Dewey Lectures Research Articles

Putnam’s Natural Realism and Its Problems

Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) was prone to change his mind on variety of philosophical issues and almost constantly to modify his views. The last period of the development of his philosophy is known as the phase of commonsense or natural realism, eloquently presented in his 1994 Dewey Lectures. This paper is focused on three facets of his position and tries to identify three difficulties it encounters. Firstly, Putnam claims that in the contemporary realism debate we have, on the one hand, proponents of extravagant metaphysical realism, and, on the other hand, advocates of various versions of irresponsible antirealism. Unfortunately, the delineation of the debate is too coarse-grained, since there are many forms of metaphysical realism, and lumping together various antirealisms is confusing and unhelpful. Secondly, Putnam’s naïve direct realism in the philosophy of perception seems incompatible with his transactional account of perception. Thirdly, for some time Putnam was under a spell of Wittgensteinian quietism that distorted the true character of his philosophical ideas.

Did Putnam Really Abandon Internal Realism in the 1990s?

This paper aims to challenge the idea claimed by Putnam in his Dewey Lectures that internal realism presupposed sense data theory so that it would have been unable to account for the fundamental intuition of common sense realism that perception gives us cognitive access to reality. Rather, I argue that Putnam’s writings from the period of internal realism indicate that it (internal realism) already presupposed a form of direct realism of the kind he puts forth in the Dewey lectures. I support my thesis with a demonstration of the implication of direct realism in the refutation of the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis that occurs in the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History, as well as with various passages from the philosopher’s writings of the time when he defended internal realism. I also argue, contrary to what the philosopher seems to assert in his Dewey Lectures, that his model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism does not involve sense data theory. After noting the very strong resemblance between the theses of his common sense realism of the 1990s and those of his internal realism of the 1980s, I hypothesize that Putnam pretended to renounce internal realism in order to allow himself to rephrase his original position so as to avoid being misinterpreted as a form of idealism or fact constructivism, as was the case with his initial statement.

Testing pragmatic genealogy in political theory: The curious case of John Rawls

Starting from the ‘Dewey Lectures’, Rawls presents his conception of justice within a contextualist framework, as an elaboration of the basic ideas embedded in the political culture of liberal-democratic societies. But how are these basic ideas to be justified? In this article, I reconstruct and criticize Rawls’s strategy to answer this question. I explore an alternative strategy, consisting of a genealogical argument of a pragmatic kind – the kind of argument provided by authors like Bernard Williams, Edward Craig and Miranda Fricker. I outline this genealogical argument drawing on Rawls’s reconstruction of the origins of liberalism. Then, I clarify the conditions under which this kind of argument maintains vindicatory power. I claim that the argument satisfies these conditions and that pragmatic genealogy can thus partially vindicate the basic ideas of liberal-democratic societies.

Rawls on Dewey before the Dewey Lectures.

This article sheds light on John Rawls's views on John Dewey's philosophical temperament by investigating unpublished papers and lectures that Rawls wrote and delivered across the late 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, and the early 1970s. Moreover, the article shows that Rawls's rejection of Kant's dualisms predates by at least three decades the "Dewey Lectures" (1980) and that Dewey's notion of deliberation as "dramatic rehearsal in imagination" might have had an impact on Rawls's development of the notion of "reflective equilibrium" as a state of affairs that we strive to reach in ethical reflection.

The Centrality of Dewey's Lectures in China to his Socio-Political Philosophy

The Centrality of Dewey's Lectures in China to his Socio-Political Philosophy

Dominant Patterns in Associated Living: Hegemony, Domination, and Ideological Recognition in Dewey's Lectures in China

In this paper I focus on the notion of “dominant patterns”, as revealed by the recently discovered typescript of what we can assume to be Dewey’s fragmentary and incomplete preliminary notes for the Lecture Series on Social and Political Philosophy. I will show that the way “dominant patterns” is dealt with in the notes is not only consistent with the conceptual content of the whole series of the Lectures in China as published by R. W. Clopton and Tsuin-Chen, but also gives us further arguments to appreciate the centrality of this question in the development of Dewey’s philosophical project during this period. In particular, I argue that a comparative reading of the notes and the published Lectures in China allows us to appreciate the central role dominant patterns play for Dewey’s understanding of social groupings as embodying habitual patterns of action and the way habit formation shapes and gives content to the interests that groups identify with and are identified by in social practices. Secondly, I will argue that such a comparative reading allows us to appreciate how in the lecture series Dewey developed the notion of dominant patterns into a theory of social domination that is basically described in terms of habitualized recognitive relations. Hence, the discovery of the notes is also very helpful in deepening our understanding of the Deweyan approach to the question of social recognition – in particular of the dynamics of institutional recognition and its ideological function – and how it relates to habitualized patterns of dominant-subservient relations.

