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Botanical Companions
A Memoir of Plants and Place
Frieda Knobloch
University of Iowa Press, 2005
In her luminous inquiry into the intricate connections among work, place, and people, Frieda Knobloch explores the lives of two Rocky Mountain botanists, Aven Nelson (1859-1952) and Ruth Ashton Nelson (1896-1987). Aven was a professor of botany at the University of Wyoming for many years; Ruth compiled field guides to Rocky Mountain plants and wrote articles on botany for magazines. The two met and married when Aven was in his seventies and Ruth was in her mid thirties, and they developed a symbiotic partnership that joined work and play, learning and companionship. Into this relatively straightforward reconstruction of two lives Knobloch blends the history of her own life as a scholar and an amateur naturalist, her own journal entries, and her letters written to Ruth to create a transformative environmental auto/biography.
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The Collected Works of John Dewey, Index
1882 - 1953
John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

This cumulative index to the thirty-seven volumes of The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, is an invaluable guide to The Collected Works.

The Collected Works Contents incorporates all the tables of contents of Dewey’s individual volumes, providing a chronological, volume-by-volume overview of every item in The Early Works, The Middle Works, and The Later Works.

The Title Index lists alphabetically by shortened titles and by key words all items in The Collected Works. Articles republished in the collections listed above are also grouped under the titles of those books.

The Subject Index, which includes all information in the original volume indexes, expands that information by adding the authors of introductions to each volume, authors and titles of books Dewey reviewed or introduced, authors of appendix items, and relevant details from the source notes.

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A Companion to John Dewey's "Democracy and Education"
D. C. Phillips
University of Chicago Press, 2016
This year marks the centenary publication of John Dewey’s magnum opus, Democracy and Education. Despite its profound importance as a foundational text in education, it is notoriously difficult and—dare we say it—a little dry. In this charming and often funny companion, noted philosopher of education D. C. Phillips goes chapter by chapter to bring Dewey to a twenty-first-century audience. Drawing on over fifty years of thinking about this book—and on his own experiences as an educator—he lends it renewed clarity and a personal touch that proves its lasting importance.
           
Phillips bridges several critical pitfalls of Democracy and Education that often prevent contemporary readers from fully understanding it. Where Dewey sorely needs a detailed example to illustrate a point—and the times are many—Phillips steps in, presenting cases from his own classroom experiences. Where Dewey casually refers to the works of people like Hegel, Herbart, and Locke—common knowledge, apparently, in 1916—Phillips fills in the necessary background. And where Dewey gets convoluted or is even flat-out wrong, Phillips does what few other scholars would do: he takes Dewey to task. The result is a lively accompaniment that helps us celebrate and be enriched by some of the most important ideas ever offered in education.
 
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The Dewey Experiment in China
Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic
Barry Keenan
Harvard University Press, 1977

After the May Fourth Incident, John Dewey’s followers in China assumed the leadership of an important group of intellectuals who were largely veterans of the New Culture movement. The Chinese Communist movement had its inception in the same two years Dewey lectured in China (1919–1921); Dewey’s followers pitted their “liberalism” against this new radical alternative, in arguments that proved to be harbingers of a thirty-year conflict in Chinese politics.

The Dewey Experiment in China critically analyzes the careers and writings of John Dewey’s followers through the 1920s—particularly Kuo Ping-wen, Chiang Meng-lin, and T’ao Hsing-chih—as they attempted to implement Dewey’s political reform ideas and his progressive educational principles. The “new education” reform movement was spearheaded by Deweyites and directed a national-level educational reform effort for many years following World War I. Many of Dewey’s ideas that seemed most progressive in the United States are shown to be surprisingly conservative for China. The promise of progress implicit in problem-solving based upon conflicts in actual, concrete social conditions, as Dewey formulated it, deluded its proponents with a false hope of efficacy. The issue of political power was not adequately addressed. In education, unspoken assumptions about progressive reform in the United States proved to be absent in China.

The most dedicated Deweyites were forced to “turn Dewey on his head” by the end of the 1920s. What appeared to Dewey to be democracy through interest-group bartering among nations was often understood in “Third World” China as Big Power politics and the exploitation of the weak. The Dewey Experiment in China reflects, therefore, not only upon Dewey’s own thought but upon the fragility of many American ideas assumed to have been applicable again after World War II in China and Southeast Asia.

