Seeing Together: Mind, Matter, and the Experimental Outlook of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley by Frank X. Ryan (review)

In the past twenty years, scholarly interest in John Dewey's later writings has surged. While later works such as Art as Experience (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), and Freedom and Culture (1939) have received considerable attention, Knowing and the Known (1949), Dewey's late-in-life collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley, has been largely neglected. A common bias among Dewey scholars is that this work, instead of developing Dewey's Logic, departs from its spirit, reflects the overbearing influence of Bentley on Dewey (who was at the time an octogenarian), and, therefore, merits little serious scholarly consideration. However, Dewey and Bentley engaged in an extended correspondence, collected in John Dewey and Arthur Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence, 1932-1951 (1964), the result of which was no less than a watershed moment in Dewey's thinking on the experimental method of inquiry. The Logic was improved in ways that incorporated the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce's logic and developed Dewey's earlier work in a direction expressly intended by the aging pragmatist. Indeed, Dewey writes in correspondence with his co-author: "You [Bentley] shouldn't lean too heavily on the [1938] Logic; it wasn't a bad job at the time, but I could do better now [with Knowing and the Known]; largely through association with you and getting the courage to see my thing [logical theory] through without compromise" (Correspondence, 4:595, see also 184, 420, 481, 483-84).

One of the few scholars of American pragmatism to acknowledge that Knowing and the Known was a watershed development in Dewey's thinking is Frank X. Ryan, author of an exciting new book, Seeing Together: Mind, Matter, and the Experimental Outlook of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, that clearly and concisely presents the revolutionary method developed in Knowing and Known: the transactional approach. However, as the author notes in the Preface, the book does more than offer a "mere summary or exposition" (ii). It also argues that the transactional method can help philosophers generally, and philosophical pragmatists specifically, reconceive their role as interdisciplinary specialists, assisting natural and social scientists in breaking through previous barriers and bringing progress to their separate fields of inquiry. The book is organized into seven main sections: (1) an introduction; (2) an initial chapter devoted to reconstructing the history of Western philosophy along transactional lines; (3) another on Dewey's groundbreaking method of inquiry; (4) one on the vital relationship between self-action, interaction, and transaction; (5) another on the implications of transaction for an expansive theory of experience; (6) a penultimate chapter on how transaction illuminates communicative behavior; and (7) a final chapter about the treating the transactional approach as a theory of valuation.

Reminding the reader of Bentley's declaration (in his 1908 work The Process of Government) that "THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT TO FASHION A TOOL," Ryan begins with the simple, though pregnant, notion that philosophy is an instrument: "The philosophy introduced in these pages, transaction, is a radical extension of this idea [that philosophy is a tool] . . . [for] transaction 'sees together' as dynamically interdependent what we know and how we come to know" (i). The tool of philosophy has a long history of use, punctuated by two competing views: rationalism, the metaphysical-epistemological position that objects in our world, in Ryan's words, "conform to mind," and empiricism, the opposite view that "Mind conforms to objects" (8). Rationalists, such as Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, espoused the notion that reality comes to us already infused with intellectual content (whether Plato's forms, Descartes's clear and distinct ideas, or God's infinite mind). In contrast, empiricists, such as Locke and Hume, insist that what is experienced, at least initially, are not conceptual forms, ideas, or infinite mind, but sensible particulars directly perceived in a raw physical world. But how can we be assured of the existence...