Abstract

This dissertation presents a realist interpretation of Dewey's naturalism, with emphasis on his conception of value. Dewey's alternative realism displaces representation and correspondence, but not simply with relative pragmatic judgment. Dewey breaks with the assumption that nature is something that must be accessed through knowledge. Our apprehension of nature is grounded, rather, in the pre-cognitive, immediately present, dynamic whole or environing context of nature. Thus, I argue against Ralph Sleeper who has located Deweyan realism in his logic of judgment. ;I run this notion of a extra-epistemological, contextualist realism through Dewey's central philosophical ideas: nature, experience, and value. Each represents a critique of a philosophical problem to the end of undermining the theoretical-explanatory point of view by disclosing the implicit contextual being of nature. ;The critique of metaphysics attacks the problems associated with thinking about the world as a whole. It leads to the conclusion that, metaphysically, nature is an analogically inclusive environment or tensional world. I defend this reading by showing that it was influenced by the realism of Frederick Woodbridge. I take important lessons from Raymond Boisvert's 1988 book, but claim against it that Dewey's is a metaphysics of matter and not organic form. ;With respect to experience, the issue is the puzzle over point of view in an objective world. Dewey tries to critique subjectivity by locating the central phenomenon of experience as that of implicit background or horizon. I distance my view from a reading that also attempts to take a non-instrumentalist approach to the meaning of "experience," that of Richard Bernstein and Thomas Alexander. I address the main features of pre-reflective experience, "quality" and "immediacy;" we should not conflate these features, however, into an analysis of a quasi-mental state; in that case Dewey's realist discussion of experience would collapse into objective idealism. ;Lastly, Dewey's realism critiques the see-saw between agency-relative and absolute conceptions of value. The standard reading of Dewey's notion of value relativizes it to "valuation." I argue, alternatively, that valuation as such cannot fix the particular objective reference that Dewey wants to attach to it. Value proper, therefore, must be the end of the evaluative process without being an absolute "end-in-itself." Dewey's contextualist realism says that an implicit world sustains pragmatic action. Value, therefore, is the objectively relative constitutive space of valuation