"... a comprehensive canvass of Dewey’s logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of history, and social thought."—Choice "... a major addition to the recent accumulation of in-depth studies of Dewey." —Journal of Speculative Philosophy "Larry Hickman has done an exemplary job in demonstrating the relevance of John Dewey’s philosophy to modern-day discussions of technology."—Ethics.

Hickman situates Dewey’s critique of technological culture within the debates of 20th-century Western philosophy by engaging the work of Richard Rorty, Albert Borgmann, Jacques Ellul, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Martin ...

Postmodernism -- Classical pragmatism : waiting at the end of the road -- Pragmatism, postmodernism, and global citizenship -- Classical pragmatism, postmodernism, and neopragmatism -- Technology -- Classical pragmatism and communicative action : Jürgen Habermas -- From critical theory to pragmatism : Andrew Feenberg -- A neo-Heideggerian critique of technology : Albert Borgmann -- Doing and making in a democracy : John Dewey -- The environment -- Nature as culture : John Dewey and Aldo Leopold -- Green pragmatism : reals (...) without realism, ideals without idealism -- Classical pragmatism -- What was Dewey's magic number? -- Cultivating a common faith : Dewey's religion -- Beyond the epistemology industry : Dewey's theory of inquiry -- The homo faber debate in Dewey and Max Scheler -- Productive pragmatism : habits as artifacts in Peirce and Dewey. (shrink)

In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modern philosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers at the Special Collections (...) Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work. In Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Dewey argues that modern philosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment. Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy. (shrink)

John Dewey (1859-1952), hailed during his lifetime as "America's Philosopher," is now recognized as one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century.

In addition to being one of the greatest technical philosophers of the twentieth century, John Dewey was an educational innovator, a Progressive Era reformer, and one of America’s last great public intellectuals. Dewey’s insights into the problems of public education, immigration, the prospects for democratic government, and the relation of religious faith to science are as fresh today as when they were first published. His penetrating treatments of the nature and function of philosophy, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of life, (...) and the role of inquiry in human experience are of increasing relevance at the turn of the 21st century. Based on the award-winning 37-volume critical edition of Dewey’s work, The Essential Dewey presents for the first time a collection of Dewey’s writings that is both manageable and comprehensive. The volume includes essays and book chapters that exhibit Dewey’s intellectual development over time; the selection represents his mature thinking on every major issue to which he turned his attention. Eleven part divisions cover: Dewey in Context; Reconstructing Philosophy; Evolutionary Naturalism; Pragmatic Metaphysics; Habit, Conduct, and Language; Meaning, Truth, and Inquiry; Valuation and Ethics; The Aims of Education; The Individual, the Community, and Democracy; Pragmatism and Culture: Science and Technology, Art and Religion; and Interpretations and Critiques. Taken as a whole, this collection provides unique access to Dewey’s understanding of the problems and prospects of human existence and of the philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

In this commentary on Evan Selinger’s book Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde, I begin with Carl Mitcham’s claim that with respect to Don Ihde’s “postphenomenology” there are “challenges both to and from pragmatism.” I discuss four points on which postphenomenology and pragmatism seem to be in agreement, and then two points on which I believe pragmatism offers a program that socially thicker.

_Confines of Democracy_ is a collection of critical assessments and interpretations of Richard J. Bernstein’s extensive and illuminating work on pragmatism, epistemology, hermeneutics, and social and political theory, including Bernstein’s replies to the contributors.

Sassen is Interested in what she terms “conceptually subterranean trends” that are for the most part invisible to current analytical methods but visible, or in her words, “legible,” to other, newer sorts of analytical tools that she herself is developing. She thus emphasizes suspension of accepted methods and development of certain “analytic tactics” that function, as she puts it, “before method.” What this means more specifically is that she is not so much analyzing the structures of existing institutions but instead (...) pursuing a more functional approach, that is, seeking to determine how they are assembled, dis-assembled, and re-assembled. Her focus is thus on the making of non-material conditions, that is, their .. (shrink)

This book, the result of cooperation between the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and the Dewey Center at the University of ...

This essay argues that "the family" should be understood in functional terms:whatever functions as a family should have the legal status of a family. Theauthor's argument thus avoids two extreme positions. The first is the position ofthe hard-line "platonic" essentialists who, on grounds of nature, supernature, orcultural history, argue that a family unit must comprise heterosexual partners.The second is the position of the radical relativist, who argues that there are noessences whatsoever or that essences are purely arbitrary. Treating the family (...) infunctionalist terms, the author argues, would have positive consequences thatwould strengthen the social fabric. (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview of John Dewey's life and work. John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, the third of four sons of Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemesia Rich Dewey. In 1949, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, Dewey was hailed by the New York Times as “America's Philosopher”. He died at his apartment on New York City on June 1, 1952. During his long and productive life, Dewey wrote widely about psychology, philosophy, art, and social issues. (...) The chapter focuses on three general topics that are recurring themes in Dewey's work. The themes are: his concept of the purpose and process of human learning; his understanding of truth as a process, instead of something absolute and unchanging; and his faith in democracy as the only means of social organization that can foster individual fulfillment, and its implications for education and the arts. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What was the state of Pragmatism studies when you first encountered pragmatism? Larry A. Hickman – After completing my undergraduate degree in psychology I decided that I wanted to study philosophy. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent a year taking philosophy courses at the University of Texas in Austin. The faculty included Charles Hartshorne, who was co-editor of the Peirce Collected Papers. There was also David L. Miller and George Gentry, b...

