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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Companion to Dewey
  • Robert B. Talisse
Molly Cochran (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Dewey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, xviii + 356pp., with an index.

Chief among the many virtues of The Cambridge Companion to Dewey is its list of contributors. Rather than rounding up the usual disciples, Molly Cochran has instead enlisted several prominent scholars who are distinguished not so much by their skill in repackaging Dewey's ideas, but rather by their original contributions to philosophy. This brings to the volume a lively air. Most of the chapters break with the familiar pattern in which an author reports Dewey's views, shows how they compare favorably to some weakly developed alternative, and then exhorts the reader to adopt them. Rather than cheerleading and preaching, we find here philosophers grappling with Dewey. Many contributors aspire to engage in what Nel Noddings calls in her essay "appreciative critique" (265). That is, many essays seek to reassess Dewey's views in light of contemporary developments and against the backdrop of the authors' own (not necessarily Deweyan) commitments. Dewey rarely emerges unscathed; yet even those who are most critical show how Dewey's views remain a vital source of insight. Committed Deweyans will find many challenges.

A related virtue is that most of the chapters strike a healthy balance between exegesis and critique. Each essay begins by presenting Dewey's views on the issue at hand. These exegetical moments are uniformly careful, jargon-free, and well-informed. They enable the reader both to understand Dewey's views and to appreciate the critical engagements that often follow. Consequently, the Companion could be read with profit by amateurs and experts alike. It can also be recommended for advanced courses on Dewey.

Another virtue is that the volume covers a broad range of themes. The Companion features a total of fourteen chapters, beginning with an outstanding essay by Robert Westbrook about Dewey's intellectual development. Other chapters focus on the mainstays of Dewey's philosophy: epistemology (Ruth Anna Putnam), experimentalism (James Tiles), inquiry (Isaac Levi), metaphysics (Richard Gale), ethics (Jennifer Welchman), aesthetics (Richard Eldridge), philosophy of religion (Sami Pihlstrom), philosophy of education (Nel Noddings), and political philosophy (Richard Bernstein). Importantly, the Companion also includes chapters dealing with topics less often discussed, such as Dewey's views about intentional action (Matthias Jung), his conception of cognition (Mark Johnson), his moral psychology (James Bohman), and his views about international relations (Molly Cochran). The essays of this latter kind typically attend to the continuities within Dewey's philosophy; for example, Cochran helps us to see how Dewey's views about experience and democracy lead naturally to concerns about global politics that [End Page 112] Dewey did not address. Thus the volume suggests some new and largely unexplored dimensions of Deweyan pragmatism.

In short, this is generally an excellent collection which deserves a central place among the scholarly resources available to those working on Dewey's philosophy. As I cannot engage here with all of the chapters in the Companion, I will mention a few highlights, and then offer two critical observations.

The stand-outs are the chapters by Richard Gale, Isaac Levi, Jennifer Welchman, and James Bohman. Of these, Levi and Gale are the most critical of Dewey. In "The Naturalism of John Dewey," Richard Gale argues that Dewey ultimately succumbs to the kind of metaphysical mysticism that his officially-declared naturalism disallows; Gale concludes that "the future of philosophy is all the richer" because Dewey failed "to adhere to his own deconstructionist metaphilosophy" (76). Noting that his views draw inspiration from Dewey and Peirce (80), Isaac Levi, in his fascinating essay on "Dewey's Logic of Inquiry," presses the need to distinguish a model of inquiry which seeks to affect changes in the world from one which sees inquiry as changing the inquirer's point of view (83) or commitment (89); this latter formulation leads us to a less casual view of truth than Dewey would have endorsed (99). According to Levi, we must opt for the non-Deweyan formulation if we are to sustain a defensible version of pragmatic naturalism.

The contributions of Welchman and Bohman both fix on Dewey's moral philosophy...

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