The extensive reach of Dewey’s philosophical work gives this volume an unusual format covering a wide breath of subjects, as the editor of the volume points out. The introduction offers an explanation for the resurgence of interest in Dewey’s work, and provides a summary of Dewey’s life and philosophical accomplishments. In addition, Cochran shows that Dewey reconstructed several key philosophical concepts and illustrates the insightful nature of his reconstructions with the description of Dewey notion of experience, intelligence and situation.

The first chapter “The making of a democratic philosopher: the intellectual development of John Dewey” provides an intellectual biography describing how Dewey’s democratic faith can be seen in many aspects of his work and life and, more specifically, how it is very visible in his respect for women.

The following four chapters are dedicated to Dewey’s instrumental logic and his naturalistic metaphysics. “Dewey’s epistemology” by Ruth Anna Putnam analyses how Dewey’s main problem of philosophyˆthe acceptance of science while conserving the realm of valuesˆis tight to a second problem: the connection of physical science with ordinary experience. In this analysis, Putnam explains how theory and practice are united in Dewey’s theory of knowledge, and the rich theoretical consequences of Dewey’s denial of the existence of any immediate knowledge. Putnam ends the chapter by describing that the real problem for Dewey was not the status of values in a scientific world, but what revisions of belief and method was demanded by the conclusions of the natural sciences, and how controlled transformation of belief and practices in human institutions was possible. The following chapter by Richard Gale “The naturalism of John Dewey” lays down an account of Dewey’s metaphysics of naturalism and how experience, continuity and organicism show how Dewey’s philosophy is of anthropomorphic or humanistic kind. Gale illustrates his claim by verifying how naturalism, and its impact and ramifications, is visible in Dewey’s epistemology, aesthetics, ethics and religion. Next, Issac Levi discusses Dewey’s logic of inquiry emphasizing the normative element in Dewey’s logic.  Levi praises the great strength of Dewey’s model of inquiry in the way it generalizes the logic of scientific inquiry, and the way Dewey finds logic reflected in different realms such as politics, art, and morals. While pointing out some of the inspirational impact on his own work, Levi points out how his own ideas have improved the clarity of Dewey’s account of logic. The fourth chapter “The primacy of practice in Dewey’s experimental empiricism” by J. E. Tiles explains the significance of the concept of habit for Dewey’s empiricism, and his genetic account of the development of habitual responses through the process of inquiry. Title shows the Aristotelian tone of Dewey’s approach in his identification of experience as the modification of habits, and argues for the normative character of Dewey’s particular brand of experimentalism.

The next two chapters look at Dewey’s theory of mind and action. In “Cognitive science and Dewey’s theory of mind, thought and language”, Mark Johnson explains how Dewey’s principle of continuity produced a non-dualistic concept of mind, which means that Dewey offers a theory of mind that is naturalistic, non-reductive, and process-oriented. Johnson argues that Dewey was almost fifty years ahead of his time, and that he constructed a broad philosophical framework that enables us nowadays to understand the implications of contemporary cognitive science. In the following chapter, Mathias Jung examines Dewey’s theory of action pointing out how it emphasizes the importance of situations, and how Dewey identified habit and embodied creativity as universals of human action. In this way, Jung argues, Dewey developed an alternative theory of action to the normative and utilitarian theories.

The following two chapters look at Dewey’s moral theory. Jennifer Welchman explains how Dewey was an ethical naturalist who believed, in contrast to non-cognitivists such as Hume, that values are empirically verifiable, and responsive to reason. Indicating the importance of habits in Dewey’s ethical thought, Welchman describes Dewey’s ameliorating normative theory. Welchman also explains how Dewey was not a moral realist, since for Dewey a value judgment is a judgment about what course of action best fulfills a function. Welchman further explains how Dewey considered value judgments as practical, being a type of judgment that is especially complex, and that moral practical deliberation is irreducibly pluralistic. In “Ethics as moral inquiry: Dewey and the moral psychology of social reform”, James Bohman explores the social reform element of Dewey’s ameliorative naturalist ethics. Bohman writes that, in contrast to social psychologists of his day, Dewey’s moral and social psychology offered a vigorous defense of democracy and human rationality. Stating the importance of habits in Dewey’s thought, Bohman argues that Dewey’s philosophy is very much in the spirit of contemporary experimental philosophy, and that his debate with Lippmann, about the public sphere, is a good example of critical and practical social inquiry concerning social facts.

The chapters by Sami Pilstrom, Richard Eldridge, and Nel Noddings examine Dewey’s writings on religion, aesthetics and education respectively.

Pihlström describes the socially grounded, naturalistic conception of religious faith that Dewey developed in A Common Faith and other writings, and places his religious thought in the context of the metaphysics vs. antimetaphyscics debate that permeates twentieth-century philosophy of religion. Describing Dewey’s characterization of faith and how qualities and values of religious experience enhance human growth, Pihlström shows that Dewey’s concern with religious experience was in line with his continuous effort to transform the philosophical status of the category of experience.

In “Dewey’s Aesthetics” Richard Eldridge explains that Dewey’s approach to the philosophy of art was motivated by his will to link art to wider human problems, and in particular to reconnect meaning with human action in modern industrial society. By describing some of the main issues of Dewey’s aesthetics such as art continuity with life, the notion of an experience, the role of expression, evaluation and interpretation in his philosophy of art and the crucial importance of aesthetic tertiary qualities, Eldridge shows how Dewey conceived art as the most effective mode of communication.

Nell Noddings offers a critical appreciation of Dewey’s philosophy of education, examining it through the feminist lens of care theory. Noddings surveys five key topics in Dewey’s extensive work of education: the child, the curriculum, learning and inquiry, democracy and moral education. In doing so, Noddings argues that there is much overlap in the way Dewey and Care theory conceive of the active nature of the child, the interactive curriculum, the importance of inquiry and critical thinking, and the need to develop and improve democratic ideas. Nevertheless, Noddings points out that Dewey falls short in failing to pay proper attention to relations among individuals and of addressing the experience of women, and leaves us with the question if Dewey’s insistence on method could accomplish all that Dewey set it out for it to accomplish.

The last two chapters reflect on Dewey’s democratic thought. First, Richard Bernstein aims to demonstrate how central democracy is to Dewey’s philosophy and how democracy was for Dewey both a form of government and a way of life.  Bernstein compliments Dewey’s richness in working outside certain limitations of contemporary democratic theory associated with participatory, procedural, and deliberative democracy. Bernstein ends his chapter pointing out some of the relevant criticisms to Dewey’s democratic thought such as Dewey’s insufficient institutional analysis or sustained comment on the kind of economic reform, and insufficient description of the integrative principle that this ideal of democracy required.   

Finally, Molly Cochran examines Dewey’s engagement with international politics, and his belief that Old World diplomacy should be replaced with a new international politics reconstructed along democratic lines. Cochran shows how in “Progress” Dewey developed a similar idea to Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment”, namely that each individual is responsible for the overall progress of human condition. The chapter argues that Dewey’s pragmatism applied to human problems in connection with international relations today could be very fruitful to continue to maintain our faith in democracy and may serve as a continuous test to democracy as a working hypothesis.

The volume offers a collection of thought provoking chapters both for Dewey scholars as well as for philosophy students.

 

© 2012 Dina Mendonça

 

Dina Mendonça, Ph.D. Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa