that he remained an idealist, and explicitly compare him to Immanuel Kant.

Logical Forms

This chapter cites John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry and argues that it holds a special prominence in regard to the issue of forms. This stems from two facts: as a text on logic, it returns to the subject John Dewey treated in 1916 when he published the Essays in Experimental Logic; and as a late book in his career, it follows those that were studied in Dewey’s previous literature. The chapter unravels Dewey’s growing appreciation of the need to situate properly the permanent or stable dimensions of existence. It is this dimension which is encapsulated in the concept of form. The chapter shows that the specific topic in Logic is logical forms, but here Dewey’s analysis builds on the more generalized interpretation.

Metaphysics and Evolutionary Biology

This chapter investigates how John Dewey’s naturalistic period is characterized by the substitution of ontological issues for the methodological ones that dominated the experimentalist phase. This change in emphasis resulted from his continued preoccupation with certain concerns that had marked his idealistic period, two of which are relevant here: the recognition that consciousness must be viewed as active as well as passive; and organicism. From William Morris, Dewey had come to appreciate the active role of intelligence in the acquisition of knowledge; and in G.W.F. Hegel, he had found a well-worked-out expression of organicism, a doctrine that had attracted him since his undergraduate years at the University of Vermont.

Change and Permanence in Dewey’s Idealistic Period

This chapter explains how John Dewey spent seventy years of his life in active and copiously productive philosophical activity. Scholar Richard Bernstein has accurately characterized Dewey’s career as consisting of three periods. The first is the idealistic phase, beginning with the article of 1882 and lasting until 1903. At that time Dewey introduced his new methodology in Studies in Logical Theory. These studies inaugurate the experimental phase in which Dewey developed a novel methodology for dealing with philosophical issues. The third phase, the naturalistic, is one in which Dewey attempted to present a coherent articulation of a naturalistic ontology. This period was announced in 1925 with the publication of Experience and Nature.

Dewey’s Reconstruction of Traditional Metaphysics

This chapter considers the close association of forms and ends, and the particular manner in which form, though not possessed of a Platonic kind of separate existence, may still be distinguished and discussed independently. The new material falls under the general heading of the relationship between forms and knowledge in John Dewey’s thought and encompasses three topics: his defense of the thesis that knowledge grasps forms, not matter; the status of forms as possibilities for knowledge; and the pluralistic understanding of forms in his thought. The chapter shows how the significant part of the teleological dimension plays in Dewey’s understanding of forms was underscored in the two definitions of form given in Art as Experience.

Change and Permanence in the Experimental Logic

This chapter examines John Dewey’s new logic. Dewey understands logic as involving especially the search for method. His earliest attempt at developing a methodology fully consistent with the advances of modern science is found in Studies in Logical Theory, published in 1903. Dewey’s views were not developed in isolation from the philosophical controversies of his day. The type of logic he espoused is presented as a response to the perceived insufficiencies of alternative positions. The chapter also explores Dewey’s objections to the two traditions that dominated philosophical discussion, realism and idealism, and deals in greater detail with his understanding of the term object.

Some Implications of the Study

This concluding chapter discusses how the interpetation of John Dewey’s metahysics presented in this book has a direct bearing on a much-discussed topic in contemporary philosophical literature: the dispute between foundationalists and anti-foundationalists. The chapter cites the works of Richard Rorty, a prominent defender of the anti-foundationalist side. He is particularly important because he enlists Dewey’s support in his enterprise. Rorty admires Dewey as someone who encouraged the promulgation of a non-epistemological sort of philosophy. However, such high praise is counterbalanced by the admission that there are weaknesses in Dewey’s philosophy, the most significant of which talks about his engagement with metaphysics.

Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses responses to two major problems in Deweyan scholarship and to a third issue of a more purely theoretical character. To begin with, it argues that there are scholars who dismiss the Deweyan attempt at formulating a metaphysics as superficial, irrelevant, and contradictory. In addition, there are others who provide a caricature of Deweyan metaphysics as describing a natural world given over solely to flux, process, and change. Finally, there is a general need, occasioned by developments in the sciences, for contemporary philosophers to deal with the issues encapsulated in the term form. The chapter also shows that the approach taken in examining John Dewey’s metaphysics is both theoretical and historical.