This book discusses topics normally excluded from the current educational conversation such as soul, authority, irony, memory, style, luck, privacy, power, and hospitality.

This chapter presents an edited e-mail discussion based on the philosophical conversations at a conference held in Cologne, Germany, in December 2001. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the contributors discuss selected questions about their contributions, roughly following the sequence of the chapters in Part II of this book. Second, the contributors ask more general questions about Dewey, Pragmatism, and constructivism. Finally, the chapter ends with brief statements about why Dewey is still an indispensible thinker for them. As they (...) clarify their differences and seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from Pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points, in ways designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. In their views, the concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical Pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. (shrink)

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (...) to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II.

"We become what we love," states Jim Garrison in Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. This provocative book represents a major new interpretation of Dewey's education philosophy. It is also an examination of what motivates us to teach and to learn, and begins with the idea of education of eros (i.e., passionate desire)-"the supreme aim of education" as the author puts it-and how that desire results in a practical philosophy that guides us in recognizing (...) what is essentially good or valuable. Garrison weaves these threads of ancient wisdom into a critical analysis of John Dewey's writings that reveal an implicit theory of eros in reasoning, and the central importance of educating eros to seek "the Good." Chapters: Plato's Symposium: Eros, the Beautiful, and the Good • Care, Sympathy, and Community in Classroom Teaching: Feminist Reflections on the Expansive Self • Play-Doh, Poetry, and "Ethereal Things" • The Aesthetic Context of Inquiry and the Teachable Moment • The Education of Eros: Critical and Creative Value Appraisal • Teaching and the Logic of Moral Perception This book can be used in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, qualitative research, arts and education, language and literacy, and women and education. Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is pastpresident of the John Dewey Society and a winner of the Society's Outstanding Achievement Award. (shrink)

[Cause and effect], if they are distinct, are also identical. Even in ordinary consciousness that identity may be found. We say that a cause is a cause, only when it has an effect, and vice versa. Both cause and effect are thus one and the same content: and the distinction between them is primarily only that the one lays down, and the other is laid down.1In the quote above, Hegel claims that cause and effect are only distinct from a particular (...) point of view. A cause only becomes a cause when it has an effect, thus the two apparently opposing terms reverse their roles. The effect is the cause of the cause, and the cause is the effect of its own effect. This article begins with a discussion of what we believe to be .. (shrink)

In this essay, Jim Garrison explores the emerging scholarship establishing a Hegelian continuity in John Dewey’s thought from his earliest publications to the work published in the last decade of his life. The primary goals of this study are, first, to introduce this new scholarship to philosophers of education and, second, to extend this analysis to new domains, including Dewey’s theory of inquiry, universals, and creative action. Ultimately, Garrison’s analysis also refutes the traditional account that claims that William (...) James converted Dewey from Hegelian idealism, after which Charles Sanders Peirce inspired him to rebuild his instrumentalism along radically different lines. (shrink)

This is a brief rejoinder to Harvey Siegel’s ‘Dangerous Dualisms or Murky Monism? A Reply to Jim Garrison’ (35·4), which was itself a critical response to my own recent paper in this journal (33·2). This is an attempt to sum up the key points of the Deweyan pragmatism that I argue for, and hence those that Siegel opposes. It is not an attempt to settle the debate, but rather to clarify our differences.

This is a brief rejoinder to Harvey Siegel’s ‘Dangerous Dualisms or Murky Monism? A Reply to Jim Garrison’ (35·4), which was itself a critical response to my own recent paper in this journal (33·2). This is an attempt to sum up the key points of the Deweyan pragmatism that I argue for, and hence those that Siegel opposes. It is not an attempt to settle the debate, but rather to clarify our differences.

Although Richard Rorty has done much to renew interest in the philosophy of John Dewey, he nonetheless rejects two of the most important components of Dewey's philosophy, that is, his metaphysics and epistemology. Following George Santayana, Rorty accuses Dewey of trying to serve Locke and Hegel, an impossibility as Rorty rightly sees it. Rorty (1982) says that Dewey should have been Hegelian all the way (p. 85). By reconstructing a bit of Hegel's early philosophy of work, and comparing it to (...) Dewey's metaphysics and epistemology we can see that Dewey was indeed Hegelian all the way and that Rorty has constructed a false dilemma. We also gain some interesting insight into Dewey's philosophy by viewing it in terms of labor, tools and language. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking is riddled with unnecessary and confusing dualisms. He rigidly separates ‘critical skill’ and ‘critical spirit’, the philosophical and the causal, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and the moral and the epistemological. These dualisms are easily traced to his desire to defend an absolutist and decontextualised epistemology. To the Deweyan naturalist these dualisms are unnecessary. Appealing to the pragmatist notion of beliefs as embodied habits of action evincing emotion, I show how language, meanings and the mind, including (...) the mind of the critical thinker, emerge from our biological being. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking is riddled with unnecessary and confusing dualisms. He rigidly separates ‘critical skill’ and ‘critical spirit’, the philosophical and the causal, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and the moral and the epistemological. These dualisms are easily traced to his desire to defend an absolutist and decontextualised epistemology. To the Deweyan naturalist these dualisms are unnecessary. Appealing to the pragmatist notion of beliefs as embodied habits of action evincing emotion, I show how language, meanings and the mind, including (...) the mind of the critical thinker, emerge from our biological being. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking is riddled with unnecessary and confusing dualisms. He rigidly separates ‘critical skill’ and ‘critical spirit’, the philosophical and the causal, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and the moral and the epistemological. These dualisms are easily traced to his desire to defend an absolutist and decontextualised epistemology. To the Deweyan naturalist these dualisms are unnecessary. Appealing to the pragmatist notion of beliefs as embodied habits of action evincing emotion, I show how language, meanings and the mind, including (...) the mind of the critical thinker, emerge from our biological being. (shrink)

