Abstract

John Dewey's philosophical work has enjoyed a resurgence of interest of late, largely because of its iconoclastic stance toward traditional philosophy in general, and traditional epistemology in particular. In this dissertation I examine critically the anti-epistemological project which occupied Dewey throughout the first half of this century. In common with many other commentators, I understand Dewey to have held that the central, fatal flaw of traditional epistemology is its commitment to what he called the Spectator Theory of Knowledge --roughly the theory that the metaphor of vision has functioned as the primary model in the characterization of knowing: that knowing is most fundamentally a passive, "beholding" relation beween the knower and the object known. After specifying precisely what Dewey takes STK to be and illustrating how traditional epistemology is, on Dewey's view, essentially committed to it, I rationally reconstruct and then explicate the main lines of criticism of STK developed by Dewey over the course of some fifty years, and examine these criticisms to ascertain whether they show that STK, hence traditional epistemology, is indefensible. The general conclusion reached is that although Dewey achieves partial success against one version of STK, he utterly fails to defeat another version of the theory; and hence, that his overall anti-epistemological project is unsuccessful