Rawls on Kantian Constructivism

John Rawls’s 1980 Dewey Lectures are widely acknowledged to represent the locus classicus for contemporary discussions of moral constructivism. Nevertheless, few published works have engaged with the significant interpretive challenges one finds in these lectures, and those that have fail to offer a satisfactory reading of the view that Rawls presents there or the place the lectures occupy in the development of Rawls's thinking. Indeed, there is a surprising lack of consensus about how best to interpret the constructivism of these lectures. In this paper, I argue that the constructivism presented in the Dewey Lectures is best understood as involving the view that moral truth is correspondence with procedurally-determined, stance-dependent facts. Employing Rawls’s discussion of rational intuitionism as a foil, I defend this reading against textual discrepancies from within the lectures, as well as those one finds across Rawls’s other works. In addition to settling interpretive disputes, I draw out the ways in which this understanding of Kantian constructivism fits within the broader comparative project in ‘moral theory’ that Rawls inherits from Sidgwick.

Economic Experience as Art? John Dewey's Lectures in China and the Problem of Mindless Occupational Labor

ABSTRACTThis article examines the importance of John Dewey's visit to China in 1919–21 to his general philosophy of meliorism. I will argue that Dewey's view of the economic realities in China, as well as his well-known work on the U.S. educational system, points to an underlying problem—that of mindless work activity. Extending past research on Dewey's notion of artful activity, I will argue that one cannot completely understand Dewey's advice to his Chinese and American audiences without reference to his theory of aesthetic experience and its relation to everyday conduct. Art as Experience then becomes an important point of departure for endeavors that seek to constructively determine what workers can do to make occupational experience more meaningful or artful. Additionally, I will argue that Dewey's reticence to explore the aesthetic in the early 1900s does not entail that this concept was not present. To the contrary, one can see his work in the 1910s and 1920s—including his experience in China—as a precursor for the account of aesthetic experience in everyday life that he finally explicates in the 1930s. In this sense, one can detect a further emphasis on the Chinese conceptual overlay of spontaneity in his evolving thought on artful activity.

The Dewey Lectures 2013: What Kind of Creatures Are We? Lecture III: What Is the Common Good?

The Dewey Lectures 2013: What Kind of Creatures Are We? Lecture III: What Is the Common Good?

The Dewey Lectures 2013: What Kind of Creatures Are We? Lecture II: What Can We Understand?

The Dewey Lectures 2013: What Kind of Creatures Are We? Lecture II: What Can We Understand?

The Dewey Lectures 2013: What Kind of Creatures Are We? Lecture I: What Is Language?

The Dewey Lectures 2013: What Kind of Creatures Are We? Lecture I: What Is Language?

The Hegelian Legacy in Dewey's Social and Political Philosophy, 1915––1920

This paper considers the criticism and critical appropriation of Hegel in Dewey's social and political philosophy in the years 1915-20, and particularly in Dewey's Lectures in China, 1919-1920 . I find two systematically motivated reasons for Dewey's criticism of Hegel in his wartime philosophical works when these are seen as starting points for a social and political philosophy developed over the whole period: first, in his defence of political democracy and his evolving conception of social and political institutions; second, in his epistemic requirement that social philosophy should be based on the methods and findings of the social sciences. Yet his social philosophy makes no clean break with Hegel: it may be seen to develop his former ethical analysis of freedom under modern conditions and to appropriate the Hegelian notions of recognition and Bildung for this purpose. As a practical discipline it proposes criteria for social reform and for criticism of modes of domination embedded in practices and institutions. Finally, Dewey proposes certain idealised norms of political culture to ground politics and legislation in public and rational discussion. While Dewey's proposed norms are to be applied in critical appraisal of the normative authority of any traditional origin, I find his proposal consistent with a Hegelian notion of immanent criticism as articulated in James Good's interpretation.