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Dewey for Artists
Mary Jane Jacob
University of Chicago Press, 2018
John Dewey is known as a pragmatic philosopher and progressive architect of American educational reform, but some of his most important contributions came in his thinking about art.
          Dewey argued that there is strong social value to be found in art, and it is artists who often most challenge our preconceived notions. Dewey for Artists shows us how Dewey advocated for an “art of democracy.” Identifying the audience as co-creator of a work of art by virtue of their experience, he made space for public participation. Moreover, he believed that societies only become—and remain—truly democratic if its citizens embrace democracy itself as a creative act, and in this he advocated for the social participation of artists.
          Throughout the book, Mary Jane Jacob draws on the experiences of contemporary artists who have modeled Dewey’s principles within their practices. We see how their work springs from deeply held values. We see, too, how carefully considered curatorial practice can address the manifold ways in which aesthetic experience happens and, thus, enable viewers to find greater meaning and purpose. And it is this potential of art for self and social realization, Jacob helps us understand, that further ensures Dewey’s legacy—and the culture we live in.
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Dewey, Russell, Whitehead
Philosophers as Educators
Brian Patrick Hendley
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

In Philosophers as Educators Brian Patrick Hendley argues that philosophers of edu­cation should reject their preoccupation with defining terms and analyzing concepts and embrace the philosophical task of con­structing general theories of education.  Hendley discusses in detail the educational philosophies of John Dewey, Bertrand Rus­sell, and Alfred North Whitehead. He sees in these men excellent role models that contem­porary philosophers might well follow. Hendley believes that, like these men­tors, philosophers should take a more ac­tive, practical role in education. Dewey and Russell ran their own schools, and Whitehead served as a university admin­istrator and as a member of many com­mittees created to study education.

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Dewey's Dream
Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform
Lee Benson
Temple University Press, 2007

This timely, persuasive, and hopeful book reexamines John Dewey's idea of schools, specifically community schools, as the best places to grow a democratic society that is based on racial, social, and economic justice. The authors assert that American colleges and universities bear a responsibility for-and would benefit substantially from-working with schools to develop democratic schools and communities.

Dewey's Dream opens with a reappraisal of Dewey's philosophy and an argument for its continued relevance today. The authors-all well-known in education circles-use illustrations from over 20 years of experience working with public schools in the University of Pennsylvania's local ecological community of West Philadelphia, to demonstrate how their ideas can be put into action. By emphasizing problem-solving as the foundation of education, their work has awakened university students to their social responsibilities. And while the project is still young, it demonstrates that Dewey's "Utopian ends" of creating optimally participatory democratic societies can lead to practical, constructive school, higher education and community change, development, and improvement.

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Dewey's New Logic
A Reply to Russell
Tom Burke
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Although John Dewey is celebrated for his work in the philosophy of education and acknowledged as a leading proponent of American pragmatism, he might also have enjoyed more of a reputation for his philosophy of logic had Bertrand Russell not attacked him so fervently on the subject. In Dewey's New Logic, Tom Burke analyzes the debate between Russell and Dewey that followed the 1938 publication of Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Here, he argues that Russell failed to understand Dewey's logic as Dewey intended, and despite Russell's resistance, Dewey's logic is surprisingly relevant to recent developments in philosophy and cognitive science.

Burke demonstrates that Russell misunderstood crucial aspects of Dewey's theory and contends that logic today has progressed beyond Russell and is approaching Dewey's broader perspective.

"[This] book should be of substantial interest not only to Dewey scholars and other historians of twentieth-century philosophy, but also to devotees of situation theory, formal semantics, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and Artificial Intelligence."—Georges Dicker, Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society

"No scholar, thus far, has offered such a sophisticated and detailed version of central themes and contentions in Dewey's Logic. This is a pathbreaking study."—John J. McDermott, editor of The Philosophy of John Dewey
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The Evolution of Pragmatism in India
Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction
Scott R. Stroud
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The story of how the Indian reformer Bhimrao Ambedkar reimagined John Dewey’s pragmatism.
 
