Moral education as practiced in schools today roughly falls into two kinds, either taught as an independent subject or practiced as a form of school-wide social learning. Dewey’s criticism of rigid moral training in traditional schools gives credence to the latter trend. For instance, in 2000 Taiwan’s Ministry of Education decided to eliminate moral education as a required subject from the national school curriculum and suggested that all schools and teachers should infuse morality into the school culture as a whole. (...) More than a decade has passed, and many people question whether schools have been infused with morality. Some even suggest that not teaching morality in schools has led to an eroding of moral standards in society at large. In light of this controversy, in this paper, I take a close look at Dewey’s conception of the nature of morality, and in particular, his distinction between reflective and customary morality. Drawing on Dewey’s own moral struggles in life to illustrate his major contentions, I explore what Dewey means by moral reflection, dramatic rehearsal, and growth. Finally, I argue for the importance of committed moral values as the foundation for realizing Dewey’s ideal of reflective intelligence. Overall, I aim to unpack the underlying assumptions in Dewey’s ideas in order to renew his lessons for moral education today. (shrink)

Few remember Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) as a connoisseur of beauty or champion of beauty’s importance to an institutionally modern and technologically sophisticated society. Similarly few credit Veblen with any constructive theory of politics. Yet Veblen’s conception of the beautiful, his account of its role in human cultural evolution, and his critique of its perversion in the industrialized societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are invaluable to contemporary social-aesthetic aims of political and economic reconstruction. In contrast to the Veblen (...) of memory, the real Veblen devoted significant intellectual energy to building a theory of what political thinkers today call public work: creative, negotiated, open-ended production of shared goods by individuals alert both to self-interest and collective needs. Partaking of the rich tradition of philosophical pragmatism, Veblen's social aesthetics also points to that tradition's continuing value for contemporary aesthetic, social, and political theory. Indeed, further augmented by recent advances in cultural evolutionary theory, Veblen’s pragmatist, public-work aesthetics suggests a vision of democratic citizenship defined by cooperative imagination, production, critique, and re-creation of a moral and material commonwealth. The so-called “bard of savagery,” therefore, is better understood as a “bard of democracy,” narrating the travails and affirming the ideals of a culture aspiring to self-government. His is a vision that might lend the fragmented field of social aesthetics a common, compelling narrative of its own. (shrink)

This essay surveys three prominent trends in current pragmatist political philosophy: Deweyan Democratic Perfectionism, Rortyan Ironism, and Pragmatist Epistemic Deliberativism. After articulating the main commitments of each view, the author raises philosophical problems each must confront. The essay closes with the more general criticism that pragmatist political theory has been nearly exclusively focused on democracy, but needs to address additional topics.

This paper aims at providing an epistemic defense of democracy based on John Dewey’s idea that democracies do not only find problems and provide solutions to them but they also articulate problems....

This paper aims at providing an epistemic defense of democracy based on John Dewey’s idea that democracies do not only find problems and provide solutions to them but they also articulate problems. According to this view, when citizens inquire about collective issues, they also partially shape them. This view contrasts with the standard account of democracy’s epistemic defense, according to which democracy’s is good at tracking and finding solutions that are independent of political will-formation and decision-making. It is also less (...) vulnerable to the criticisms that have been raised against the standard account. To show this, the paper develops a theory of expressive domination and argues that problem-articulation works best when it is inclusive and domination-free. It also shows that democratic conflict represents a fundamental element for problem-articulation. (shrink)

During the 1960s and 1970s, institutionalists and behavioralists in the discipline of political science argued over the legitimacy of the institutional approach to political inquiry. In the discipline of philosophy, a similar debate concerning institutions has never taken place. Yet, a growing number of philosophers are now working out the institutional implications of political ideas in what has become known as “non-ideal theory.” My thesis is two-fold: (1) pragmatism and institutionalism are compatible and (2) non-ideal theorists, following the example of (...) pragmatists, can avoid a similar debate as took place between institutionalists and behavioralists by divulging their assumptions about institutions. (shrink)

We consider the prospect of a trans-Atlantic alliance for a social theory of critical pragmatism, seeking the specific value that French critical pragmatism can offer American pragmatists, and vice versa. We proceed through a discussion of the ontological and metho- dological keys to French critical pragmatism: the architecture of justification, the treatment of conflict in public disputes, the dynamics of argumentation, and the play of acts defined analytically as ‘test’ and ‘compromise’. At each level, we compare this approach to Deweyan (...) pragmatism. (shrink)

even a brief review of disability narratives shows that many people with disabilities, encompassing a diverse range of impairments, encounter disruptions in their everyday interactions. Individuals with disabilities report that strangers and neighbors alike fail to communicate with them.1 Instead, people defer to friends, partners, and caretakers to offer some command over the interaction. These experiences might be understood as mere annoyances, part of the experience of impairment insofar as it undermines non-disabled individuals’ modes of interaction, leaving them fumbling, seeking (...) assurance that they are handling the situation correctly. But, read less cautiously, these frustrations are emblematic of a... (shrink)

