Experimentalism and the flow of experience

Educational Theory

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-19

  Waks, Leonard J ^a  

^a TEMPLE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33644624697     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1998.00001.x     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. All references to works of Dewey will appear in the text with volume and page numbers. Early Works, ed. Fredson Woodson and Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), cited as EW, Middle Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), cited as MW; and Later Works, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press) cited as LW.
2. See especially Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (New York: Knopf, 1965), 157-60.
3. Clarence Kaner "Liberal Ideology and the Quest for Orderly Change," in Clarence Karier, Paul Violas, and Joel Spring, Roots of Crisis (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973), 84-107.
4. Larry Hickman, John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
5. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
6. Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
7. Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
8. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995).
9. James Campbell, Understanding John Dewey (Chicago: Open Court, 1995).
10. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Two recent articles marking this renewal of pragmatism.
11. Richard Bernstein "The Resurgence of Pragmatism," Social Research 59 (1992): 813-840.
12. James Kloppenberg "Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Talking," Journal of American History 83 (1996): 100-38.
13. Richard Rorty, "From Logic to Language to Play"Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 1986, 752.
14. Some now detect an experiential or aesthetic turn away from science in Dewey's later philosophy. Against this it may be argued that Dewey saw Reconstruction in Philosophy as the programmatic preface to his later work, his "fresh start" after the disappointments of World War I (MW, 12, p. 283).
15. Science is if anything from that point on more central than in the earlier works, but there is a new emphasis on the relation between science and art (a new way of speaking about his perennial concern, continuity between reflective delay and free flpwing experience). He returns to the science themes of Reconstruction in Philosophy in two major works after World War II, the Preface to the second edition of Reconstruction (MW, 12, pp. 256-77).
16. The Introduction to Problems of Men (LW, 15, p. 154f.).
17. In a prefatory note to the latter volume he registers the connection between his early and late work (he included one early essay in the volume to emphasize how the early work anticipates the later) (LW, 15, p. 153).
18. But he emphatically adds that insofar as there have been inevitable changes in his formulations, it is these last essays that represent his mature point of view.
19. See, for example, my assessment of Rorty's pragmatism in Leonard J. Waks "Post-Experimentalist Pragmatism," Studies in Philosophy and Education 17 (1997), forthcoming. v..
20. Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists, 73.
21. Rockefeller, John Dewey, 42.
22. Henry Johnson "Democracy as Philosophy," Review of Politics 54 (1992): 169.
23. Cited in Emily Robertson "Is Dewey's Educational Vision Still Viable?" Review of Research in Education 137 (1992): 361.
24. Ryan remarks that Dewey pulled off the "rhetorical trick" of investing his views with the "mystique of modern science" while assuring his audiences that they were firmly linked to religious tradition. Dewey, he says, put together "an astonishing combination of old hankerings and new understandings," but for his defense of democracy as the secular realization of the kingdom of God, "everything hinged on the question how far talk o: the Kingdom of God was a metaphor" (Ryan, John Dewey, 206 and 86). But the job of philosophy as Dewey saw it was precisely to pull off such "rhetorical tricks." Ryan's dualism of literal and metaphorical is untenable. Dewey's question was not whether phrases like "the Kingdom of God" referred to a reality external to language and culture, but whether their use could ease a cultural transition by breaking up obstructions in associated life.
25. Westbrook, John Dewey, 138.
26. Robertson, "Is Dewey's Educational Vision Still Viable?" 339.
27. Campbell, Understanding John Dewey, 105.
28. Ralph Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 49-50, 140-41.
29. Charles Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," in Milton Konvitz and Gail Kennedy, American Pragmatists: Selected Writings (Cleveland: Meridian, i960), 87.
30. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism, 49.
31. Dewey notes in reviewing Peirce's collective works that "many intellectual movements in science as well as philosophy have brought Peirce's ideas closer to us" Here again he is talking about his own movement. He says that Peirce "grasped in its totality the significance of scientific experimental method" but Peirce's "formulation of the method employed to reach scientific beliefs has so far had little application in the thinking from which most beliefs on social and moral matters issue" (LW, 11, pp. 421-22, Dewey's emphasis). Dewey's project was to rectify this deficiency.
32. This account of the reflex arc is indebted to Campbell, Understanding John Dewey, 36f.
33. Cited in Robertson, "Is Dewey's Educational Vision Still Viable?" 346.
34. See the account of Dewey's journalism in James Wallace, Liberal Journalism and American Education 1914-1941 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), who narrates education coverage in The Nation and The New Republic from 1914 to 1941. Astonishingly, during these years Dewey made almost 200 contributions to just these two periodicals.