John Dewey and the Contemporary “Deliberative Turn” in Political Theory -/- Abstract In recent years Political Theory and Socio-Political Philosophy has experienced what has been called a “deliberative turn”. I argue against the recent proclamations of John Dewey as a predecessor, an influence, or as a founding father of deliberative democracy, and instead use Dewey to suggest some serious limitations of Deliberative democracy to deal with the challenges we face in the 21st century in our counterfeit democracy, such as the (...) new forms of emotional and visual persuasion.. Deliberative democratic thinkers share with Dewey the concern that the quality of deliberation in our “democracy” continues to deteriorate, but they assume a restrictive “rationalism” and constricted view of what goes on “in” and “around” deliberation. As important as public deliberation was for Dewey, the “turn” that he hoped for in the philosophy of democracy was towards a view of democracy as experience. (shrink)
The book will prove an invaluable source for philosophers and philosophy students, as well as for scholars from other disciplines (e.g., history, political science, sociology, diversity studies, and gender and race studies) to begin understanding the dynamic relationship in thinking between the two Americas. In addition to documenting the results of a new and thriving area of research, it can also function as a primer to direct and provoke further inquiry. -/- Its essays, from North American, Spanish, and Latin American (...) scholars, fill a void in the humanities and introduce a number of Hispanic pragmatists who have not been included in standard pragmatist texts. (shrink)
Dewey provides an ethics that is committed to those aspects of experience that have been associated with the "feminine." In addition to an argument against the devaluation of the affective and of concrete relationships, we also find in Dewey's ethics a thoughtful appreciation of how and why these things are essential to our moral life. In this article I consider the importance of the affective and of relationships in Dewey's ethics and set out aspects of Dewey's ethics that might be (...) useful resources for feminist writers in ethics. (shrink)
