Abstract
American pragmatism reaches its highest level of sophisticated articulation and engaged elaboration in the works and life of John Dewey. To put it crudely, if Emerson is the American Vico, and James and Peirce our John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, then Dewey is the American Hegel and Marx! On the surface, these farfetched comparisons reveal the poverty of the American philosophical tradition, the paucity of intellectual world-historical figures in the American grain. But on a deeper level, these comparisons disclose a distinctive feature of American pragmatism: its diversity circumscribed by the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy and the Emersonian theodicy of the self and America.
The endeavor to democratize the idea of God goes hand in hand with pragmatism, and both arise out of the spirit of “This, Here, and Soon.”
—Johan Huizinga
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Notes
John Dewey, Characters and Events (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1929), 1: 378–431.
Note also John Dewey, Freedom and Culture ( New York: Capricorn Books, 1939 ), pp. 74–102.
Horace Kallen, “Freedom and Education,” in The Philosophy of the Common Man: Essays in Honor of John Dewey to Celebrate His Eightieth Birthday( New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940 ), pp. 31–32.
John Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge, and Value: A Rejoinder,” in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, Library of Living Philosophers (New York: Tudor, 1939, 1951), p. 538 n. 22.
See also John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty(1929; New York: Capricorn, 1960 ), pp. 212–13.
Richard N. Current, T. Harry Williams, and Frank Freidel, American History: A Survey ( New York: Knopf, 1961 ), pp. 488–516.
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South,1877–1913 ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951 ).
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), pp. 11–43, 78, 95.
John Dewey, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (Ann Arbor: Registrar, 1891).
Dewey, The-Study of Ethics: A Syllabus ( Ann Arbor: Registrar, 1894 ).
Wiebe, Search for Order , p. 119. See also C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 325–37, 338–46.
Wilfred Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, ed. Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956 ), pp. 253–329.
John Dewey, “The Development of American Pragmatism,” Philosophy and Civilization (1931; New York: Peter Smith Edition, 1968 ), pp. 24–25.
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1957 ), pp. 123–24.
Richard Rorty, “Dewey’s Metaphysics,” Consequences of Pragmatism ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982 ), pp. 72–89.
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology(1922; New York: Modern Library, 1957 ), pp. 178–206.
John Dewey, Logic : The Theory of Inquiry( New York: Henry Holt, 1938 ), pp. 3–4.
Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ), pp. 49–74.
Milton R. Konvitz, “Dewey’s Revision of Jefferson,” in John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. Sidney Hook ( New York: Dial Press, 1950 ), pp. 164–76.
John Dewey, Individualism: Old and New (New York: Capricorn, 1929), pp. 74–100.
Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Capricorn, 1935), pp. 56–93.
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1954 ), pp. 143–84.
John Dewey, “No Half Way House for America,” People’s Lobby Bulletin (November 1934), p. 1.
John Dewey, “Introduction,” in Henry George, Poverty and Progress, ed. Harry Brown ( New York: Doubleday, 1928 ), p. 3.
John Dewey, Freedom and Culture(1939; New York: Capricorn, 1963 ), p. 148.
John Dewey, “What I Believe,” in I Believe, ed. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939 ), pp. 347–48.
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© 1989 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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West, C. (1989). The Coming-of-Age of American Pragmatism: John Dewey. In: The American Evasion of Philosophy. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20415-1_4
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