John Dewey was the foremost figure and public intellectual in early to mid-twentieth century American philosophy. He is the most academically cited Anglophone philosopher of the past century, and he is among the most cited Americans of any century. In this comprehensive volume spanning thirty-five chapters, leading scholars help researchers access particular aspects of Dewey’s thought, navigate the enormous and rapidly developing literature, and participate in current scholarship in light of prospects in key topical areas. Beginning with a framing essay (...) by Philip Kitcher calling for a transformation of philosophical research, contributors interpret, appraise, and critique Dewey’s philosophy under the following headings: Metaphysics; Epistemology, Science, Language, and Mind; Ethics, Law, and the Starting Point; Social and Political Philosophy, Race, and Feminist Philosophy; Philosophy of Education; Aesthetics; Instrumental Logic, Philosophy of Technology, and the Unfinished Project of Modernity; Dewey in Cross-Cultural Dialogue; The American Philosophical Tradition, the Social Sciences, and Religion; and Public Philosophy and Practical Ethics. (shrink)

This article is part of alarger project exploring the continuity betweentwo philosophical positions – that of Frenchpoststructuralist Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995)and John Dewey – that appear at first sight tobe separated by time, place and culture. Thescope of the present paper is necessarilylimited and focuses on one aspect of theproject, namely: the problematics ofsubjectivity, or subject formation, inDeleuze's philosophy. Deleuze's position isestablished as pragmatic by virtue of itssharing the value allotted by Dewey toexperiential and experimental inquiry inphilosophy. By drawing initial parallels (...) with anumber of selected Dewey's excerpts, this paperaims to open up a space for the imaginarydialogue between two philosophical thoughts soas to consider a possibility for applyingDeleuze's philosophy to educational theory andpractice in the context of current debates andin a manner continuous with the Deweyan legacy.The paper concludes by affirming Deleuze'splace in the contemporary scholarship on Dewey. (shrink)

Critics of Dewey’s metaphysics point to his dismissal of any philosophy which locates ideals in a realm beyond experience. However, Dewey’s sustained critique of dualistic philosophies is but a first step in his reconstruction and recovery of the function of the metaphysical. Detaching the discussion of values from inquiry, whether scientific, philosophical or educational, produces the same end as relegating values to a transcendent realm that is beyond ordinary human discourse. Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics supports his progressive educational philosophy. The duty (...) of education is grounded in its service to democracy; it must help students develop the ability to express, discuss, and develop their moral reasoning through experiential and experimental learning. (shrink)

Despite a prevalence of articles exploring links between sport and art in the 1970s and 1980s, philosophers in the new millennium pay relatively little explicit attention to issues related to aesthetics generally. After providing a synopsis of earlier debates over the questions ‘is sport art?’ and ‘are aesthetics implicit to sport?’, a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience will be developed. Aesthetic experience, it will be argued, vitally informs sport ethics, game logic, and participant meaning. Finally, I will argue that (...) embodying pragmatic conceptions of art as its ideal metaphor re-opens space to best realize the deep potential of sport as a meaningful human practice. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with establishing a bridge between matters of aesthetics and epistemology, by investigating the mechanisms through which artworks allow agents to derive knowledge through the former’s manipulation. It is proposed that, in order to understand the epistemic potential of artworks, we need to approach them as diagrams, in the sense developed by Charles Peirce. The background upon which the arguments are developed are mainly those of American Pragmatism – with a special emphasis on primary literature from Charles (...) Sanders Peirce about semiotics and inquiry, and John Dewey about aesthetics. It is introduced that the manipulation upon artworks can be an example of an inquiry process, due to artworks’ diagrammatic symbol-type-token structure, which embody the logical relations of abduction, deduction and induction. Through Peirce’s definition of inquiry, and Dewey’s definition of an aesthetic experience, it is possible to defend that artworks deliberate create states of doubt and chance as to stimulate and guide inquiry as a way to achieve an aesthetic experience, corroborating to the claim that inquiry processes and aesthetic experience share the same ontological basis: it is in the nature of aesthetic experience to confront agents and contexts with state of chance and doubt, to be further guided through inference into a state of regularity and belief. In order to develop and test the argument, I present the development of Arthur Danto’s influential theory of aesthetics based on Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, by focusing on a review of Danto’s main writings about it. The central point that Danto developed in this theory is that what gives something the status of an artwork are not the immediately perceivable sensorial features of an artifact, but something else. I claim it to be a “diagrammatic structure” that can be potentially manipulated through an inquiry process. I conclude by establishing a possible development of my argument in relation to modelling processes: as diagrams, artworks can be understood as models, opening room for the emergence of new hypothesis and conjectures about the relationship between aesthetics and epistemology. (shrink)

I resolve several pressing and recalcitrant problems in contemporary philosophy of science using resources from John Dewey's philosophy of science. I begin by looking at Dewey's epistemological and logical writings in their historical context, in order to understand better how Dewey's philosophy disappeared from the limelight, and I provide a reconstruction of his views. Then, I use that reconstruction to address problems of evidence, the social dimensions of science, and pluralism. Generally, mainstream philosophers of science with an interest in Dewey (...) pay little attention to the body of scholarship on Dewey and tend to misinterpret or miss important features of his work, while Dewey scholars generally do not connect his work to the nuanced problems of the contemporary scene (with some notable exceptions). My dissertation helps to fill this important gap and correct common interpretive mistakes by reconstructing and clarifying Dewey's philosophy of science and using it to resolve several contemporary problems. Though his is the road less traveled, Dewey's views provide a good starting place for addressing current concerns. He worked towards a model of science that is both fully naturalistic and fundamentally oriented towards human practice, demands that have been strongly argued for but poorly assimilated by most mainstream philosophers of science. He treats scientific practice, and human thinking generally, as not only embodied but also socially and technologically embedded, and thus can be used to open up a dialogue with much of the social studies of science. He has an anti- foundationalist but structured epistemology, and he offers a way to navigate the narrow paths between an immodest and simplistic realism and the pessimistic extremes of anti-realism and social constructivism, a pursuit of interest to many major philosophers of science at present. Philosophy of science took a different path in the twentieth century, beginning with the "received view'' of logical positivism that left many of the nuances of the original movement by the wayside. No aspect of that starting point has avoided disrepute in recent decades. I show that Dewey avoided the wrong turns of mid- century philosophy of science which are now blocking the way forward. (shrink)

This paper takes a three-pronged approach to answering the question regarding the relationship between democracy and community of inquiry and other progressive pedagogies. First, a definition of a democratic educational environment will be provided within the larger context of democracy in general. Next, I will explore a number of democratic educational environments within a community of inquiry framework. Then, community of inquiry and Dewey’s theory of democracy are examined together. This background leads to an overview of what a democratic community (...) of inquiry looks like. I end by replaying the major themes of this paper. In its perfect sense, democracy “is not a fact and never will be.” Nonetheless, without a guiding idea we would never engage in the work to eliminate the “restrictive and disturbing elements” which prevent a fuller flowering of democratic life. [Citing John Dewey in The Public and Its Problems, 1927 ]. (shrink)