Art as Experience

I: Charles Olson (1910-1970) was such a scholarly poet that the first critical monograph devoted to him, by Robert von Hallberg, carries the apt title Charles Olson: The Scholar's Art (1978). (1) Because Olson was an avid researcher--ferreting out Melville's annotated copies of Shakespeare, digging with gusto into the bowels of archives, and reading voraciously in a range of fields such as history, linguistics, geography, and archeology--and because, like Ezra Pound, he insisted on basing the truth claims in his poetry, essays, and letters on the fruits of his research, Olson's critics have tended to follow his own lead in discussing the many influences on his work. Taking their cues also from the prodigious labors of Olson scholars George Butterick and Ralph Maud, his critics have busied themselves with tracing the impact on his work of the huge library of texts he is known to have consulted. (2) Critical attention to Olson's reading, annotation, and advocacy of texts in this library has produced much admirable work; the time has come, though, for an opening out in the exploration of intellectual, esthetic, and political traditions from which he drew. It is important to move beyond trends of thought represented in his library, in order to measure him against other significant figures and movements. (3) This more expansive approach to Olson can free his work from the grip of a coterie that has persistently claimed it and can help present its acute insights, brilliant formulations, and methodological breakthroughs to a larger world. (4) One of the major modern philosophers whom Olson can fruitfully meet in dialogue is the pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952). Although there is no mention of Dewey in Olson's published work, in the sources for his work identified by Butterick and Maud, or in the critical literature (aside from one significant contribution by fellow poet Robert Duncan, discussed below), Dewey was, during the Great Depression when Olson was in his twenties and acquiring his intellectual proclivities, a towering figure in American philosophy and education and one of the most prominent left--leaning intellectuals. For a young man whose political, pedagogical, and esthetic interests had a populist and pragmatist flavor, exposure to Dewey would have been unavoidable. In early 1931, at the same time as the appearance of the Objectivists issue of Poetry (edited by Louis Zukofsky), Dewey gave the William James Lectures at Harvard (published in 1934 as Art as Experience), formulating a full-fledged pragmatist esthetics that is in many ways consonant with Objectivist poetics. (5) Olson did not attend Dewey's lectures nor did he read at the time the issue of Poetry that launched the Objectivist movement, but his debt to Objectivism has been long established. Likewise, his explicit reliance on Alfred North Whitehead's 1929 Process and Reality has received ample treatment. (6) In order to assess fully what Olson took from the poetry and theory of this period, one would need to supplement Zukofsky's poetics and Whitehead's processoriented philosophy with Dewey's esthetics. In addition, an understanding of Dewey is imperative for gauging Olson's crucial role as final rector of Black Mountain College, an institution modeled specifically on Deweyan principles of education. Most basically, though, Dewey can be seen as the signal pragmatist precursor for Olson's attempts to unite art and in a more holistic model of culture than the hierarchical and alienated one that prevailed after World War II. Like Dewey, Olson emphasized the importance of direct over received knowledge; valued the rough, unpolished quality of vernacular creation over the normative esthetics of cultural institutions; believed in the pedagogical effectiveness of both and art; and saw artistic form as arising out of fully engaged experience. The essay that follows explores in particular three topics that bring Olson and Dewey into dialogue: 1) the gains to be made by including Art as Experience within the Objectivist background out of which Olson's poetry and poetics arose; 2) the meanings that these (and other) thinkers give to the concept of experience and how its loss and attempted recapture governs their work; and 3) their shared conviction that can only be reclaimed through a new attention to the senses, which belief has influenced not only a number of poets who came after Olson but also the entire movement of performance art. …

<i>Dewey in China: To Teach and To Learn</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Dewey in China: To Teach and To Learn Joseph Grange (bio) Jessica Ching-Sze Wang , Dewey in China: To Teach and To Learn. Albany: The State University of New York, 2007. v + 152 pp. ISBN 978-0-7914-7203-5. $17.95 (Pbk). Interest in Dewey's visit to China from May 1919 to July 1921 has grown in the last decade. Professor Wang's book is among the most important contributions to this effort to uncover Dewey's experience in China. The great merit of her book is the detailed empirical evidence she provides about Dewey's lectures, meetings, and travels as well as the people he met there and contemporary reactions to his visit. The subtitle of her book, "To Teach and To Learn" sums up well her conclusions on the impact that Dewey had on China and, equally important, what Dewey learned from the Chinese. She divides her study into six parts: Dewey and the May 4th Movement, Dewey as teacher, Dewey's reception in China, Dewey as learner, China's impact on Dewey's social and political philosophy, and a final set of suggestions for future research. Her major conclusion is that, despite its difficulties, Dewey's sojourn in China marked an important turning point in his evolving sense of what philosophy should do. Dewey landed in China at the height of the May 4th Movement, which began as a student-led protest sparked by the treatment of China at the Versailles Peace Conference, but quickly spread to become a vast modernization movement to be carried out through social and intellectual means. In the end, the movement was at best only a partial success, but it did give Dewey a sense of the latent vitality in China's youth and especially the power of culture to effect radical social change. As a teacher Dewey labored under a serious handicap: He was without firsthand experience of Chinese culture. While he tried to make up for this by [End Page 60] reading English-language newspapers and taking courses in Chinese, he was left with his own direct encounter with this ancient, varied, sprawling, and richly layered culture. His talent as an observer became obvious as his trip progressed and he gained a better handle on what he experienced in this vast and novel landscape. His inability to speak Chinese left him at the mercy of his interpreters who—especially in the case of Hu Shih, his primary interlocutor—were not reluctant to shape Dewey's lectures and remarks to bolster their own positions on political, social, and cultural affairs. Nevertheless, there is enough evidence to indicate that Dewey's primary philosophical message got through: that the scientific method of experimentation had broken open old and tired philosophical methodologies. He was also able to yoke this idea with ever-deepening expositions of democracy as the best form of human self-ordering. So successful was his effort to clarify, deepen, and adapt this double message that he was called "Mr. Science" and "Mr. Democracy." Dewey was not entirely at ease with the way his message was revised and even co-opted by various Chinese intellectuals to bolster their own particular political and social agendas. Nevertheless, it can safely be said that Dewey's time in China served to introduce a new way of thinking and looking at political authority, economic growth, and cultural norms. At a time when China was crying out for new ways to "modernize" its culture, Dewey's extensive lecturing and intensive encounters with leading Chinese intellectuals and future political leaders laid a foundation that can still be felt in recent protests against autocratic Communist institutions. Dewey did more than introduce Chinese students and academics to experimentation as a way of thinking and developing new ways of life. Nor were his lectures on democracy his single contribution to China's cultural worldview. Dewey, as Professor Wang points out, also learned much from his Chinese sojourn. He was commissioned by the New Republic to write reports and observations on what he encountered. These reports back home were among the first descriptions Americans had of what at the time continued to be called "the mysterious...

