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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: John Dewey |
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John Dewey (picture), a philosopher, educator, and psychologist, was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859, the son of a grocer. Since early in childhood, Dewey had chores to do around the house and learned to regard them as a natural part of life. When he had to go to school, however, he did not show much enthusiasm. He preferred to learn from direct contacts with life, finding them much more exciting than the school work regarded by him, as by most of his boyhood friends, as boring and of little practical value. This experience impressed him deeply and determined all his subsequent views on the function of education. The range and diversity of Dewey's writings and his influence on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, education, legal and political theory, and the social sciences, place him among the great philosophers. Overview Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879 and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1884. One of his teachers was G. Stanley Hall, a founder of experimental psychology; another was Charles S. Peirce. Dewey, however, was particularly disposed to German philosophic thought, especially the unifying, organic character of the idealism of Hegel, in contrast to British empiricism. Dewey first taught philosophy at the University of Michigan (1884-88), and then at the University of Minnesota (1888), and subsequently returned to Michigan (1889-94). In 1894 he became chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago. His influential classic The School and Society (1899) formulated the method and curriculum of the school in which the child's growth is the central concern. Dewey is the most distinguished representative of modern American pragmatism. His philosophy is commonly referred to as "instrumentalism." He was a philosopher, psychologist, and educator. As an educator he is famous for his system of teaching through experimental observation, commonly referred to as the "progressive system" in education, a philosophy of education that revolutionized the public schools in this and other countries. As a philosopher he is known for the new development which he gave to James' Pragmatism. Dewey and his colleagues formed a strong pragmatic center at the University of Chicago, and when Dewey moved to Columbia University, he created a strong pragmatic center there. In these two universities many philosophers received their training. In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association, and in 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He taught at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930 and was professor emeritus from 1930 to 1939. Dewey lectured in Japan and China from 1919 to 1921, and visited schools in the USSR in 1928. He wrote for the general public on social problems and critical issues confronting American industrial democracy. He was a participant and leader in many liberal causes, in civic organizations, and in national affairs and was a founder of the New School for Social Research (1919) in New York City. Doctrine In addition to the experimental method of verification stressed by Peirce, and the popular version of pragmatism given by James, Dewey contributes two additional factors in pragmatism: the psychological, and the logical. Psychology with its biological drift greatly influenced pragmatism; and logic was turned into the assumption that positive science is true. Dewey's "instrumentalism" affirms that cognition consists in forging ideal tools or instruments with which to cope with a given situation. Like James, Dewey maintains that the mind is an instrument for realizing purposes. Ideas are teleological weapons of mind. Ideas are plastic and adaptable. They owe their stability to the vital functions which they serve. Dewey regarded philosophy as the criticism of those socially important beliefs which are part and parcel of the social and cultural life of human communities. This criticism involves an examination of the way in which ideas, taken as solutions of specific problems, function within a wider context. It is in this way that a theory of knowledge -- logic, ethics, psychology, aesthetics, and metaphysics becomes necessary and explainable. These are not to be derived from the assumption of an abstract truth, that is, a higher reality or a reality different from that within which we live and act, nor from everlasting values. Dewey objects to transcendental philosophers, because they ignore the kind of empirical situations to which their themes pertain; even the most transcendental philosophers use empirical subject matter, if they philosophize at all. But they become nonempirical because they fail to supply directions for experimentation. The supply of such directions is the core of Dewey's philosophy. His standard of belief and conduct claims to lie within, rather than outside of, a situation of life, that can be shared. Idealists, in contradistinction to Dewey's search for a guide to the beliefs of a shareable situation, deny to common life the faculty of forming its own regulative methods; they claim to have private access to truth. In Dewey's democratic philosophy, common life is the reality of a dignity equivalent to that of nature or the individual. Dewey devoted his studies not only to the conditions but also to the consequences of knowledge. He never made philosophy subservient to the vested interests of any class or nation; nor was he afraid to hurt any sensibility. He insisted that philosophy, in contrast to all other human activities, must be allowed to remain outside and above the public domain in order to maintain sound relations with these other human activities and to whose progress it must contribute. Dewey was opposed to any isolation of cognitive experience and its subject matter from other modes of experience and their subject matter. He attempted to integrate spiritual life into the precise framework of natural phenomena, and, for the sake of all-embracing experience, tried to