In The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, Scott R. Stroud delivers a comprehensive exploration of the influence of John Dewey’s pragmatism on Bhimrao Ambedkar, architect of the Republic of India’s constitution. Stroud traces Ambedkar’s development in Dewey’s Columbia University classes in 1913–1916 through his final years in 1950s India when he rewrote the story of Buddhism. Stroud examines pragmatism’s influence not only on the philosophical ideas underpinning Ambedkar’s fight against caste oppression but also how his persuasive techniques drew on pragmatism’s commitment to reconstruction and meliorism. At the same time, Stroud is careful to point out the ways that Ambedkar pushed back against Dewey’s paradigm and developed his own approach to challenges in India. The result is a nuanced study of one of the most important figures in Indian history.
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Experience and Value
Essays on John Dewey & Pragmatic Naturalism
S. Morris Eames. Edited by Elizabeth R. Eames and Richard W. Field
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism brings together twelve philosophical essays spanning the career of noted Dewey scholar, S. Morris Eames. The volume includes both critiques and interpretations of important issues in John Dewey’s value theory as well as the application of Eames’s pragmatic naturalism in addressing contemporary problems in social theory, education, and religion.

The collection begins with a discussion of the underlying principles of Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism, including the concepts of nature, experience, and philosophic method. Essays “Experience and Philosophical Method in John Dewey” and “Primary Experience in the Philosophy of John Dewey” develop what Eames believed to be a central theme in Dewey’s thought and provide a theoretical framework for subsequent discussion.

The volume continues with specific applications of this framework in the areas of value theory, moral theory, social philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Eames’s analysis of value exposes the connection between the immediately felt values of experience and the more sophisticated judgments of value that are the product of reflection. From this basis in moral theory, Eames considers the derivation of judgments of obligation from judgments of fact. This discussion provides a grounding for a consideration of contemporary social issues directed by naturalistic and scientific principles.

In the third section, with regard to educational theory, Eames considers possible resolutions of the current dichotomy between the factual worldview of science and the humanistic worldview of the liberal arts. The comprehensive article, “Dewey’s Views of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,” connects the essays of the first and second sections and explores the placement of Dewey’s value theory with respect to morals and aesthetics. With “Creativity and Democracy,” in the fourth section, Eames also considers the concept of democracy from the standpoint of current and historical issues faced by society. This article hints at a major project of Eames’s intellectual life—the theory of democracy.

The volume concludes with a discussion of the difficulty of maintaining the values of religious experience in a scientifically and technologically sophisticated world, the very topic that first brought Eames to philosophy—the meaning of religion and the religious life. Suggested solutions are offered in “The Lost Individual and Religious Unity.”

Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism illuminates Eames’ life of inquiry, a life that included moral, social, aesthetic, and religious dimensions of value—all suffused with the influence of John Dewey.

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The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal
John Dewey and the Transcendent
Victor Kestenbaum
University of Chicago Press, 2002
In this highly original book, Victor Kestenbaum calls into question the oft-repeated assumption that John Dewey's pragmatism has no place for the transcendent. Kestenbaum demonstrates that, far from ignoring the transcendent ideal, Dewey's works—on education, ethics, art, and religion—are in fact shaped by the tension between the natural and the transcendent.

Kestenbaum argues that to Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for ideal meaning occurs at the frontier of the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible. Penetrating analyses of Dewey's early and later writings, as well as comparisons with the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Oakeshott, and Wallace Stevens, shed new light on why Dewey regarded the human being's relationship to the ideal as "the most far-reaching question" of philosophy. For Dewey, the pragmatic struggle for the good life required a willingness "to surrender the actual experienced good for a possible ideal good." Dewey's pragmatism helps us to understand the place of the transcendent ideal in a world of action and practice.
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In a Shade of Blue
Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In this provocative book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., one of our nation’s rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to Glaude’s mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, he argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African American politics.
 