In addition to being one of the greatest technical philosophers of the twentieth century, John Dewey was an educational innovator, a Progressive Era reformer, and one of America’s last great public intellectuals. Dewey’s insights into the problems of public education, immigration, the prospects for democratic government, and the relation of religious faith to science are as fresh today as when they were first published. His penetrating treatments of the nature and function of philosophy, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of life, (...) and the role of inquiry in human experience are of increasing relevance at the turn of the 21st century. Based on the award-winning 37-volume critical edition of Dewey’s work, The Essential Dewey presents for the first time a collection of Dewey’s writings that is both manageable and comprehensive. The volume includes essays and book chapters that exhibit Dewey’s intellectual development over time; the selection represents his mature thinking on every major issue to which he turned his attention. Eleven part divisions cover: Dewey in Context; Reconstructing Philosophy; Evolutionary Naturalism; Pragmatic Metaphysics; Habit, Conduct, and Language; Meaning, Truth, and Inquiry; Valuation and Ethics; The Aims of Education; The Individual, the Community, and Democracy; Pragmatism and Culture: Science and Technology, Art and Religion; and Interpretations and Critiques. Taken as a whole, this collection provides unique access to Dewey’s understanding of the problems and prospects of human existence and of the philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

: The founders of American pragmatism proposed what they regarded as a radical alternative to the philosophical methods and doctrines of their predecessors and contemporaries. Although their central ideas have been understood and applied in some quarters, there remain other areas within which they have been neither appreciated nor appropriated. One of the more pressing of these areas locates a set of problems of knowledge and valuation related to global citizenship. This essay attempts to demonstrate that classical American pragmatism, because (...) its methods are modeled on successes in the technosciences, offers a set of tools for fostering global citizenship that are more effective than the tools of some of its alternatives. First, pragmatism claims to discover a strain of human commonality that trumps the radical postmodernist emphasis on difference and discontinuity. Second, when pragmatism's theory of truth is coupled with its moderate version of cultural relativism, the more skeptical postmodernist version known as “cognitive” relativism is undercut. (shrink)

i begin by thanking David Hildebrand, Daniel Brunson, and the program committee for the magnificent job they have done under the very difficult circumstances imposed by the pandemic. I’d also like to thank the program committee for their generous invitation to present this 2021 Founders Lecture.Since this is a Founders Lecture, it seems appropriate to recall that one of the society’s founders, Ralph Sleeper, said on more than one occasion that he would love to have a séance with Frank Ramsey (...) about what he, Ramsey, said to Wittgenstein about pragmatism.Now, thanks to an extraordinarily well-researched intellectual biography of Ramsey, Sleeper’s longed-for séance will not be necessary. Cheryl Misak’s book Frank... (shrink)

Larry A. Hickman is Emeritus Professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he was the director of the Center for Dewey Studies from 1993 until his retirement in 2016. His monographs include: Modern Theories of Higher Level Predicates ; John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology ; Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture ; and Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism. His edited volumes include Technology and Human Affairs ; Reading Dewey ; The Essential Dewey ; and The Correspondence of John Dewey. He has also (...) authored many articles on technology, environmental philosophy, critical theory, pragmatism, education, film studies, and philosophy of religion. This interview was conducted via email in the Spring of 2017. Hickman’s responses have not been altered in any way. (shrink)

This title presents not two, but three questions. The third question, the one that lies behind and is obscured by the two more obvious ones, concerns the nature of American philosophy. What qualifies as “American” philosophy? Is it, as some have suggested, philosophy as it is practiced in any of the Americas – North, Central, or South? Or is it perhaps philosophy as it is pursued by practitioners living in North America, or even in a more restricted sense, by practitioners (...) living in the Unite... (shrink)

This chapter presents an edited e-mail discussion based on the philosophical conversations at a conference held in Cologne, Germany, in December 2001. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the contributors discuss selected questions about their contributions, roughly following the sequence of the chapters in Part II of this book. Second, the contributors ask more general questions about Dewey, Pragmatism, and constructivism. Finally, the chapter ends with brief statements about why Dewey is still an indispensible thinker for them. As they (...) clarify their differences and seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from Pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points, in ways designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. In their views, the concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical Pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. (shrink)

