Abstract

Critics have charged Dewey with a failure to recognize the tragic dimension of human existence. Randolph Bourne argued that Dewey's pragmatism "has never been confronted with the pathless and the inexorable". For Bourne, Dewey's support of America's entry into World War I "subordinates idea to technique" in service of undemocratic ends. Raymond Boisvert accuses Dewey of a hubristic Baconian scientism in thinking that technical intelligence could solve all social problems. Cornel West claims that Dewey "has not come to terms with the sense of the tragic" in failing to "confront candidly individual and collective experiences of evil". As we can see from this selection of...