It is tempting to dismiss the first half of Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. At first blush, it would not seem to be essential to Dewey’s foremost concern to provide a naturalized account of knowing that avoids the hoary philosophical dualisms of body/mind, thing/person, material/ideal, and practical/theoretical. The load-bearing chapters would seem to be in the latter philosophical half in which he takes on the task of developing a positive account rather than the early historical...

In a 2001 article entitled “The Classical Conservative Challenge to Dewey,” Shawn O’Dwyer puts John Dewey’s understanding of method to the test of criticisms made by conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott criticizes the view that technical knowledge is superior to the reliance on custom, tradition, and habit in practical knowledge, that moral intelligence can be taught, and that moral intelligence consists of the application of techniques to resolve problems. O’Dwyer concludes that Dewey’s reflections on moral deliberation pass Oakeshott’s challenge to (...) rationalism “with its central themes intact, if not unscathed.”1 In light of O’Dwyer’s article, we see that the classical conservatives and the .. (shrink)

In this article I present two theories of historical inquiry, which I characterize as conservative and pragmatic. I argue that these two views of history, John Dewey’s and Hans Georg Gadamer’s, provide an excluded middle between the extremes of positivism and relativism. They are pragmatic insofar as they accept the anti-foundationalist critique of positivism; they are conservative insofar as they refuse to reduce historical inquiry to mere discourse or narrative. Both focus on the situatedness of historical inquiry, paying special attention (...) to the culturally emergent conceptual schemes and prejudices of the historian, but they constrain historical inquiry by providing an improved understanding of the relationship between the problems which give rise to our inquiries and the tools which help resolve them. Dewey, in the key of naturalism, and Gadamer, in the key of phenomenology, provide conservative and pragmatic philosophies of historical inquiry, which refuse to pose as science, but do not fall into narrative fiction. Additionally, their approaches to historical inquiry share a concern for the practical application of the study of history. In this concern for application, both Dewey and Gadamer provide a theory of historical inquiry consonant with a conservative and pragmatic judicial theory, which rejects both the formalism of legal positivism and the model of unconstrained judicial radicalism. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...