Dewey, Aesthetic Experience, and Education for Humanity

Following from John Dewey’s notion that aesthetic experience is experience in its fullest sense, this chapter focuses on examining Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experience as it is inextricably tied to his concepts of human nature and education. It begins by exploring the concept of aesthetic experience in the context of Dewey’s broader theory of education and growth. The chapter then discusses how aesthetic experiences are cultivated in the context of formal learning settings, including classrooms and outdoor environments, paying special attention to the critical and indispensable role of the teacher in creating situations for students’ aesthetic experiences. In this context, the chapter discusses how Dewey’s critique of traditional and progressive education is still relevant in today’s global education climate. It concludes by discussing the crisis in education as the authors see it today and suggests that Dewey’s views provide three key insights for addressing this crisis: the value of teachers, the role of art as an ethical-political force, and the special place of philosophy of education in the cultivation of shared humanity.

Pragmatist Portraits of Experimental Intelligence by Peirce, James, Dewey, and Others

Pragmatist accounts of experimental intelligence are, at once, a continuation of the historical debate about the nature, scope, and function of reason and a significant departure from this dispute. They also reveal the efforts of philosophers to come to terms with the Darwinian revolution in the life sciences. Arguably, American pragmatism was the first self-consciously Darwinian movement in Western philosophy. The reconceptions of reason or intelligence formulated by Peirce, James, Dewey, and other pragmatists were central to their reconstruction of philosophy. In conjunction with this, Peirce and Dewey redefined logic as a theory of inquiry. But virtually all of the pragmatists linked intelligence to action. They envisioned human ingenuity to be without inherent limits but its historical forms often to be pathological distortions. They were sensitive to the tragic failures of experimental intelligence to make a difference, to inform and guide action in a liberating and illuminating manner.

Beyond Moral Fundamentalism

Drawing on unpublished and published sources from 1926 to 1932, this chapter builds on John Dewey’s naturalistic pragmatic pluralism in ethical theory. A primary focus is “Three Independent Factors in Morals,” which analyzes good, duty, and virtue as distinct categories that in many cases express different experiential origins. The chapter suggests that a vital role for contemporary theorizing is to lay bare and analyze the sorts of conflicts that constantly underlie moral and political action. Instead of reinforcing moral fundamentalism via an outdated quest for the central and basic source of normative justification, we should foster theories with a range of idioms and emphases which, while accommodating monistic insights, better inform decision-making by opening communication across diverse elements of moral and political life, placing these elements in a wider context in which norms gain practical traction in nonideal conditions, and expanding prospects for social inquiry and convergence on policy and action.

Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics

Dewey gradually abandoned the absolute idealism of his early period for what became his well-known philosophy of experience, his “cultural naturalism,” as he came to call it. During this development, he had to reconsider some very basic metaphysical commitments found not only in idealism but in many other metaphysical systems. The result was his development of a robust version of nonreductive naturalism that emphasized process and creative emergence. This essay does two things: (a) it traces the development of key themes in Dewey’s metaphysics prior to Experience and Nature (1925, revised 1929), and then (b) it focuses on that work as the culminating expression of his metaphysics, especially with regard to the “generic traits of existence.”

Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom

Sixty-five years after John Dewey’s last publication, there is an enormous literature interpreting, criticizing, and developing his pragmatism. Some working this vein are called “pragmatists,” while others are variously named “neopragmatists,” “new pragmatists,” and “linguistic pragmatists.” In general, the latter groups (a) focus more upon language, truth, and logic; (b) minimize or eschew talk of “experience”; (c) incline more toward professional, intraphilosophy dialogue rather than practical, extra-philosophy dialogue. Whither Dewey? What are the newer pragmatisms’ impacts on his reception and interpretation? What opportunities or obstacles are presented? Which among Dewey’s original insights still shine with signal importance? This chapter first considers the two most important neopragmatists, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom, giving the largest space to Brandom. It concludes with Dewey, arguing that his melioristic, experiential starting point remains central and, indeed, indispensable to any pragmatism wishing to connect with everyday ethical, social, and political realities.