do away with the distinction between the objective and the subjective, and the psychical and the physical. He denied that the characteristic object of knowledge has a privileged position of correspondence with an allegedly ultimate reality; he insisted that action is involved in knowledge and that knowledge is not subordinate to action or practice; that it is in experimental knowing that genuine intellectual integrity is found. Dewey did not accept any alternative between knowledge or intelligence and action. To him it is "intelligent action" that matters. The failure of human intelligence in social areas has made Dewey strongly emphasize the social aspects of his philosophy. Throughout his long life he tried not only to apply his experimental methods to social philosophy, but he also actively participated in disputes and struggles of political, social, and cultural relevance. Political, social, cultural, and theoretical motives have enhanced Dewey's interest in education. He recognized the important role education plays in the survival of democracy, and the importance of democratic thought and action in the improvement of education. Pragmatism was then the most influential philosophy in the United States. This aspect of Dewey's thought is advanced in Essays in Experimental Logic (1916) and Human Nature and Conduct (1922), and comprehensively treated in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). He discusses the experimental theory of intelligent conduct, or inquiry, present in ethical and aesthetic kinds of experience in Ethics (with J. H. Tufts, 1908), Theory of Valuation (1939), and Art as Experience (1934) Dewey's instrumentalism was first expressed in his Studies in Logical Theory (1903) where he acknowledged his obligation to William James. His other principal works are : Democracy and Education (1916), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), The Quest for Certainty (1929). Dewey's works on psychology, ethics, and social philosophy analyze the logical features of thought and action. Thought is occasioned by problematic conditions, organic imbalance, and conflict; thoughtful action is directed toward resolution and is thus instrumental in producing truth, which is the warranted and satisfactory solution of a problem. This "instrumentalism" was Dewey's version of the pragmatism he shared with James and Peirce. Dewey's philosophy attempts to show how the conclusions of science affect the values guiding human conduct. Dewey was led to formulate an extensive naturalistic theory of existence that required no supernatural assumptions or conclusions. Experience and Nature (1925) is his most important attempt to set forth a metaphysical analysis and description of reflective experience, with its roots in natural events and its flowering in communication, knowledge, value, and art. Dewey discards the metaphysical (he is decidedly anti-metaphysical) and substitutes the love of society and advocates a positivistic pragmatism which gives account of all sides of experience. Pragmatism is presented as the philosophic counterpart of democracy. For the pragmatist, it is a religion! After the World War, pragmatism grew into a social philosophy. Pragmatists have applied their doctrine to every phase of social theory. Dewey made theory and living identical and applied his philosophy to economic, political, and pedagogical questions. Reality is declared to be changing, growing, developing in things. A real philosophy, according to Dewey, must abandon absolute origins and finalities and explore specific values in practical, moral, and social life. Man continues to change his ideas until they work. Fixities (atoms, God) have existence and import only in the problems, needs, struggles and instrumentalities of conscious agents. For more than forty years, Dewey maintained a leadership in American education, bringing increased human interest into school life and work, making for the increased encouragement of pupil initiative and responsibility. Among recent American thinkers few command greater respect than John Dewey. His philosophy was no mere product of abstraction; its roots were in our national history, going back to the colonial and frontier days, when ideas had to cling close to every day reality and be tested in application. But though his philosophy was grounded in the past, deeper than is customary to believe, it was also inseparable from the living present. John Dewey died on June 1, 1952. In The Radical Academy
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The positive contributions of Pragmatism to the Perennial Philosophy Pragmatism made no genuine positive contributions to Commonsense Philosophical Realism. In fact, much of it is antithetical to an authentic realism. Dewey was anti-metaphysics, claiming that metaphysics forms an obstacle to scientific knowledge. But, on the contrary, metaphysics completes science by giving an explanation of a fact of everyday experience which science is unable to justify. In studying the philosophy of Dewey, it is important to observe that throughout his works he shows a superficial knowledge of classical Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy. More often, he confuses it with the tenets of Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and even with Idealism. For example, the criticism so often repeated of the Aristotelian "species" -- that is, that they are fixed and immutable realities -- should have been directed toward Platonic Ideas or against the exaggerated realism of the Middle Ages. In classical Aristotelian philosophy, individuals alone are real entities. Species and ideas are not realities, but ways of understanding reality and, as such, they exist only in the intellect. A complete critique of James and Dewey would entail more than can be offered here. Suffice to say, they have not made a positive contribution to the Perennial Philosophy and have, indeed, done much to destroy it and make it unpopular. Return to Page 1 of American Pragmatism Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book... Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Magazine...
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