First, it is clearly a great honor to our society that Paul Rabinow has agreed to present the Coss Dialogue Lecture for 2012. His work in the field of what he has termed "the anthropology of the contemporary" has reached out to otherwise diverse traditions in anthropology and philosophy in order to incorporate their best elements into a novel approach to the logos of anthropos. His case-based studies have focused on the relations between the physical sciences and the human sciences, (...) and especially between the efforts of scientists working in the fields of synthetic biology and the efforts of those working in the fields of the human sciences who take it as their task to evaluate the ethical and other diagnostic .. (shrink)

This brief essay examines James A. Good’s argument that the Hegel of the young Dewey was functionalist, historicist, instrumentalist, and practicalist—in short, the Hegel of “centrist” Hegelians such as those then active in St. Louis and of contemporary interpreters such as Good himself and Terry Pinkard. Good’s claims are examined in terms of possible conflicts with what is known of William James’s influence on Dewey, and in the light of recently published correspondence in which Dewey comments on the Hegelian “deposit” (...) in his work. (shrink)

Despite the fact that John Dewey had a great deal to say about education and technology, many of his insights have yet to be understood or appropriated. A close reading of Democracy and Education offers support for the view that Dewey was prescient in proposing a pedagogy that was friendly to current initiatives in innovative classroom technology including inverted or “flipped” classroom projects in the United States and elsewhere and the Future Classroom Lab project of the European Schoolnet. In both (...) of these initiatives application of tools and techniques grow out of educational occupations guided by teachers rather than being imposed on learning situations a priori. Both initiatives honor the pillars of Dewey’s educational philosophy as presented in his 1916 Democracy and Education and elsewhere in his work: problem-or theme-based learning, peer-based learning, learning that is open to the world outside the classroom, and teachers who are engaged as coaches and facilitators rather than authority figures. (shrink)

This article contains a brief discussion of some of the key concepts of John Dewey's theory of inquiry. Dewey presented his theory of inquiry differently to different audiences, such as fellow philosophers, teachers, and the public. Nevertheless, his many accounts exhibit a common pattern: inquiry arises out of unsettled situations, proceeds by the formulation and testing of hypotheses, and contains an affective dimension. Proposed solutions must be tested in the domain of existential affairs. Even when they are accepted, their warrant (...) is only provisional. (shrink)

Jo Ann Boydston, 2 July 1924 - 25 January 2011Jo Ann Boydston enjoyed a distinguished career as general editor of the Collected Works of John Dewey and director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Born in Poteau, Oklahoma of Choctaw Indian heritage, she graduated summa cum laude from Oklahoma State University in 1944. She received an M.A. from Oklahoma State (1947), a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1950), and honorary doctorates from Indiana University (1994) and Southern (...) Illinois University (2004).In 1961, Boydston joined the staff of a modest research project at Southern Illinois University called "Co-operative Research on Dewey Publications" as assistant to project .. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Early Years: Burlington, Baltimore, Ann Arbor, Chicago Middle Years: New York City, Japan, China Later Years: Retirement, Travel, Eleven More Books Legacy: Initial Eclipse, Revival of Interest, Rise of Neo‐pragmatism.

In what follows I want to discuss some of the themes of John Dewey’s “new” book Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, recently published by Southern Illinois University Press. The scholarly world certainly owes a debt of gratitude to Professor Phillip Deen for his efforts to bring this volume to fruition. His careful research among the Dewey Papers in Special Collections of Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale led him to see what others had overlooked. He discovered...

This collection offers close examinations of the global impact of Dewey’s philosophies, both in his time and our own.

Diese Abhandlung untersucht die Erkenntnisse über globale Ethik, die Dewey während seiner internationalen Reisen, insbesondere während seines zweijährigen Aufenthalts in China 1919–1921, gewonnen hat. Ich behaupte, dass Deweys Naturalismus, welcher auf einem Verständnis der Möglichkeiten basiert, Charles Darwins Arbeit in den Geisteswissenschaften anzuwenden, Modelle für interkulturelle Diskussionen liefert. Ich weise darauf hin, dass ei nige der Hindernisse, Deweys Beitrag zur globalen Ethik anzuerkennen, in falschem Lesen und falscher Deutung seiner Arbeit liegen, so wie jene, die von Roberto Unger avanciert wur (...) den. Letztendlich behaupte ich, dass das Auftreten einer globalen Ethik solange unwahrscheinlich sein wird, bis die Menschen die engen supernaturalistischen und nicht-naturalistischen Dogmen überschreiten und sich die naturalistischen Weltansichten zueigen machen. (shrink)

This essay considers the lessons about global ethics that John Dewey learned during his international travels, especially during the two years he spent in China, 1919–1921. I argue that Dewey’s naturalism, which is based on an appreciation of the ways in which the work of Charles Darwin can be applied within humanistic disciplines, provides models for cross-cultural discussions of ethics. I suggest that some of the impediments to appreciating Dewey’s contribution to global ethics lie in misreadings and misinterpretations of his (...) work, such as those advanced by Roberto M. Unger. Finally, I suggest that it is unlikely that a global ethics will emerge until human beings transcend narrow supernaturalist and nonnaturalist dogmas and embrace naturalistic world views. (shrink)