The Idea of Justice1

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Text of the first Mahbub ul Haq Memorial Lecture of the Human Development and Capability Association, given at the New School in New York on 19 September 2007. 2. Underlying the approach is the major issue of what Hilary Putnam calls the denial of a “fact\value dichotomy.” I shall not have the chance to address that methodological question here (although I do discuss it in the book; Sen, A. (forthcoming) The Idea of Justice, Penguin, London and Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.); but see Hilary Putnam's contribution to this issue. See also Putnam, H. (2002) The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.; and Vivian Walsh (2004) ‘Sen after Putnam’, Review of Political Economy, 16, pp. 315–394. 3. This relates to the central focus of the work of the Human Development and Capability Association. Indeed, I would imagine they are getting much attention in the wonderful conference of the Human Development and Capability Association, imaginatively arranged by Sakiko Fukuda Parr, working with Martha Nussbaum, President of the Human Development and Capability Association, and others (including the dynamic Sabina Alkire). 4. I have discussed this issue in my essay ‘Elements of a theory of human rights’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 32 (2004), pp. 315–356. 5. I tried to go into these issues in my 1984 Dewey Lectures at the Columbia University, which were published in the form of three papers, under the general title of ‘Well‐being, agency and freedom’, Journal of Philosophy, 82 (1985), pp. 169–221. The connections are more fully explored in The Idea of Justice. 6. On this see my article ‘What do we want from a theory of justice?’, The Journal of Philosophy, 103 (2006), pp. 215–238. 7. On this see my essays ‘Maximization and the act of choice’, Econometrica, 65 (1997), pp. 745–779; and ‘Consequential evaluation and practical reason’, Journal of Philosophy, 97 (2000), pp. 477–502. 8. Nagel, T. (2005) ‘The problem of global justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33, p. 115.

Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984

The main aim of Dewey lectures is to explore a moral approach that sees persons from two different perspectives: and agency. Both the well-being aspect and the agency aspect of persons have their own relevance in the assessment of states and actions. A second objective is to examine a set of metaethical issues, making use of an approach to moral analysis which focuses on the admissibility and use of different types of information in moral valuation. Informational analysis can be used to bring out the content, scope, and limitations of different moral principles. A few examples may help to illustrate the diversity of ways in which informational constraints may be used through the specification of invariance requirements. Authorship invariance does have some claims to being a reasonable requirement of moral evaluation. The possibility of combining position relativity with authorship invariance is also the reason why positionality of moral valuation is perfectly consistent with objectivity of moral values.

Public culture of a democratic society: Comments on Professor Rawls' Dewey lectures

Public culture of a democratic society: Comments on Professor Rawls' Dewey lectures

George Dykhuizen's "The Life and Mind of John Dewey"The Life and Mind of John Dewey. George Dykhuizen , Jo Ann Boydston

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsGeorge Dykhuizen's "The Life and Mind of John Dewey" The Life and Mind of John Dewey. George Dykhuizen , Jo Ann Boydston Robert E. FitchRobert E. Fitch Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 55, Number 2Apr., 1975 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/486428 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1975 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.