Diggins brings Reinhold Niebuhr into the post-structuralist dialogue, and demonstates that his writings are the more constructive about the human predicament. "[I]n Niebuhr power and morality meet in one, with a suspicious glance at the disavowal of power and the pretensions of morality.".

Social media have undoubtedly changed our ways of living. Their presence concerns an increasing number of users (over 4,74 billion) and pervasively expands in the most diverse areas of human life. Marketing, education, news, data, and sociality are just a few of the many areas in which social media play now a central role. Recently, some attention toward the link between social media and political participation has emerged. Works in the field of artificial intelligence have already pointed out that there (...) is a close link between the use of machine learning algorithms in social media and possible epistemic isolation, which could lead to political radicalization. The idea supporting this paper is that artificial intelligence for social media can actively put users’ deliberative capacity at risk and foster political extremism. To prove these claims, I proceed along two lines of inquiry. First, I focus on filter bubbles, namely the result of selections made by algorithms that recommend contents that meet users’ expectations and opinions. To analyze this phenomenon, I refer to the Deweyan model of experience. Second, I connect the filter bubbles problem to the Deweyan idea of deliberative and participatory democracy and Nussbaum’s concept of political compassion. The purpose of this paper is to provide a philosophical foundation that can both (1) effectively serve as a method for analyzing machine learning algorithms and their potential problems in relation to political extremism, and (2) be adopted as a standard to counter the danger of extremism associated with social media experience. (shrink)

Selective permeability holds that people’s distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just people) need remedial attention, also raising questions about normative judgments in disability nomenclature. (...) Second, affordances can be negotiated in numerous ways to reach a goal, analogously to how people with missing arms have learned to drive with their feet, so restrictive problem-solving methods are often counterproductive. Third, our approach illuminates how cultural factors ranging from gait styles to language and hence group coordination modulate action possibilities, so that cultural groups may encounter objectively different affordances in the same classroom. But fourth, while fit with environment allows for skill refinement, non-fit can contribute to growth situations, which suggests a degree of selective closure can be desirable. Throughout, we argue social constructs—including educational ones—are literally built or enacted barriers or openings that have reality in environments in the same way that affordances do. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as Occupations:Two Neglected Roots of John Dewey's AestheticsAuthors: Fabio Campeotto (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET, Univ. Nacional de La Rioja); Juan Manuel Saharrea (CONICET, Universidad Católica de Córdoba-Unidad Asociada al CONICET) and Claudio M. Viale (CONICET, Universidad Católica de Córdoba-Unidad Asociada al CONICET). Campeotto and Saharrea contributed similarly to the development of this work. Language edition: Rita Karina Plascencia, https://www.rkplasencia.com/. This article was made in (...) the frame of two research projects: "Pragmatismo y educación: Fundamentos teóricos y abordajes empíricos," financed by the Universidad Católica de Córdoba (2019–2023); and "Praxis, experimentalismo, aprendizaje y democracia: hacia una reevaluación de la filosofía de la educación contemporánea," PICT 2020 serie A 01539 financed by the Fondo para la Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (FONCyT). Both projects were under the direction of C. M. Viale.undoubtedly, art as experience1 is one of the most important texts by John Dewey, as well as his most systematic approach to aesthetics.2 This book usually appears in the literature as an almost mandatory reading for interpreters of classical pragmatism, and it is praised as an ineludible reference for those interested in aesthetics from a pragmatic point of view. However, this justified centrality tends to invisibilize two important veins of Dewey's thought: the vital role of his fragmentary or piecemeal approach to aesthetics, on one hand, and the relevance of his educational conceptions in relation to aesthetics, on the other.Going beyond the centrality of Art as Experience toward a comprehensive and contemporary view of Dewey's aesthetics entails looking upon three elements of his thought: Firstly, Dewey's works—some of them considered minor and some implicit or sporadic references in canonical texts—depicting the links between education and aesthetics in his philosophy as well as texts that belong to his fragmentary approach to aesthetics. Secondly, his systematic development of aesthetics, mainly in Art as Experience, where Dewey presents his conceptions at length. Thirdly, what we could call a re-evaluated aesthetics, which consists in a contemporary attempt to integrate diverse aspects of his philosophy, trying to overcome some weaknesses in his theoretical developments, especially regarding his dealing with the links between education and [End Page 1] aesthetics. It is necessary to remark that these links were neither adequately addressed by Dewey nor exhaustively examined by the literature, as far as we know. We hold that it is crucial to make them critically explicit, in order to get fruitful contemporary approaches not only to Dewey's aesthetics but also to his pedagogy and philosophy of education.Thus, the core question of this article is the following: How should the educational root of Dewey's aesthetics have worked? Or, more precisely, how should he have explicitly or meticulously conceived aesthetics in relation to his educational developments? We think that two neglected roots of Dewey's writings related to aesthetics can help us to re-evaluate it: what we call its fragmentary approach and Albert C. Barnes's role in it, on one hand, and a coherent articulation among occupation, art teaching, and the overcoming of the distinction between vocational and humanistic education, on the other.To carry out our task, we have divided this article into three parts. In the first (The Genesis of Dewey's Aesthetics: A Re-interpretation), we argue how to interpret the emergence of Dewey's aesthetics. In the second (Dewey and Education: Central Issues), we present the key aspects of this topic related to our purposes. In the third section (Two Neglected Roots of Dewey's Aesthetics), we develop our argument by describing how to recover these sources, and also by showing how Dewey's aesthetics could be critically re-evaluated or reconstructed from a contemporary viewpoint. Finally, we put forward a conclusion.The Genesis of Dewey's Aesthetics: A Re-interpretationIt is well-known that Dewey's aesthetics is usually equated with Art as Experience. This is part of the canonical interpretations that tend to conceive Dewey's philosophy in, using his term, grooves (LW 2:113). Democracy and Education... (shrink)