According to Glaude, Dewey’s pragmatism, when attentive to the darker dimensions of life—or what we often speak of as the blues—can address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African American discourse. How blacks think about themselves, how they imagine their own history, and how they conceive of their own actions can be rendered in ways that escape bad ways of thinking that assume a tendentious political unity among African Americans simply because they are black. Drawing deeply on black religious thought and literature, In a Shade of Blue seeks to dislodge such crude and simplistic thinking and replace it with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for black life in all its variety and intricacy. Glaude argues that only when black political leaders acknowledge such complexity can the real-life sufferings of many African Americans be remedied, an argument echoed in the recent rhetoric and optimism of the Barack Obama presidential campaign.

 
In a Shade of Blue is a remarkable work of political commentary and to follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their cultural and political history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century.
 
“Eddie Glaude is the towering public intellectual of his generation.”—Cornel West
 
“Eddie Glaude is poised to become the leading intellectual voice of our generation, raising questions that make us reexamine the assumptions we hold by expanding our inventory of ideas.”—Tavis Smiley
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John Dewey, America's Peace-Minded Educator
Charles F. Howlett and Audrey Cohan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
One of America’s preeminent educational philosophers and public intellectuals, John Dewey is perhaps best known for his interest in the study of pragmatic philosophy and his application of progressive ideas to the field of education. Carrying his ideas and actions beyond the academy, he tied his philosophy to pacifist ideology in America after World War I in order to achieve a democratic world order. Although his work and life have been well documented, his role in the postwar peace movement has been generally overlooked.
 
In John Dewey, America’s Peace-Minded Educator, authors Charles F. Howlett and Audrey Cohan take a close look at John Dewey’s many undertakings on behalf of world peace. This volume covers Dewey’s support of, and subsequent disillusionment with, the First World War as well as his postwar involvement in trying to prevent another world war. Other topics include his interest in peace movements in education, his condemnation of American military intervention in Latin America and of armaments and munitions makers during the Great Depression, his defense of civil liberties during World War II, and his cautions at the start of the atomic age. The concluding epilogue discusses how Dewey fell out of favor with some academics and social critics in the 1950s and explores how Dewey’s ideas can still be useful to peace education today.
 
Exploring Dewey’s use of pragmatic philosophy to build a consensus for world peace, Howlett and Cohan illuminate a previously neglected aspect of his contributions to American political and social thought and remind us of the importance of creating a culture of peace through educational awareness.
 
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John Dewey and Continental Philosophy
Edited by Paul Fairfield
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

“These essays build a valuable, if virtual, bridge between the thought of John Dewey and that of a host of modern European philosophers. They invite us to entertain a set of imagined conversations among the mighty dead that no doubt would have intrigued Dewey and each of the interlocutors gathered here.”—Robert Westbrook, author of John Dewey and American Democracy and/or Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth.

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.

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.

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John Dewey's Educational Philosophy in International Perspective
A New Democracy for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Larry A. Hickman and Giuseppe Spadafora
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

John Dewey’s Educational Philosophy in International Perspective brings together eleven experts from around the globe to examine the international legacy of the famous philosopher. Placing special emphasis on Dewey’s theories of education, Larry A. Hickman and Giuseppe Spadafora have gathered some of the world’s most noted scholars of educational philosophy to present a thorough exploration of Dewey’s enduring relevance and potential as a tool for change in twenty-first-century political and social institutions.

This collection offers close examinations of the global impact of Dewey’s philosophies, both in his time and our own. Included are discussions of his reception as a much-respected yet criticized philosopher among European Catholics both before and after World War I; the utilization of his pragmatic theories in Italian education and the continuing quest to reinterpret them; his emergence as a source of inspiration to new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe; and his recently renewed popularity in the Hispanic world, particularly in South America and Spain. In addition, authors delve into Dewey’s notion of democracy as a personal way of life and his views on the important ties between education and the democratic state.

Also discussed are Dewey’s philosophies regarding school and society, including the understanding of educational trends as reflections of their social context; the contrast between his methods of applying intelligence to ethical problems and the theory of orthodox utilitarianism; responses to criticisms of Dewey’s controversial belief that the sciences can be applied directly to educational practices; and incisive queries into how he would have responded to the crucial role the Internet now plays in primary and secondary education.

