Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist

Notes

n o t e s introduction 1. John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 5: 1929–1930, Jo Ann Boydston, ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 155. Hereafter EW (Early Works); MW (Middle Works); LW (Later Works). 2. Randall Collins adeptly employs the tools of social network analysis, pioneered by Bernard Groffman, in his ambitious and scrupulously researched book The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap and Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 7. Collins’s provocative thesis (one shared by the author) is that an original and distinctive body of thought is the product of “coalitions in the mind.” Individual scholarship re®ects the in®uence of “intellectual communities” and networks that cut across generations and make possible, according to Collins, “a repartitioning of attention space,” whereby the focus of interpretive con®icts and innovation is shifted to re®ect the ascendancy of one interpretive point of view over others. For a technical discussion of the methods employed by network analysis see Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 3. George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture 1880–1900 (New York: Twayne, 1992), 40. See also George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 4. Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 5. My research, begun in 1989, has included consultation of numerous archive collections and libraries listed in the bibliography. In addition, I have conducted an extensive number of personal interviews with individuals who were directly acquainted with Dewey or familiar with his colleagues and associates, including Myrtle McGraw. Individuals personally acquainted with Dewey that I interviewed and with whom I corresponded included Lois Murphy and Tao Able, psychologists, Mary Perry, wife of Dewey associate and Rockefeller and Macy Foundation executive Lawrence K. Frank, and Katherine Heyl, former lab assistant to Myrtle McGraw. Persons familiar with Dewey’s scienti¤c associates and acquaintances in the arts whom I consulted included Lawrence J. Pool, a neurosurgeon who worked with Frederick Tilney , director of the Neurological Institute during McGraw’s studies; Muriel Coghill, daughter of neuroanatomist George Coghill, a Dewey acquaintance who served as a consultant in McGraw’s research; Dr. William Damrosch, a pediatrician at Babies Hospital familiar with McGraw; Dr. Alan Frank, son of Lawrence Frank, who was familiar with his father’s colleagues in psychology and psychiatry; Willard C. Rappleye Jr., son of the former director of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation during Dewey’s tenure on the board; Yvette Eastman, daughter of Max Eastman, a Dewey student and literary ¤gure; Dr. Thomas Frank, son of Waldo Frank, a Dewey friend and literary ¤gure; and Maurice Rudiselle, a student and con¤dant of Fr. Eric MacCormack, who was personally familiar with Dewey’s second wife Roberta. In addition, Gerard Piel, founding publisher of Scienti¤c American who covered McGraw’s research as a science reporter for Life magazine, McGraw’s daughter Mitzi Wertheim, and Victor Bergenn, McGraw’s associate at Briarcliff College, each provided important recollections. I have also interviewed persons who were acquainted and/or corresponded with Myrtle McGraw and have referred to her in their published works. Among them are the following psychologists: Berry Brazelton, Jerome Bruner, Gilbert Gottlieb, Lewis Lipsitt , and Philip Zelazo. Also included are neurobiologist Ronald Oppenheim and developmental neurologist Bert Touwen. 6. This account is shared by those holding divergent views of pragmatism. For example , Robert Westbrook in John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 61, contends that Dewey made the shift from absolute idealism to pragmatic naturalism in the early 1890s after “he stripped his work of the metaphysical method, the transcendental logic of internal relations.” While Westbrook is correct in insisting that Dewey dropped Hegel’s transcendentalism, it is misleading to say that Dewey no longer expressed an interest in metaphysics or logic. Some of Dewey’s most important ideas about judgment and measurement can be traced back to Hegel’s Science of Logic. Steven Rockefeller argues in John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 216, that Dewey sought a humanist version of Christian spirit to replace the Hegelian system he discarded. Rockefeller thinks that Dewey’s profession of a strong religious faith indicates that...