In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan’s Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been (...) duly considered. The Canon backfired largely because of Morgan’s background metaphysical commitment to a univocal, hierarchical, and anthropocentric account of cognitive architecture. I make the case that, going forward, comparative psychologists would do well to pair judicious use of Morgan’s Canon with an openness to the existence of non-humanlike animal minds comprising phenomena belonging to distinct cognitive and folk psychological ontologies. And I argue that this case gives us pragmatic reason to reconcile deep—e.g., psychofunctionalist—and superficial—e.g., dispositionalist—approaches to the metaphysics of belief. (shrink)

Practice-based philosophy of science has gradually arisen in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and science and technology studies (STS) during the past decades. It studies science as an ensemble of practices and theorising as one of these practices. A recent study has shown how the practice-based approach can be methodologically justified with reference to Peirce and Dewey. In this article, I will explore one consequence of that notion: science, as practice, is necessarily social. I will disambiguate five different senses (...) in which science is social. First, science presupposes language, which is essentially social. Second, practices, including science, are adaptations of the behaviour of an organism to an environment, of which other organisms are a part. Third, practices, including science, are public and hence shareable. Fourth, scientific knowledge can serve as a vehicle of social and moral reform. Fifth, scientific knowledge can be applied to improve the human condition. This fivefold result bears on the problem of realism. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering takes a distinctively normative and reconstructive approach to our conceptual repertoire. This approach is congenial to the ideas defended by philosophers belonging to the multifaceted tradition of American and Cambridge Pragmatism. This special issue is devoted to the investigation and development of these connections. Our introduction maps some of the historical and theoretical entanglements between the two fields and gives a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.

Mainstream philosophy has seen a recent flowering in discussions of intellectualism which revisits Gilbert Ryle’s famous distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, and challenges his argument that the former cannot be reduced to the latter. These debates so far appear not to have engaged with pragmatist philosophy in any substantial way, which is curious as the relation between theory and practice is one of pragmatism’s main themes. Accordingly, this paper examines the contemporary debate in the light of Charles Peirce’s (...) habit-based epistemology. We argue both that knowing-that can be understood as a particularly sophisticated form of knowing-how, and that all bodily competencies—if sufficiently deliberately developed—can be analysed as instantiating propositional structure broadly conceived. In this way, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism are seen to be not opposed, and both true, although Peirce’s original naturalistic account of propositional structure does lead him to reject what we shall call ‘linguistic intellectualism’. (shrink)