This well-rounded volume provides international insight into Dewey’s philosophies and contains a wealth of information never before published in English, resulting in an indispensable resource for anyone interested in John Dewey and his lasting role in education around the world.

Contributors

Viviana Burza

Franco Cambi

Giorgio Chiosso

Jim Garrison

Jaime Nubiola

Hilary Putnam

Ruth Anna Putnam

Giuseppe Spadafora

Emil Višnovský

Leonard J. Waks

Krystyna Wilkoszewska

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John Dewey's Liberalism
Individual, Community, and Self-Development
Daniel Savage
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

John Dewey's classical pragmatism, Daniel M. Savage asserts, can be used to provide a self-development-based justification of liberal democracy that shows the current debate between liberal individualism and republican communitarianism to be based largely on a set of pseudoproblems.

From Dewey's classical pragmatism, Savage derives a conception of individual autonomy that, while meeting all of the criteria for a conception of autonomy, does not, as the dominant Kantian variant does, require transcendence from any particular language community. The Deweyan conception of autonomy that Savage derived from classical pragmatism, in fact, requires that the individual be situated within a context of cultural beliefs. Savage argues that this particular conception of autonomy is necessary if one wants to conceive of life, as communitarians do, as a quest for the good life within a social context.

Thus, Savage constructs a conception of autonomy that consists of a set of intellectual virtues, each of which can be understood, like Aristotle's moral virtues, as a mean between two extremes (or vices). The virtue of critical reflection is the mean between the vices of dogmatism on the one hand and philosophical skepticism on the other. The virtue of creative individuality is the mean between the opposing vices of conformity and eccentricity. Finally, the virtue of sociability is the mean between the extremes of docility and rebelliousness.

The three virtues together provide a natural method of adapting to change. The method is natural because it is in accord with a continuous cycle of activity—tension/movement/harmony—that is generic to all living things, Dewey's method of adapting to change requires, in both the individual and in the community, the synthesis of integrating and differentiating forces.

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Knut Hamsun Remembers America
Essays and Stories, 1885-1949
Knut Hamsun, Translated and Edited by Richard Nelson Current
University of Missouri Press, 2003
When Americans remember him at all, they no doubt think of Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) as the author of Hunger or as the Norwegian who, along with Vidkun Quisling, betrayed his country by supporting the Nazis during World War II. Yet Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1920 for his novel The Growth of the Soil, was and remains one of the most important and influential novelists of his time. Knut Hamsun Remembers America is a collection of thirteen essays and stories based largely on Hamsun’s experiences during the four years he spent in the United States when he was a young man. Most of these pieces have never been published before in an English translation, and none are readily available.
Hamsun’s feelings about America and American ways were complex. For the most part, they were more negative than positive, and they found expression in many of his writings—directly in his reminiscences and indirectly in his fiction. In On the Cultural Life of Modern America, his first major book, he portrayed the United States as a land of gross and greedy materialism, populated by illiterates who were utterly lacking in artistic originality or refinement. Although the pieces in this collection are not all anti-American, most of them emphasize the strangeness and unpleasantness, as the author saw it, of life in what he called Yankeeland.
Arranged chronologically, the pieces fall into three categories: Critical Reporting, Memory and Fantasy, and Mellow Reminiscence. The Critical Reporting section includes articles that appeared in Norwegian or Danish newspapers soon after each of Hamsun’s two visits to America and that give his views on a variety of American subjects, and includes an essay devoted to Mark Twain. Memory and Fantasy comprises narratives of life in America, most of which are presented as personal experiences but which actually are blends of fact and fiction. Mellow Reminiscence includes later and fonder recollections and impressions of the United States.
The pieces in this collection provide variations on a theme that runs through much of American history—European criticism of American ways. They give vivid, at times distorted, pictures of life as it was in the United States. They tell us something about the development of the worldview of a man who became a great writer, only to jeopardize his reputation by defending the Nazi oppressors of his own people. Knut Hamsun Remembers America will appeal to anyone interested in the history of American civilization or, more specifically, in the history of anti-Americanism.
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Naturalizing Philosophy of Education
John Dewey in the Postanalytic Period
Jerome A. Popp
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

Jerome A. Popp examines the role of Dewey-based pragmatism in the past, present, and future of philosophy of education. He insists that even though Marx-ian utopian thought subjugated Dewey’s ideas during the 1970s, Dewey’s epistemological arguments are directly relevant to contemporary philosophy. He contends that not only are Dewey’s arguments related to how we think about philosophy of education; they actually improve the thinking reflected in the literature. Dewey’s arguments, he demonstrates, provide the basis for both a rejuvenated account of conceptual analysis and a criticism of the utopian relativism currently dominating the literature.

