In this highly original book, Victor Kestenbaum calls into question the oft-repeated assumption that John Dewey's pragmatism has no place for the transcendent.

My paper is the outcome of a puzzlement concerning the absence of a word in Dewey and a refinement of a disagreement with Stanley Cavell. It also is motivated by my recognition (nearly thirty-five years after the publication of The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning)1 of how much more remains to be said regarding habit, drama, and the dramatic in Dewey's pragmatism. Clarification of the convergence of these seemingly disparate elements requires a brief introduction to each of (...) them. I will start with the disagreement with Stanley Cavell.The disagreement goes back a number of years, but it began to loom larger in my thinking while I was writing The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey .. (shrink)