Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide (review)

This book is a clear, engaging, and ambitious introduction to the philosophy of John Dewey. First, a comment about the subtitle: while I recognize that it reflects the book’s inclusion in a series of “beginner’s guides,” the subtitle (“a beginner’s guide”) is unfortunate. The book is much more than that, and, as such, it is more valuable than the subtitle suggests. It is clearly of help to people new to Dewey, and yet it is also a significant resource for those returning to Dewey in a variety of capacities. For example, this reviewer has found Hildebrand’s book helpful for thinking about pedagogical strategies for teaching Dewey in a recent seminar class (on James and Dewey), and I expect many other teachers will find Hildebrand useful for helping them to better incorporate Dewey into a variety of theme-based courses on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, aesthetics, or philosophy of religion. For reasons including the above, I believe this book deserved a better subtitle, although I realize this was likely to have been largely or completely outside of the author’s control.

In addition to the Introduction and perhaps too brief Conclusion, Dewey is constituted by seven chapters, each intended to be able to stand independently of the others. Chapter 1 (“Experience: Mind, Body, and Environment”) is an exploration of various themes crucial for understanding Dewey’s naturalism, including Dewey’s account of transactional experience. The chapter is strengthened by Hildebrand’s Figure 1 (33) on mind and consciousness. Chapter 2 (“Inquiry: Knowledge, Meaning, and Action”) discusses Dewey’s notion of inquiry as fundamental to the naturalistic/instrumentalist “critique and diagnosis” of traditional epistemological projects such as classical rationalism, empiricism, and Kant’s failed attempt to adequately adjudicate between them. Instead, for Dewey, knowing is reconstructed as an organic function, and it is here that we also receive some helpful background on Peirce (regarding the “Fixation of belief”). These first two chapters lay the groundwork for the remaining chapters, each of which, as Hildebrand says, “constitutes a special inquiry of their own” (6). Let us now turn briefly to each of them.

Chapter 3 (“Morality: Character, Conduct, and Moral Experience”) does an outstanding job of elucidating Dewey’s reconstruction of ethics. There is extremely lucid exploration of Dewey on ends/means, habit and functional virtue, socialization, and, as a part of all this, Dewey’s rejection of absolutism. Within his discussion, Hildebrand makes judicious use of insights from Steven Fesmire, Gregory Pappas, and Jennifer Welchman. Also, he is surely right to pinpoint Dewey’s 1930 “Three Independent Factors in Morals” as a crucial statement of his pragmatist critique of traditional approaches to ethics (Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Mill’s and Bentham’s utilitarianism, and Kant’s deontological ethics) as dismissive of the moral situation’s uncertainty because of various assumed transcendental realities and fixed ends. Hildebrand rightly emphasizes that, according to Dewey’s approach to morality, the proper aim of life is “the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining” (as cited in Hildebrand 84). In pragmatist fashion, Dewey rejects absolute criteria, perspectives, and values in favor of his moral criterion of growth as the only moral end.

In Chapter 4 (“Politics: Selves, Community, and Democratic Life”), I am pleased to see that Hildebrand begins with reference to Dewey’s 1939 “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us,” surely the most important and succinct statement of Dewey on democracy apart from the fifth chapter of The Public and Its Problems. Once again, Hildebrand includes the work of others as part of his weaving the tale. In addition to Dewey himself, we encounter Alan Ryan, James Campbell, Alison Jaggar, and James Gouinlock, all of whom aid our author in his focus here upon the Deweyan analysis of liberalism, of the relationship between individual and society, as well as the relationship between democracy and education, community, and public. For Dewey, as Hildebrand emphasizes, “faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education” (as cited in Hildebrand 123). While...