Popp notes that empiricism, manifested in the philosophy of education as analytic philosophy, holds that scientific findings, especially from psychology, have no place in philosophy. But contemporary writers in the philosophy of science contend that to justify the methods of science we must consider what is known about intelligence and cognitive processes. These arguments are relevant to the ways in which we justify claims about proper education.

Naturalizing epistemology (using the results of science in philosophic theories) leads to an enhanced account of Dewey’s instrumental approach to normative inquiry and strengthens attempts to justify educational practices. Dewey’s critique of utopian approaches to social theory is bolstered by contemporary arguments in epistemology and the philosophy of science. These arguments reject the attempt by some in philosophy of education to solve value questions through an appeal to utopian thinking. Popp agrees with Dewey’s view that the proper goals of education cannot be stated in these terms.

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The Necessity of Pragmatism
John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy
R. W. Sleeper
University of Illinois Press, 1986
Hailed as "the most important overall reassessment of Dewey in several decades" (Sidney Ratner, Journal of Speculative Philosophy), The Necessity of Pragmatism investigates the most difficult and neglected aspects of Dewey's thought, his metaphysics and logic. R. W. Sleeper argues for a fundamental unity in Dewey's work, a unity that rests on his philosophy of language, and clarifies Dewey's conception of pragmatism as an action-based philosophy with the power to effect social change through criticism and inquiry.
 
Identifying Dewey's differences with his pragmatist forerunners, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, Sleeper elucidates Dewey's reshaping of pragmatism and the radical significance of his philosophy of culture. In this first paperback edition, a new introduction by Tom Burke establishes the ongoing importance of Sleeper's analysis of the integrity of Dewey's work and its implications for mathematics, aesthetics, and the cognitive sciences.
 
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Pragmatism and Feminism
Reweaving the Social Fabric
Charlene Haddock Seigfried
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Though many pioneering feminists were deeply influenced by American pragmatism, their contemporary followers have generally ignored that tradition because of its marginalization by a philosophical mainstream intent on neutral analyses devoid of subjectivity. In this revealing work, Charlene Haddock Seigfried effectively reunites two major social and philosophical movements, arguing that pragmatism, because of its focus on the emancipatory potential of everyday experiences, offers feminism its most viable and powerful philosophical foundation.

With careful attention to their interwoven histories and contemporary concerns, Pragmatism and Feminism effectively invigorates both traditions, opening them to new interpretations and appropriations and asserting their timely philosophical relevance. This foundational work in feminist theory simultaneously invites and guides future scholarship in an area of rapidly emerging significance.
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Pragmatism and Political Theory
From Dewey to Rorty
Matthew Festenstein
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Pragmatism has enjoyed a considerable revival in the latter part of the twentieth century, but what precisely constitutes pragmatism remains a matter of dispute. In reconstructing the pragmatic tradition in political philosophy, Matthew Festenstein rejects the idea that it is a single, cohesive doctrine. His incisive analysis brings out the commonalities and shared concerns among contemporary pragmatists while making clear their differences in how they would resolve those concerns. His study begins with the work of John Dewey and the moral and psychological conceptions that shaped his philosophy. Here Festenstein lays out the major philosophic issues with which first Dewey, and then his heirs, would grapple.

