 Hi, and welcome back to 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown. And today we're talking about John Dewey. John Dewey was born in 1859, not long before the start of the Civil War. And he died in 1952, seven years after the devastation of World War II. He lived through obviously a period of incredible technological change as well as social change in the United States. He was born in Vermont, grew up there, went to university there. And then he worked principally in the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, and then Columbia University in New York City. Dewey is most well known for his philosophy of education. His social and political philosophy, he's known as the philosopher of democracy. But during his career, he wrote important works in nearly every field of philosophy you could think of. His collected works run some 38 long volumes covering 70 years of publications from 1882 to 1953. John Dewey is an interesting figure for many reasons, an interesting figure for us to look at in particular. He's one of the key early figures of American pragmatism. He follows shortly after Charles Perce and William James. In fact, Perce was one of his graduate school teachers at John Hopkins University. And he's roughly contemporary with Jane Adams, who had a major influence on him and he on her as well. Our concept of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy is largely due, I think, to Dewey's work, the way he thought about pragmatism. Not only because of his longevity, his writing career was itself much longer than most of the other pragmatists, what we would call the classical pragmatists. He also wrote reflectively about the American philosophical tradition and about pragmatism specifically. That said, he also had a love-hate relationship with the concept of pragmatism, and sometimes issued it in favor of other terms. Dewey is also interesting because he was part of the first generation of American academic philosophers to be fully professionally trained. Most of the figures of Dewey's period sort of fit this mold. Most of Dewey's own teachers had to go to Europe for serious philosophical training, or they were largely self-taught. But Dewey was trained to do philosophy in a serious contemporary way in the US, and that's a significant difference, I think. Dewey is also one of the last academic philosophers who was also a really prominent public intellectual. So today, it's somewhat more rare to find academic philosophers in America who are also public intellectuals. Dewey founded the laboratory school at the University of Chicago, where he pursued educational innovations, really tested out theories of education, philosophies and theories of education, and he was active in Jane Adam's social settlement, the whole house. He also headed the International Commission of Inquiry that cleared Leon Trotsky of the charges made by Stalin at the Moscow show trials. So Dewey, along with several other figures, traveled to Mexico in 1937 to clear Trotsky of those charges. Well, to review the charges, and they ended up deciding that he was not actually guilty of what Stalin said he had done. Dewey actually ends up having a kind of significant indirect effect on Barack Obama. Dewey's granddaughter, Alice Dewey, was a anthropologist and was Ann Dunham's dissertation supervisor, Ann Dunham being Barack Obama's mother. Also, when they lived in Chicago, the Obama's children went to school at the laboratory school. So just little factoids, but interesting connections, I think. Dewey began his career in philosophy in the 1880s, very much influenced on the one hand by German idealism, Hegel in particular, and on the other hand by the new experimental psychology, which he had learned from Hall at Johns Hopkins. He sought in his own work, to early work to reconcile the two. But largely I think thanks to the influence of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory and the psychology of William James, which was published in 1890. For Dewey, in Dewey's thinking, a kind of evolutionary naturalism came to replace the role of absolute idealism in his thinking. Now, one name for his philosophy, I mentioned that Dewey had a kind of love-hate relationship with the term pragmatism. He also used and discarded terms like experimentalism and instrumentalism for his view. But one name for his philosophy that Dewey flirted with was cultural naturalism. And one of the things that's nice about the term cultural naturalism is that the naturalism captures Dewey's strong and long-lasting commitment to the continuity of nature and the human, the continuity also of science and philosophy. And you know, Dewey's kind of swimming upstream on that point in the early 20th century. But it's also cultural naturalism. So Dewey, the term cultural there for Dewey is emphasizing that humanity is a social organism. The medium in which we live is culture, right? By which he means communication through language and other media, the construction of our world through artifacts and sort of the built environment and the sort of cooperative enterprises that characterize democratic governance. In this later view, some of Hegel's influence still survives. Hegel had emphasized the active nature of human intelligence as against, say, the empiricists or the rationalists who had a kind of receptive view of human intelligence. Dewey is very much still Hegelian in that sense. Not only is human intelligence active, but it's active in shaping the world, right? And Dewey's also Hegelian in his insistence that philosophy is always bound to its sort of historical, cultural, institutional moment. Okay, but for Dewey, both of these thoughts are fully naturalized, right? So it's not that intelligence shapes the world in any sort of mysterious way or because the real is the rational and the rational is the real or anything like that. Literally what intelligence is for is physically and socially reshaping the world, right? Dewey's philosophy really centers on a concept that in some places he calls organism-environment interaction, right? Or sometimes transaction, he uses that language as well. You know, Dewey's a pragmatist or an instrumentalist in the sense that he thinks of philosophical conceptions as tools for getting into a better relation with the world. So his epistemology and his meta-philosophy are very much problem-solving oriented, right? His logical theory as well, very much sort of emphasizing problem-solving for problems that are of sort of human relevance, relevant to human practices, right? Now the essay you read for this class this week, The Need for Recovery of Philosophy presents an interesting, I think contrast to emerging practices and conceptions in the philosophical world at the time. So, you know, while a little bit before this time on into the 19-teens, you know, a lot of our proto-analytic and proto-continental philosophers are arguing for a kind of anti-psychologism, right? Which is a kind of anti-naturalism. It's an argument for a separation between science and philosophy, between the subject matter of philosophy and the subject matter of the natural world. Dewey is developing a kind of naturalism, right? Which emphasizes continuity. Dewey is laying out what he would call an empirical theory of experience, right? As against those assumptions about experience which he thinks are theoretically driven, which we see in classical empiricism, rationalism and idealism from the early modern and modern periods into the 20th century. In the need for a recovery of philosophy, Dewey contrasts philosophy focused on the problems of philosophers versus philosophy that's focused on what he calls the problem of men. Or if he was using more contemporary, less sexist language, we would say the problems of humanity or of humans, right? Dewey here is fighting against a certain way of professionalizing the discipline of philosophy, right? One thing that characterizes professionalized academic disciplines or scholarly disciplines is that they have their own sort of characteristic concerns, right? Physicists aren't so much concerned with building a better bridge or building a better combustion engine. They're focused on concerns about particles and forces and laws of nature that are driven really by the internal focus of the discipline. Although Dewey emphasizes the continuity of science and philosophy, he doesn't think philosophy should professionalize in that way. And ultimately he thinks, you know, although physicists are focused on very abstract and what might seem like rest assured problems, in the end, the value of physics is that it does increase our capacity to predict and control the natural world, right? And so although that may seem remote, ultimately it's always present there in the methods of natural science. You know, we can contrast, I think, Dewey's view with that of Frege or Husserl, both of whom are kind of concerns with foundations, right? They're concerned with the sort of, you know, what Dewey would call questions about knowledge or questions about reality, uberhaupt, right? Which is just German for in general, right? Sort of wholesale analysis of knowledge or reality. Rather than taking things in their plurality and particularity, right? So Dewey really wants us to think about things in terms of their specificity and the various, the great variety of things that we encounter in our daily world. All right, so that's a short introduction to Dewey and his sort of background, his thinking and some of the things that make the essay The Need for Recovery of Philosophy interesting in context of the other readings that we've been talking about. I look forward to digging into the details of that piece with you on Discord or in the comments here in the video or in our synchronous class meeting later today. Hope you're having a good week and I'll see you next time.