John Dewey Between Pragmatism and Constructivism

Notes

Notes chapter one john dewey: his life and work (Larry A. Hickman) 1. Even if these technologies exposed his innate shyness, as is apparent in the clip. 2. Hull House was a widely known example of the late-nineteenthcentury social settlement movement in major American cities that reacted, among other things, to the great migration and urbanization processes that followed the Civil War. Hull House provided solidarity and support for marginalized parts of the citizenry and a forum for progressive thinking and social reform. Great importance was attached to social education and political work, especially with female immigrants. Addams tried to establish political coalitions among urban workers, peasants, socialists, and other progressive intellectuals and to support legislative amelioration of the situation of industrial workers and better urban services (see Westbrook 1991, 85). Most of its work was carried out by women. Hull House is also often cited today as an outstanding example of pioneering work in Pragmatist feminism (see Seigfried 1996, 57ff.). For further information see http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/ hull/hull_house.html. Retrieved July 31, 2007. 3. See Jim Garrison’s extensive discussion in Chapter 5 of this volume. 4. It is important to note that by ‘‘adjustment’’ Dewey does not simply have in mind the passive acceptance of an environment. In ‘‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy’’ (1917), e.g., he writes: ‘‘as life requires the fitness of the environment to the organic functions, adjustment to the environment means not passive acceptance of the latter, but acting so that the environing changes take a certain turn. The ‘higher’ the type of life, the more adjustment takes the form of an adjusting of the factors of the environment to one {  }  notes to pages 20–23 another in the interest of life . . .’’ (MW 10:8). See also the distinction between passive and active adaptation in his ‘‘Contributions to Cyclopedia of Education’’ (MW 6:364f), where he notes that in ‘‘progressive societies . . . activities are to an extent directed toward securing an adaptation of the environment to the individual’s needs and ends, rather than vice versa.’’ chapter two pragmatism: diversity of subjects in dewey’s philosophy and the present dewey scholarship (Stefan Neubert) 1. There are, however, already in Dewey’s Middle Works a number of minor writings in which his mature concept of experience is already prefigured and progressively worked out. Compare, e.g., the writings indicated by the key words ‘‘experience’’ and ‘‘immediate empiricism’’ in the index of MW 3, the essay ‘‘The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry’’ (MW 8:3– 13), Chapter 11 of Democracy and Education (MW 9:146–58), and Chapter 4 in Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW 12:124–38). 2. Compare in this connection Dewey’s important 1931 essay ‘‘Context and Thought’’ (LW 6:3–21), where he criticizes ‘‘the habit of philosophers of neglecting the indispensability of context, both in particular and in general,’’ and suggests that ‘‘the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context’’ (LW 6:5). 3. In addition to Experience and Nature compare especially his two books Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW 12:77–201) and The Quest for Certainty : A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (LW 4). 4. It deserves attention, too, that Dewey eventually explicitly renounced the term ‘‘metaphysics’’ with regard to his own philosophy. His student and colleague Sidney Hook reports in his introduction to the Collected Works edition of Experience and Nature that Dewey ‘‘vowed on the eve of his ninetieth year ‘never to use the words [metaphysics and metaphysical] again in connection with any aspect of my own position’ because, he complained, his use of the terms had been assimilated to the sense they bear ‘in the classic tradition based on Aristotle’’’ (LW 1:viii). In a late draft for a new introduction of Experience and Nature that Dewey wrote in the years before his death (1949–51; see ‘‘The Unfinished Introduction,’’ LW 1:329–64), he was even prepared to jettison the term ‘‘experience’’ and replace it by the term ‘‘culture ,’’ because his specific use of the word ‘‘experience’’ had led to misunderstandings (LW 1:361f.). 5. There is no doubt that this dimension had already been emphasized in earlier works like Experience and Nature (LW 1), but Dewey’s elaboration notes to pages 24–30  in Art as Experience is more systematic and takes place on a considerably broader scale...