The book's second part traces how Dewey's approach has been differently developed, especially in the work of three contemporary pragmatic thinkers: Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam. This first full-length critical study of the relationship between the pragmatist tradition and political philosophy fills a significant gap in contemporary thought.
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Pragmatism as a Way of Life
The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey
Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam; edited by David Macarthur
Harvard University Press, 2017

Throughout his diverse and highly influential career, Hilary Putnam was famous for changing his mind. As a pragmatist he treated philosophical “positions” as experiments in deliberate living. His aim was not to fix on one position but to attempt to do justice to the depth and complexity of reality. In this new collection, he and Ruth Anna Putnam argue that key elements of the classical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey provide a framework for the most progressive and forward-looking forms of philosophy in contemporary thought. The Putnams present a compelling defense of the radical originality of the philosophical ideas of James and Dewey and their usefulness in confronting the urgent social, political, and moral problems of the twenty-first century.

Pragmatism as a Way of Life brings together almost all of the Putnams’ pragmatist writings—essays they wrote as individuals and as coauthors. The pragmatism they endorse, though respectful of the sciences, is an open experience-based philosophy of our everyday lives that trenchantly criticizes the fact/value dualism running through contemporary culture. Hilary Putnam argues that all facts are dependent on cognitive values, while Ruth Anna Putnam turns the problem around, illuminating the factual basis of moral principles. Together, they offer a shared vision which, in Hilary’s words, “could serve as a manifesto for what the two of us would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-first century and beyond.”

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Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism
The Foundational Crisis of the Separation of Church and State
J. Judd Owen
University of Chicago Press, 2001
If liberalism is premised on inclusion, pluralism, and religious neutrality, can the separation of church and state be said to have a unitary and rational foundation? If we accept that there are no self-evident principles of morality or politics, then doesn't any belief in a rational society become a sort of faith? And how can liberalism mediate impartially between various faiths—as it aims to do—if liberalism itself is one of the competing faiths?

J. Judd Owen answers these questions with a remarkable critical analysis of four twentieth-century liberal and postliberal thinkers: John Dewey, John Rawls and, most extensively, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. His unique readings of these theorists and their approaches to religion lead him to conclusions that are meticulously constructed and surprising, arguing against the perception of liberalism as simple moral or religious neutrality, calling into question the prevailing justifications for separation of church and state, and challenging the way we think about the very basis of constitutional government.
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The School and Society
John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Introduction by Joe R. Burnett
Southern Illinois University Press, 1980

First published in 1899,The School and Society describes John Dewey’s experiences with his own famous Laboratory School, started in 1896.

Dewey’s experiments at the Labora­tory School reflected his original social and educational philosophy based on American experience and concepts of democracy, not on European education models then in vogue. This forerunner of the major works shows Dewey’s per­vasive concern with the need for a rich, dynamic, and viable society.

In his introduction to this volume, Joe R. Burnett states Dewey’s theme. Industrialization, urbanization, science, and technology have created a revolution the schools cannot ignore. Dewey carries this theme through eight chapters: The School and Social Progress; The School and the Life of the Child; Waste in Education; Three Years of the University Elementary School; The Psychology of Elementary Education; Froebel’s Educa­tional Principles; The Psychology of Occupations; and the Development of Attention.

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front cover of Teachers, Leaders, and Schools
Teachers, Leaders, and Schools
Essays by John Dewey
Edited by Douglas J. Simpson and Sam F. Stack Jr.
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

John Dewey was one of the most prominent philosophers and educational thinkers of the twentieth century, and his influence on modern education continues today. In Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey, educators Douglas J. Simpson and Sam F. Stack Jr. have gathered some of  Dewey’s most user-friendly and insightful essays concerning education with the purpose of aiding potential and practicing teachers, administrators, and policy makers to prepare students for participation in democratic society.

Selected largely, but not exclusively, for their accessibility, relevance, and breadth of information, these articles are grouped into five parts—The Classroom Teacher, The School Curriculum, The Educational Leader, The Ideal School, and The Democratic Society. Each part includes an introductory essay that connects Dewey’s thoughts not only to each other but also to current educational concerns. The sections build on one another, revealing Dewey’s educational theories and interests and illustrating how his thoughts remain relevant today.

 

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front cover of Toward a Pragmatist Sociology
Toward a Pragmatist Sociology
John Dewey and the Legacy of C. Wright Mills
Robert G. Dunn
Temple University Press, 2018

In Toward a Pragmatist Sociology, Robert Dunn explores the relationship between the ideas of philosopher and educator John Dewey and those of sociologist C. Wright Mills in order to provide a philosophical and theoretical foundation for the development of a critical and public sociology. Dunn recovers an intellectual and conceptual framework for transforming sociology into a more substantive, comprehensive, and socially useful discipline. 