walt whitman writes: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature”. Naoko Saito is an American philosopher and something of a Whitmanesque philosophical poet. Saito’s book is “the product of many years spent reading and studying American philosophy”. She further indicates: “Mostly I have done this from a remote part of the world—far from America across the Pacific Ocean—and, like so many others, in a language that is not my own”. Saito (...) is a scholar in and of translation.Saito states that the “tensioned relationship between Dewey and Emerson, and more broadly pragmatism and American transcendentalism... is carried forward into the present... (shrink)

[Cause and effect], if they are distinct, are also identical. Even in ordinary consciousness that identity may be found. We say that a cause is a cause, only when it has an effect, and vice versa. Both cause and effect are thus one and the same content: and the distinction between them is primarily only that the one lays down, and the other is laid down.The Logic of Hegel, Translated from ““The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences,”” 3rd ed., trans. William (...) Wallace, §153; hereafter cited as ““Lesser Logic”” parenthetically in the text by section number. Similarly, in the Science of Logic Hegel writes: ““Cause is cause only in so far as it produces an effect, and cause is nothing but this determination, to have an effect, and effect is nothing but this, to have a cause. Cause as such implies its effect, and effect implies cause; in so far as cause has not yet acted, or if it has ceased to act, then it is not cause, and effect in so far as its cause has vanished, is no longer effect but in indifferent actuality””. See also Hegel’s discussion of rain and wetness, color and pigment, and act and motion in ibid., 560–61. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Exploring "The Vital Depths of Experience":A Reader's Response to HenningJim Garrisonbethany henning's dewey and the aesthetic unconscious is a much-needed and marvelous book. It explores the pragmatic unconscious as it reveals itself in the qualitative unity of artistic expression integrated with aesthetic appreciation and response. By illuminating the role of often unconscious impulses, feelings, desires, memories, imaginaries, habits, meanings, and more, that goes into creating or appreciating a work (...) of art, she exposes the role of the unconscious in our daily lives. In this regard, she may wish to look at Hans Joas's theory of creative action. Relying largely on Dewey, Joas argues that we should regard "creativity as an analytical dimension of all human action" (Joas 116). We transform the world in even our most mundane actions and in doing so, we may draw on the depths of our unconscious.Henning writes with sincerity, clarity, and force. Recognizing that ultimately she is striving to articulate something that is often ineffable, she is not afraid of vagueness, the indeterminate, or the incomplete, and is content to live with mysteries. Henning shows unusual vulnerability in exposing some of her own aesthetic unconscious and the ways culture has inscribed itself upon her, when she responds to art works. She does so without assuming she has plumbed the vital depths of herself much less the artists and art works she explores.I found Henning's responses to be an invitation to explore my own aesthetic unconscious, and I believe others will as well. Her book is subtitled The Vital Depths of Experience. I will strive to demonstrate that depth by summoning the courage to share some of my own aesthetic responses to her textual creation. My goal is to express some of the power in a text that dares to explore the pragmatic unconscious.In writing book reviews, I often rely on Louise Rosenblatt's reader response theory. On this occasion, Rosenblatt is especially apropos since her [End Page 90] work exemplifies the kind of transactionalism that integrates the artistic artifact with those who do the work of art in experiencing it. This emphasis becomes especially obvious in Henning's chapter 5, where she defends Dewey's qualitative "unity thesis" against such critics as Richard Shusterman, John Lysaker, and Noël Carroll. My response concentrates on this remarkable chapter.Carroll argues that works like John Cage's 4'33" and the paintings of Mark Rothko lack qualitative unity that unfolds temporally because they fail to provide closure. Henning replies that "Carroll has forgotten that the art product does not need to have any particular duration for the art work to unfold temporally" (128). As Dewey states it, "[t]he work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it" (LW 10:111). Those experiencing an artistic product collaborate with the initial creator to complete the meaning. Henning goes on to say that "the encounter between perceiver and product culminate in a transaction: a dynamic exchange between the organism and environment" (128). The idea is correct, but for Dewey and Bentley, however, "exchange between" suggests interaction not transaction; a mutual or reciprocal transaction or an integration would be better descriptions.Although specifically concerned with literary works of art and the experience of reading, Rosenblatt helps illuminate any aesthetic event. In her "The Poem as Event," Rosenblatt remarks:A poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or an ideal entity. It is an occurrence, a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The reader brings to the text his past experience; the encounter gives rise to a new experience, a poem.(126)Compenetration is a nice synonym for transaction. Rosenblatt's book on transactional reading is titled The Reader, the Text, the Poem. There, she defines "poem" as "the whole category of aesthetic transactions between readers and texts without implying the greater or less 'poeticity' of any specific genre" (12). It is an event of conjoint meaning-making where meaning is felt and acted upon as well as cognized. Dewey himself states: "A new poem is... (shrink)