I examine the effort that some theorists make to write to, and inspire a new sense of agency in, their readers. I will consider the work of John Dewey and Hannah Arendt, two theorists who attempt to close the gap between political reality and a theoretically informed politics by using their texts to rethink and recreate their reader. By working between a determined past and the possibility of a redeemed future, Dewey and Arendt use their theory to implant a sense (...) that their present readers can become self-aware, free, and potent agents for political change. (shrink)

Sayyid Qutb and Fethullah Gülen are two of the most important Muslim leaders and intellectuals of the twentieth century: the two are similar not only for their focus on the relationship between Islam and politics, but also for their lifelong commitments to education. For both Qutb and Gülen, schools were a means through which society itself could be made more just and, ultimately, more Islamic, and for both, their philosophy of education and broader political projects were at once pragmatic and (...) implicitly and explicitly for Qutb contrasted with American pragmatism. Their differing pedagogies are illustrative of their larger visions: for Qutb, Muslim education must be a “total world” in which Islam is protected from secular contagion, while for Gülen, Muslim education can move more slowly through largely secular means. For Gülen, Islam can work outside of and within a secular system; for Qutb, the system must be changed. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the transformations undergone by Dewey’s philosophy in the period from 1916 to 1921. By analyzing three different problematic situations with which Dewey found himself confronted (German militarism; the effects of propaganda on American society; the experience of a two-year stay in China), the paper seeks to show the various lines of development at work in his thought. The thesis of the paper is that in the war and immediately post-war years Dewey was concerned with outlining (...) a new account of the nature of theory which was preliminary to the formulation of his social philosophy. The paper presents Dewey’s main philosophical achievements, with the aim of providing some background knowledge that could be useful to understanding that place and significance of the Lectures in China in the overall context of his thought. (shrink)

In the last fifteen years, John Dewey’s early philosophy received considerable attention. John Shook’s Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, Jim Good’s The Search for “Unity in Diversity”: the “Permanent Deposit” of Hegel in John Dewey’s Philosophy, Donald Morse’s Faith in Life: John Dewey’s Early Philosophy, on the top of many articles, critical editions, and reviews: all these texts have contributed to a better understanding of many important aspects of Dewey’s early thought. T...

Critics of Dewey’s metaphysics point to his dismissal of any philosophy which locates ideals in a realm beyond experience. However, Dewey’s sustained critique of dualistic philosophies is but a first step in his reconstruction and recovery of the function of the metaphysical. Detaching the discussion of values from inquiry, whether scientific, philosophical or educational, produces the same end as relegating values to a transcendent realm that is beyond ordinary human discourse. Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics supports his progressive educational philosophy. The duty (...) of education is grounded in its service to democracy; it must help students develop the ability to express, discuss, and develop their moral reasoning through experiential and experimental learning. (shrink)

This essay has several related goals. The first is to contribute to the philosophy of education literature on Cora Diamond while introducing the work of her sister, Julie Diamond, to the field. I introduce Julie Diamond’s work by connecting it to the work of John Dewey, and a secondary goal of the paper is to test lines of connection between Dewey and Cora Diamond. Finally, by developing Cora and Julie Diamond’s thinking on teaching and the moral life, I hope to (...) contribute to conversations in teacher education, especially ongoing conversations about the meaning of responsive teaching. The first half of the paper discusses and engages Cora Diamond’s thinking on the moral life drawing on a range of her published work, the middle of the paper builds a bridge from Cora Diamond to Dewey as a way of introducing Julie Diamond, and the final part of the paper offers an engagement with Julie Diamond’s work. I discuss teaching throughout the paper, and my hope is that a vision of responsive teaching, one grounded in the work of Julie and Cora Diamond, emerges that allows teachers to come alive to aspects of their work that can disappear in the rush and whirl of classroom life. The paper begins with a personal story as a way of connecting with the style of Cora and Julie Diamond’s approach to teaching and the moral life. (shrink)

This article surveys recent work in pragmatism and political theory. In doing so, it shows both how recent work on pragmatism has secured the view that at its core is a set of arguments about the character of democracy – although the character of those arguments is open to debate and reimagination – and how pragmatist arguments have been reinterpreted and deployed to address contemporary concerns and approaches. This charts a terrain of live disagreements rather than settled opinion.

Research Articles Eldon J. Eisenach, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

In liberal modernity, the democratic collective will of society was understood to emerge through the public and deliberative freedoms of associational life. Today, however, democratic discourse is much more focused on the formation of plural and diverse publics in the private and social sphere. In these ‘non-linear’ approaches, democracy is no longer seen to operate to constitute a collective will standing above society but as a mechanism to distribute power more evenly through the social empowerment of individuals and communities as (...) the ultimate decision-makers. Government is brought back ‘to the people’ and democracy is seen to circulate through the personal decisions made in everyday life. This article seeks to analyse the development of non-linear approaches to the political sphere, which seek to overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/private divide, paying particular attention to the work of two key liberal theorists, John Dewey and Friedrich von Hayek. (shrink)