The Continuing Relevance of John Dewey

The Continuing Relevance of John Dewey: Reflections on Aesthetics, Morality, Science, and Society gathers selected and revised essays from a conference at the University of Opole in Poland. The conference, held in June 2009, marked the anniversary of John Dewey’s 150th birthday, and pursued as its stated theme: “John Dewey in the context of American and European Values.” The volume begins with an introduction by Larry Hickman, one of John Dewey’s most committed and energetic champions. The rest of the volume’s seventeen essays are organized into four sections: (1) Aesthetics, (2) Ethics, (3) Science and Logic, and lastly, (4) Society.

The first section features six essays on aesthetics that range across an assortment of issues. Taken as a group, these essays do well to accentuate the pivotal role in Dewey’s thought of aesthetic experience. Aesthetics is indeed a central theme in Dewey’s corpus (it is fitting, admittedly, that a selection of essays on aesthetics would come first in a volume of this kind) and the authors of the papers in this section admirably bring out some implications that Deweyan aesthetics have both for political theory and naturalized ethics. It is decisively un-Deweyan to demand necessary and sufficient conditions for some concept, but “aesthetics” in these essays seems to take on different meanings at different times. Sometimes, as in John Ryder’s “Experience, Knowledge and Art,” the term can be substituted for “art.” At other times, as in James Campbell’s “Aesthetics as Social Philosophy” (in my opinion, the finest essay in this section), it comes to mean something more like “the organic unity between individual and community.”

The volume’s second section offers four papers on ethics. While loyal and experienced readers of Dewey are unlikely to gain much from these offerings, they nevertheless do well to highlight the anti-foundationalism and functionalism that was at the center of Dewey’s ethical thinking. Angel M. Faerna’s piece, “Dewey’s Value Theory and the Analytic Tradition of Moral Philosophy,” is particularly noteworthy on this score. Hugh McDonald’s essay on Dewey’s theory of evaluation provides a clear and helpful overview of Dewey’s theory, though, as far as I can tell, it is almost entirely expository and does not break new ground. Rather conspicuous for its absence is any sustained discussion of Darwin’s influence on Deweyan ethics. Dewey’s approach to ethics was profoundly shaped by a Darwinian view of human beings, and this omission is rather glaring—especially for a volume touting Dewey’s “continuing relevance.” As is well known, Dewey repudiated the idea—the least common denominator between Kant and Bentham—that there are supreme, fixed moral axioms from which the right course of action in every predicament might be deduced. On Dewey’s view, no two moral situations are exactly alike. Thus, for any given problem, we need to be attentive both to its specific contours and the plurality of normative considerations that might bear on its moral resolution. Doing so results in what Dewey famously called “reflective morality,” which is to be distinguished from (and supersedes) its “customary” counterpart. Roughly, the difference is between doing what comes “naturally” and acting on the basis of intelligent reflection and experimentation. This picture of ethical progress is decidedly in a Darwinian key, and is fertile ground for contemporary ethics. More attention and engagement on this score would have been a welcome inclusion.

The next section features three essays on science and logic. Dewey was particularly smitten with the democratic impetus of scientific inquiry at its best. The analogy between science and democracy was pushed frequently throughout his work, implying both that a democratic community requires scientific (experimentalist) sensibilities, and that a scientific community of inquirers embodies many of the traits constitutive of democracy in general: a willingness to work in concert with others, to revise...