I consider a naturalistic approach to death, seeking a naturalistic or “functional” version of immortality. Making use of John Dewey and some other classical American philosophers, I first articulate the naturalism of this project. I then discuss what such naturalism means for understanding the self and its survival. Finally, I consider the existential question about to what extent such a view of immortality is satisfying.

As we have discussed elsewhere, Franz Boas and John Dewey were intellectual and political allies at Columbia University for over thirty years.1 Dewey advocated for an increased role of anthropology for philosophical insight, and he often used anthropological knowledge as a starting point for his ethics and politics, including such knowledge as learned from Boas. We hold that Boas and Dewey shared a common core understanding of human global and evolutionary diversity, and that this shared understanding itself forms a core (...) component of their progressive projects.However, with regard to the problem of racism in the United States, Boas and Dewey had different engagements. Boas made the questioning... (shrink)

We pragmatists have within our tradition significant methodological resources for contributing to the understanding of the meaning of beliefs about the nature of death—a topic that has still not received enough attention. 1 I want here to articulate what crucial features of pragmatism I believe to be especially helpful for such a contribution, and to explain something about why they are helpful in this regard. As my title indicates, I am not drawing upon the neo-pragmatism of those such as Richard (...) Rorty, but instead upon some of pragmatism’s rich classical American manifestations, according to which theory must be connected to practice and experience (as opposed to neopragmatism’s linguistic preoccupation).2 In.. (shrink)

This book is a clear, engaging, and ambitious introduction to the philosophy of John Dewey. First, a comment about the subtitle: while I recognize that it reflects the book’s inclusion in a series of “beginner’s guides,” the subtitle (“a beginner’s guide”) is unfortunate. The book is much more than that, and, as such, it is more valuable than the subtitle suggests. It is clearly of help to people new to Dewey, and yet it is also a significant resource for those (...) returning to Dewey in a variety of capacities. For example, this reviewer has found Hildebrand’s book helpful for thinking about pedagogical strategies for teaching Dewey in a recent seminar class (on James and Dewey), and I expect many other teachers will .. (shrink)

According to H.O. Mounce, James's pragmatism is a failure simply for being inconsistent with that of C.S. Peirce. Mounce also dismisses James's radical empiricism as involving phenomenalism. There are significant inaccuracies with such a view of James, and, accordingly, this paper is a response to Mounce. The two themes of radical empiricism and pragmatism constitute the heart of William James's philosophical project, and at least for this reason alone I think it important to correct Mounce. In short, his indictment of (...) James for having paved the way for the Richard Rortys of our community both fails to sufficiently engage James on his own terms and fails to present pragmatism in a sufficiently pragmatic manner. (shrink)

There has been little scholarly attention to the tension within Dewey’s comments on the ancients. On the one hand, Dewey’s polemics condemn the lasting influence of Greek philosophers as deleterious. He charges the Greeks with originating a quest (“the quest for certainty”) that has led Western philosophy into such dualisms as reason and emotion, mind and nature, individual and community, and theory and practice. On the other hand, Dewey often has many sympathetic things to say about the Greeks. Taking account (...) of the limited scholarship done on this topic, this essay articulates the dimensions of the tension and tries to put it into a Deweyan perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by John DeweyCharles A. HobbsJohn Dewey. Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012, 351 pp., index.John Dewey’s latest publication marks a watershed moment for scholarship in American philosophy, and, in addition to Dewey himself, we have editor Phillip Deen to thank for discovering it (among the Dewey papers in Special Collections at Morris Library of Southern Illinois (...) University) and editing it. We see Dewey late in life (early 1940s) engaged mainly in a critique of the modern, ancient, and (fragmentarily) medieval philosophical periods, which Dewey argues, are eras not nearly as distinct as traditional understanding admits. In the Introduction, Deen helpfully explains how we are now bequeathed incomplete but in most [End Page 122] cases quite robust chapter drafts that amount to another substantial work by Dewey. While published by Southern Illinois University Press, this volume is not itself part of The Collected Works of John Dewey. Still, the careful editing (of what are actually a number of manuscripts) is comparable in its excellence. There is also a well-done Index.The scope is twofold: retrospective and prospective. Chapters one through seven trace the development of so-called modern philosophy along with its central epistemological problem, with the aim being to demonstrate how thoroughly “unmodern” such philosophy has been. Then, chapters eight through fourteen constitute a genuinely modern approach that naturalistically and functionally undercuts the epistemic problem of subject/object and points to a revolution in the process of knowing.We turn to the retrospective, beginning in the first chapter with the acknowledgement that Dewey comes to philosophy itself as a kind of anthropologist, something we note as consistent with the influence of Franz Boas on Dewey (with whom Dewey was a colleague and intellectual ally at Columbia for about thirty-five years). This is further underscored by a lengthy quotation of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on the meaning of culture (p. 290). The ongoing history of philosophy is itself a cultural activity. Indeed, citing James, Dewey declares that “The sickliest way in which a student of philosophy can approach his subject-matter is that of a search for ultimate impersonal revelation of truth.” (p. 16) Rather, let the philosopher have the pragmatic attitude of openness “... to truth from whatever source it comes” (ibid).With that, Dewey once again turns to the Greeks, who initiated “The Discovery of Rational Discourse” (Ch. III) as underscored by the Socratic means of cooperative discourse, with the dialogues—not lectures—being evidence of the Athenian philosophical revolution in turning “from discussing nature and giving an account of it to the examination of the nature and procedure of discussion and report” (p. 38). Yet this project, despite its initial promise, failed for lack of a genuine logic of experimentation or inquiry. Then philosophy focused on going beyond the natural, beginning with the medieval “Search for Salvation” (Ch. IV, a significantly less developed and unified chapter draft). “Modern” philosophers then rightly replaced grand cosmic schemes with a focus on human nature (Ch. V), but they went too far with their introspective methods, gradually resulting in the same consequence supernaturalism had produced: a dualism of mind and nature, as if human nature is somehow not a part of nature. As we recall from Human Nature and Conduct (1922), human nature is not independent of but rather interdependent (or, using Dewey’s later term, transactional) with the rest of nature. The key is to avoid hypostatizing mind and better to talk of culture as nature. [End Page 123]With the Renaissance onward, humans have been “Wandering between Two Worlds” (Ch. VI), and endless arguments between “rationalists” and “empiricists” overlook what these camps share, namely a psychology assuming a fundamental split between subjective/objective and assumptions about certainty as founded upon various first principles or substances. The result is the stagnation of philosophy while science flourishes. Dewey cites Bertrand Russell as an example of continued insistence on such a priori principles (p. 106).We find ourselves in an epoch split between scientism and moral and religious fundamentalism, the result of a lingering tenacious investment in bad elements from ancient and medieval... (shrink)