Abstract

In this paper I claim that Hegel's emergent and dialectical understanding of self-consciousness occurs in the thought of John Dewey, albeit in naturalized form. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Dewey's talk of the self, consciousness, and self-consciousness as it is developed in Experience and Nature together with some attention to Dewey's other great experiential text Art as Experience, will form the contexts for my claim. I do not argue that Dewey reproduces Hegel's dialectic or that Dewey's notion of self-consciousness emerges as isomorphic with Hegel's own. In fact, Dewey's understanding of consciousness and self-consciousness lead me to conclude that for Dewey these are roughly equivalent to experimental ..