Having taken the linguistic turn, neo-pragmatists eschew "experience." Prominent among them are Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom who admire Wilfrid Sellars's critique of the Myth of the Given. Brandom affirms, "I have by and large followed my teacher [Rorty] in rejecting the notion of experience as too burdened by noxious baggage—in particular, by the Myth of the Given—to be worth trying to recruit for serious explanatory and expressive work in philosophy".2 My paper removes the burden supposedly imposed by the myth (...) by resorting to Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, especially chapter 8, "Immediate Knowledge: Understanding and Inference" where the reader finds arguments against immediate... (shrink)

This chapter presents a constructivist reading of Dewey's work by establishing a line of development between Dewey's 1896 essay on the reflex arc and the social constructivism explicit in his later works. It demonstrates the relevance of classical Pragmatism to current issues in the philosophy of education, highlighting key theoretical and conceptual components of the cultural construction of meanings, truth claims, and identities. It also looks into Dewey's short essay “Knowledge and Speech Reaction” to identify the connection between speech acts, (...) the constitution of stimuli by responses, and the construction of knowledge objects by the operations of inquiry. (shrink)

My article is a rejoinder to Gert Biesta’s, ‘“This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours”. Deconstructive pragmatism as a philosophy of education.’ Biesta attempts to place Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction in ‘the very heart’ of John Dewey’s pragmatism. My article strives to impress Deweyan pragmatism in the heart of Derridian deconstruction. It does so by offering Dewey’s denotative, naturalistic, empirical perspectivalism as an alternative to Derrida’s anti-empirical quasi-transcendentalism for understanding otherness and difference. The first section of my article shows Biesta offers (...) a catastrophically mistaken and confused argument. The second section imprints Deweyan pragmatism in the heart of Derrida’s deconstruction. Dewey specifically makes philosophical use of a version of the genetic method he calls the ‘empirical denotative method’ to trace the exclusions as well as the inclusions of our perspectival selections driven by our finite embodied needs, interest, desires, and purposes. We may derive the trace of quasi-transcendental différance from the trace of empirically perspectival inclusions and exclusions. Specifically, différance is a reified hypostatic abstraction. Next, I respond to Biesta’s claim that since the metaphysics of presence still entangles Dewey, he cannot appreciate the fact that presence depends on absence. Actually, presence in Dewey always depends on absence. Finally, we will find that Biesta’s own deconstructive pragmatism flounders on his commitment to self-refuting relativism. (shrink)

Hager and Beckett assert that a ‘characteristic feature of … assorted co-present groups is that their processes and outputs are marked by the full gamut of human experiences involved in their functioning’. My paper endorses and further develops this claim. I begin by expanding on their emphasis upon the priority of relations in terms of Dewey and Bentley’s transactionalism and Buddhist dependent co-origination and emptiness. Next, I emphasize the importance of embodied perspectives in acquiring meaning and transforming the world. Here, (...) too, we will find surprising Buddhist connections. Finally, I examine the primacy of practice: how we acquire our minds and selves by participating in shared social practices. This stance is shared by philosophers as diverse as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey. (shrink)

Against the background of the Deweyan tradition of Democracy and Education, we discuss problems of complexity and reductionism in education and educational philosophy. First, we investigate some of Dewey’s own criticisms of reductionist tendencies in the educational traditions, theories, and practices of his time. Secondly, we explore some important cases of reductionism in the educational debates of our own day and argue that a similar criticism in behalf of democracy and education is appropriate and can easily be based on Deweyan (...) terms. Thirdly, we draw some more general conclusions about complexity and reductionism as challenges for democracy and education. Among other things, we argue that powerful social tendencies of capitalist competition and social Darwinism support reductionisms in education and put the democratic project at risk. The tensional relation between democracy and capitalism constitutes a major challenge for educational philosophy in our own time as much as in Dewey’s. (shrink)

My paper focuses on the following famous passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” (OTL 1). I will show that John Dewey entirely agrees with this statement. Dewey and Nietzsche has a rich and novel understanding of metaphor, metonymy, simile, and such that they use to comprehend the creation of linguistic meanings, the identity of things, the creation of objects (essences, eidos, etc.), cause and (...) effect, free will, and necessity as serving anthropomorphic purposes. My conclusion presents Dewey as a gay scientist joining Nietzsche in making creative use of the genetic method. The result of is a surprisingly poetic and rhetorical interpretation of Dewey that should not astonish anyone who reads him carefully. We arrive at this radical reading of Deweyan pragmatism by a metaphorical transfer from Nietzsche as the more familiar source domain to Dewey as the target domain. All along the way, things will fall into place if we carefully distinguish our anoetic experience of existence from the cognitive linguistic meanings, identities, and essences we create from our experience of existence. (shrink)