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Conclusion The Revival of Dewey’s Naturalism As this intellectual biography draws to a close, recounting the highlights of Dewey’s career as a public philosopher and naturalist enables us to assess and put his contribution in contemporary perspective. Unlike the criticisms leveled against Dewey’s pragmatism during its heyday, the rhetorical strategies mounted by some contemporary interpreters endorse rather than condemn the cultural implications of pragmatism, even while gutting its scienti¤c core. This has contributed to the neglect of the relationship between logic and science that Dewey considered fundamental to the relationship between mind and inquiry. Fortunately, there have been recent efforts to reinstate Dewey’s attempt to naturalize science and technology by showing that the inclination to forge philosophical tools as instruments of inquiry is rooted in human evolution and the demand to make thought productive.1 This is an encouraging development that enables Dewey scholars to retrieve the missing strands of Dewey’s naturalism , his philosophy of mind, and his theory of inquiry and to reweave them to form a more integrated understanding of his work as a whole. There are several interrelated themes that emerge from previous chapters that invite some concluding remarks. These have to do with how contemporary scholars and scientists have interpreted differently Dewey’s analysis of the relationships between spirit, nature, mind, and inquiry. This enables us to assess how recent attempts to carry forward Dewey’s attempt to reconstruct the logic of inquiry from a naturalistic perspective have fared. This will also make it possible to situate Dewey in the ongoing debate about instrumental and expressive conceptions of thought and inquiry, and to determine how this debate affects philosophical questions about spirit and scienti¤c conceptions of the brain and mind. Dewey was a dedicated leader of and critical participant in the processes of secularization and modernization that forever transformed American thought and culture after the turn of the twentieth century. His dissatisfaction as a youngster with the Calvinist formula for redemption and God’s grace impelled him to embrace a philosophy that would enable him to better understand and to personally address the social and moral consequences of secularization and modernity for community life. Hegelian idealism initially provided Dewey a congenial platform from which to launch a spirited critique of the materialist theories advanced by Spencer and the transcendental conception of mind proposed by Kant that stood in the way of an experiential and experimental understanding of human development. While he welcomed the advent of the Darwinian and scienti¤c revolutions, Dewey reformulated the premises of evolution and reconstructed the methods of science to better capture their power to advance human inquiry and understanding . By adopting a naturalistic perspective, Dewey was able to argue that mind is an emergent phenomenon and that intelligence consists in developing and enlarging the powers of human judgment. He reasoned that consciousness and judgment work in tandem with emotions to enable us to determine whether our actions and discoveries make a difference that has aesthetic, moral, scienti ¤c, or social value. Dewey encountered resistance among his esteemed fellow pragmatists to his Hegelian-inspired attempt to reconcile mind, nature, and spirit. These criticisms foreshadowed Dewey’s subsequent professional and personal dilemmas involved in his strategies to enlist science in the service of educational and social reform. Dewey’s ambitious goal to demonstrate that mind and society are connected through experience placed a premium on the strategic role of education in increasing the resources for intelligent action. He made a seminal contribution to early childhood education through his Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. There he showed that children learn best when given suf¤cient latitude to de¤ne the rules of intellectual engagement and to choose the tools with which they construct communities for learning and participation in civic life. This agenda for social reconstruction ironically stirred the most enthusiasm and admiration among his students and disciples, such as Randolph Bourne, who believed that educational reform would instigate a cultural rather than a scienti¤c revolution. An economy based on the worship of science and technology , they believed, would be routed and replaced with one rooted in a romantic vision of freedom and creativity. Dewey soon realized that control over the agenda for social reform was slipping from his grasp and that Freudian psychoanalysis had become a cultural fait accompli before entering the mainstream of science. To sustain the relevance of an argument ¤rst proposed by Bourne, Rorty paradoxically has recruited Freud as Dewey...

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