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  • John Dewey's Lost Book - Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy
  • Loren Goldman (bio)
John Dewey , Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Philip Deen (ed). Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 400 pages. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN 10: 0809330792

Sometime in the early 1940s, John Dewey left the manuscript of his long-planned socio-cultural history of Western philosophy in a New York City taxicab, never to see it again. Even with 37 volumes of collected works and 3 volumes of correspondence, the fantasy of Dewey's "lost book" has tantalized pragmatic imaginations for decades. This is especially true for those interested in Dewey's later years. Works like Freedom and Culture (1939) and the unpublished revised introduction to Experience and Nature (1949) find Dewey arguing that pragmatism's emphasis on thought as a tool for human conduct entailed conversations with anthropology, a field focused on the material and ideational practices shaping human behavior. While these discussions are rich and suggestive, offering insight into the radicalism of Dewey's politics and his self-understanding in relation to Marx, they ultimately afford readers only a glimpse of his approach to cultural inquiry. Now, thanks to Philip Deen's extraordinary efforts, the equation has changed dramatically: Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy is the reconstructed text of Dewey's once-lost socio-cultural history, the first "new" book by the great thinker to appear in over half a century.

As the taxicab vignette suggests, the very existence of Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy is little short of miraculous: Deen happened upon it whilst researching in the Dewey Archives at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. How the manuscript got there is a mystery. The excellent editorial introduction offers several possibilities: perhaps Dewey's colleague Joseph Ratner or his wife Roberta had it; perhaps Dewey only lost a part of the manuscript (pace his claim to have lost the integral work); perhaps the published text is comprised of a number of earlier drafts (xvi-xvii). Whatever the real story, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy is largely complete, although the manuscript is missing a numbered fifth chapter, and several other chapters have been cobbled together from scattered pieces. The work is split into two major parts, the first of which presents Dewey's cultural history of philosophy, and the second of which dissects longstanding theoretical dualisms like Material/Ideal and Mind/Body with an anthropological scalpel, ascribing their persistence to missed philosophical opportunities rooted in the refusal of modern thinkers to update their methods with the (democratic) times. Alongside these historical and theoretical sections looking at philosophy's past and present, Dewey had originally projected a "practical" section looking towards the future; until some other researcher serendipitously stumbles upon that grail in another forgotten archival box, the more narrowly-focused treatments of better-known texts like Individualism, Old and New, The Public and Its Problems, Liberalism and Social Action, and Freedom and Culture will have to suffice.1

As might be expected from a book that claims the mantle of socio-cultural history, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy ranges across a kaleidoscopic array of topics. The common thread is Dewey's conviction that inquiry must take a comprehensive view of a problematic situation in its widest environing context. As he explains in a chapter dedicated to epistemology,

... [t]he impact of the broadly human problem of knowledge is not within knowledge as a specialized field. It has to do with transaction and interaction carried on between what is known and what is to be done in the entire range of human concerns

(147).

Instead of fixating on a quest for certainty, philosophy should offer an immanent critique of our values, what Dewey described elsewhere as "a criticism of criticisms" (LW 1: 298).2 In Dewey's "transactional" or ecological view, humans must be understood first and foremost as organisms inter-acting with an environment -- life "is not something which goes on below the skin-surface of an organism: it is always an inclusive affair involving connection, interaction of what is within the organic body and what lies outside in space and time..." (LW 1: 215). By the time Dewey wrote Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, he had concluded that...

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