Dewey and Confucian Philosophy

Perhaps the most important international relationship in the twenty-first century is that between America and China. Given the often delicate and sometimes underproductive history of the relationship between America and China broadly, this chapter argues that American pragmatism might serve as a vocabulary to promote a positive dialogue between these cultures at a moment in history when such a conversation is imperative. These commonalities provide a language introducing Confucian philosophy to the Western academy and also an external perspective from which to examine the presuppositions of our own worldview and common sense. The chapter compares the central Confucian notion of relationally constituted persons (ren 仁)— or human “becomings”—with Dewey’s technical term, “individuality.” It explores the centrality of moral imagination in Confucian role ethics and in Deweyan ethics and also concludes that these two traditions share the idea of a human-centered religiousness.

Dewey’s Chicago-Functionalist Conception of Logic

Both Dewey and Russell were Hegelians in their early careers. Acquaintance with Hegel left permanent deposits in their respective thinking about logic. Russell’s atomistic logicism aspired to achieve a foundationalist unity characteristic of his Tiergarten Programme. Dewey’s instrumentalism was rooted in an inside-out inversion and naturalization of Hegel’s dialectical schematism, replacing Hegel’s grand sweep of human history with a down-to-earth pattern of inquiry. Russell’s structuralist approach to deductive logic greatly influenced the development of mathematical logic and linguistics in the twentieth century, some highpoints of which are surveyed here. Dewey’s functionalist approach to logic as a normative theory of inquiry had little influence on this development. Dewey viewed logic more broadly as a study of how abductive, deductive, and inductive forms of inference best work together in the course of inquiry. This approach is spelled out, addressing points of consistency and conflict with contemporary mainstream views of logic.

Experimental Democracy for China

This chapter explores the relevance of Dewey’s philosophy of democracy for China within the context of Dewey’s historical visit to China (1919–1921) and continuing debates about his influence among the Chinese. Dewey’s pragmatism illuminates certain problems in the contemporary discourses about China’s democratization, including questions whether Chinese culture is an obstacle to democratization and the strengths of a Deweyan approach to articulating a Confucian democracy that could work in China. Dewey’s emphasis on experimentation in social reforms and his fallibilism regarding the political institutions of democracy open up new possibilities for China’s democratization and suggest where one might look to discover the indigenous conditions—the varied experiments being conducted in local governance and civil society—from which a Chinese democracy might be born.

Dewey’s Pragmatic Politics

The chapter presents John Dewey’s philosophy in terms of three central commitments: a dynamic ontology of impermanence, change, and temporality; a descriptive logic of experimental inquiry; and a democratic politics of individuals having opportunities to share equally in the direction of communities that, in turn, provide resources needed for individual fulfillment consonant with shared goods. This account makes possible a critical assessment of Dewey’s account of democracy as a way of life. Commitment to Deweyan democracy, this chapter shows, requires faith, new kinds of inquiry and education, and difficult social change. After explaining these demands, the chapter examines three issues that necessitate additions and reconstructions to make Dewey’s thought a “pragmatism for realists”: relations of power embedded in experimental inquiries, practical limits to the effectiveness of democratic means for democratic ends, and the gap between tribal political realities and Deweyan inclusive ideals.

The Starting Point of Dewey’s Ethics and Sociopolitical Philosophy

In order to appreciate the radical and promising character of Dewey’s ethics and sociopolitical theory, we must understand how his approach in these areas of philosophy was a consequence of what he thought should be the starting point of philosophy, that is, his metaphilosophy. Dewey prescribed that philosophers should make an effort to be “empirical” and to take “experience” seriously, but these claims are subject to misunderstandings. The first section of this chapter clarifies what they mean. The second section considers the difference that Dewey’s form of empirical philosophy makes in ethics and third section the difference it makes in approaching sociopolitical problems. Dewey proposes a much more radical approach than similar contemporary approaches that are interested in a shift from traditional approaches centered on ideal theories and abstractions toward a more nonideal contextualist, problem-centered, and inquiry-oriented approach.