I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I then develop a more controversial assertion: that environments have non-subjective emotional qualities, which organize behavior and help us make sense of the world. I defend this from ecological and related embodied standpoints that take properties to be interrelational outcomes. I also build on conceptions of experience as a cultural phenomenon, one that (...) coheres around shared environmental contours and public emotional concerns, introducing normative constraints (or what might be called “world grammars”). Endorsing this outlook suggests an argument for the view that cultural spaces have affectively charged, non-subjective, normative openings and closures. These openings and closures engender selectively permeable barriers which cordon space without physically preventing entry, as seen with decorative half walls and elevation changes. An area with such barriers may look emotionally hostile to, say, the dispirited homeless who are in fact less welcome there. Outcomes like these might be thought of as “political affordances.” These affordances can be regarded as normative openings and closures that implicitly filter, and hence segregate, according to various social divisions. Although registering political affordances requires more than the detection of ambient arrays, the notion retains core Gibsonian ideas: that affordances are values, that these values are linked with how a space can be used, and that the existence and nature of such affordances is not a subjective matter. (shrink)

Dog whistling—speech that seems ordinary but sends a hidden, often derogatory message to a subset of the audience—is troubling not just for our political ideals, but also for our theories of communication. On the one hand, it seems possible to dog whistle unintentionally, merely by uttering certain expressions. On the other hand, the intention is typically assumed or even inferred from the act, and perhaps for good reason, for dog whistles seem misleading by design, not just by chance. In this (...) paper, I argue that, to understand when and why it’s possible to dog-whistle unintentionally (and indeed, intentionally), we’ll need to recognize the structure of our linguistic practices. For dog whistles and for covertly coded speech more generally, this structure is a pair of practices, one shared by all competent speakers and the other known only to some, but deployable in the same contexts. In trying to identify these enabling conditions, we’ll discover what existing theories of communicated content overlook by focusing on particular utterances in isolation, or on individual speakers’ mental states. The remedy, I argue, lies in attending to the ways in which what is said is shaped by the temporally extended, socio-politically structured linguistic practices that utterances instantiate. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

In recent years, the growing scientific interest in design has led to great advances in our knowledge of authentic design processes. However, as these findings go counter to the existing theories in both design research and cognitive science, they pose a serious challenge for both disciplines: there is a wide gap between what the existing theories predict and what designers actually do. At the same time, there is a growing movement of research on authentic cognitive activities, which has among other (...) things documented the central roles of action and the physical environment in these activities, something that existing cognitive theories have overlooked and cannot properly account for. This creates an explanatory gap analogous to the one found in design. This book aims to fill both of these gaps with a cognitive theory of how designers work. It revolves around the roles of physical activities and working materials in design, and the theory explains at length how these have functions that are essential to cognition. The two threads of design and cognition run in parallel throughout the book: the cognitive theory is applied to design, but is also consistently related to cognition in general. The result is, in back cover text parlance, a 'provocative' account of cognition and human performance, which should be of interest to cognitive scientists as well as to design researchers. (shrink)

The notion of “emergence” has recently received renewed attention in research fields ranging from biology to cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. Today’s concept of “emergence” incorporates a long history of philosophical debates and reflections that can be traced back to James and John Stuart Mill and nineteenth-century associationist philosophy. This tradition reached its theoretical maturity in the early twentieth century with so-called classical British emergentism, which gained the attention of pragmatist philosophers from the beginning. In the current literature exploring (...) the relationship between Pragmatism and the emergentist tradition, almost nothing is said about the interesting case of Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), a follower of J. S. Mill and A. Bain, and a crucial figure for the origins of pragmatist philosophy. After a brief historical introduction about the history of the notion of “emergence” and its relationship to classical Pragmatism, the paper aims to examine Wright’s philosophy in relation, on one hand, to the pragmatist tradition and, on the other hand, to the problem of emergence. In the wake of Wright’s original interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the article focuses on the key notions of “novelty” and “new uses,” through which Wright developed an “emergentist” philosophy that was well ahead of its time and attracted the interest of Samuel Alexander, one of the major philosophers of classical British emergentism. In the second part, the paper analyzes Wright’s reflections about the origin of human self-consciousness as a paradigmatic case of authentic evolutionary novelty. In the final part, the article focuses on the kind of pragmatic realism sketched out by Wright and summarizes the most important aspects to have emerged during the scholarly debate on the topic. (shrink)