Toward a Pragmatist Sociology argues that Dewey and Mills shared a common vision of a relevant, critical, public sociology dedicated to the solution of societal problems. Dunn investigates the past and present state of the discipline, critiquing its dominant tendencies, and offering historical examples of alternatives to conventional sociological approaches.  

By stressing the similar intellectual and moral visions of both men, Toward a Pragmatist Sociology provides an original treatment of two important American thinkers whose work offers a conception and model of a sociology with a sense of moral and political purpose and public relevance. It should liberate future sociologists and others to regard the discipline as not only a science but an intellectual, moral, and political enterprise.

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front cover of Translating Modernism
Translating Modernism
Fitzgerald and Hemingway
Ronald Berman
University of Alabama Press, 2009
In Translating Modernism Ronald Berman continues his career-long study of the ways that intellectual and philosophical ideas informed and transformed the work of America’s major modernist writers.
Here Berman shows how Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrestled with very specific intellectual, artistic, and psychological influences, influences particular to each writer, particular to the time in which they wrote, and which left distinctive marks on their entire oeuvres. Specifically, Berman addresses the idea of "translating" or "translation"—for Fitzgerald the translation of ideas from Freud, Dewey, and James, among others; and for Hemingway the translation of visual modernism and composition, via Cézanne.
Though each writer had distinct interests and different intellectual problems to wrestle with, as Berman demonstrates, both had to wrestle with transmuting some outside influence and making it their own.
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front cover of Works about John Dewey, 1886-2012
Works about John Dewey, 1886-2012
Compiled and Edited by Barbara Levine
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Works of John Dewey, 1886–2012 is an invaluable and meticulously compiled resource for the growing number of scholars and researchers seeking a deeper understanding of the work of the prominent American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.

Dewey (1859–1952), an influential philosopher credited with the founding of pragmatism and also recognized as a pioneer in functional psychology and the progressive moment in education, was hailed by Life magazine in 1990 as one of the one hundred most important Americans of the twentieth century. This rich and continually expanding compendium of historical and more recent essays, research, and references is a testament to the growing interest in Dewey’s intellectual work and his measurable impact in the United States and throughout the world.

In Works of John Dewey, 1886–2012, some four thousand new entries are presented in ebook format, in addition to those from earlier print and electronic editions dating back to 1995. Copies of most of the works have been obtained and are stored at the Center for Dewey Studies. For the first time, users can access all items from all editions in one user-friendly format. Jump links to alphabetical sections facilitate movement through the vast collection of entries. Users can search by keyword and author.

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front cover of The World in Which We Occur
The World in Which We Occur
John Dewey, Pragmatist Ecology, and American Ecological Writing in the Twentieth Century
Neil W. Browne
University of Alabama Press, 2007
American philosopher John Dewey considered all human endeavors to be one with the natural world. In his writings, particularly Art as Experience (1934), Dewey insists on the primacy of the environment in aesthetic experience. Dewey’s conception of environment includes both the natural and the man-made. The World in Which We Occur highlights this notion in order to define “pragmatist ecology,” a practice rooted in the interface of the cultural and the natural. Neil Browne finds this to be a significant feature of some of the most important ecological writing of the last century.
 
To fully understand human involvement in the natural world, Browne argues that disciplinary boundaries must be opened, with profound implications for the practice of democracy. The degradation of the physical environment and democratic decay, for Browne, are rooted in the same problem: our persistent belief that humans are somehow separate from their physical environment.
 
Browne probes the work of a number of major American writers through the lens of Dewey’s philosophy. Among other texts examined are John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911); Sea of Cortez (1941) by John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts; Rachel Carson’s three books about the sea, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955); John Haines’s The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989); Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986); and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991). Together, these texts—with their combinations of scientific observation and personal meditation—challenge the dichotomies that we have become accustomed and affirm the principles of a pragmatist ecology, one in which ecological and democratic
values go hand in hand.
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