In this article I try to answer one central question: how can it be explained that the most intense reception of American pragmatism in Germany took place during the Nazi dictatorship (and not in democratic political environments before – during the Weimar Republic – and afterwards – in the first 20 years of the Federal Republic)? The answer is complicated: it starts with an academic exchange programme between Germany and the USA which brought the young post-doc Eduard Baumgarten in the (...) mid -20ties to America and put him in contact with John Dewey and some of his pupils. After his return in 1929 he hoped to write and teach about pragmatism. This project came to an abrupt end, when Martin Heidegger denied him a promised position at the university of Freiburg. After the Nazi “seizure of power” the situation became worse when a completely negative expert opinion by Heidegger, by then the leading Nazi philosopher, blocked Baumgartens habilitation in Göttingen. Baumgarten fought back and established ties to a rising star in Nazi-philosophy, Alfred Baeumler, a devoted follower of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power.” This move secured in the end the publication of Baumgarten´s two books on American philosophy and especially on pragmatism. But this triumph came at a cost: a “reinterpretation” of the democratic content of pragmatism and an effort to show similarities between it and Nietzsche´s philosophy. (shrink)

This paper offers some brief reflections on pragmatist themes in Georg Simmel’s philosophy. §1 presents a number of assessments – by Simmel’s contemporaries, by later interpreters, and by Simmel himself – concerning his proximity to pragmatism. §2 offers a reconstruction of Simmel’s 1885-paper “The Relationship between the Theory of Selection and Epistemology,” focusing in particular on what the argument owed to von Helmholtz. It was this paper first and foremost that suggested to many that Simmel was close to pragmatism. §§3-5 (...) follow the development of the core idea of the 1885-paper in Simmel’s subsequent writings. §§6-8 compare and contrasts Simmel’s views on evolution and truth with the positions of Peirce, James, and Dewey. §9 returns to the overall question whether Simmel was a pragmatist and offers an irenic answer. (shrink)

The practice and industry of organizational coaching are now well established, but how it is understood theoretically continues to lag behind. In this paper we analyze possible reasons for this state of affairs and argue that the development of coaching as an academic discipline will benefit from adopting philosophical pragmatism as an overarching theoretical framework. This move will enable coaching academics to utilize the contributions to knowledge that different paradigms generate. Positioning pragmatism as a theory of action we argue that (...) organizational coaching is by default a pragmatic enterprise and provide three examples of the considerable benefits to be gained by conceptualizing it this way. Drawing from the pragmatists’ ideas, particularly those of John Dewey, we demonstrate how the theoretical understanding of organizational coaching can be enhanced by considering its nature as a joint inquiry. Pragmatism suggests development as an ultimate purpose for organizational coaching which also helps to resolve fundamental conceptual debates. In light of the complexity and diversity involved in the way that organizational coaching is practiced, pragmatism offers coaches a useful framework for developing the flexibility required for navigating the multiplicity of influences on their practice. (shrink)

El presente artículo reflexiona sobre los orígenes del pragmatismo atendiendo puntos importantes para implicaciones epistemológicas que buscan servir luego de clave para una perspectiva para el pensamiento del sur del continente. Hay una exposición de aspectos centrales que sobre el pragmatismo expuso Charles Pierce, específicamente sobre las creencias, el signo como mediación cognitiva, así como una consideración de las ciencias para comprender el papel tanto del razonamiento como de la percepción y el instinto. Igualmente, se exponen elementos claves de la (...) teoría del conocimiento de John Dewey, quien ante el rechazo declarado al racionalismo cartesiano y sin limitarse a la experiencia como punto de referencia para la clarificación conceptual, se encamina más a unas vivencias y contactos con un mundo observado comprometiendo así la realidad sentida la propia mente. El pragmatismo implica atención a lo que nos rodea sin generar separaciones entre sensibilidad y razón o entre pensamiento y emoción, lo cual hace que los asuntos de la ciencia y del conocimiento no se den ajenos a las acciones democráticas entre los individuos activos y sus colectivos. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the social foundations of a theory of democracy. It purports to show that a social ontology of democracy is the necessary counterpart of a political theory of democracy. It notably contends that decisions concerning basic social ontological assumptions are relevant not only for empirical research, but bear a significant impact also on normative theorizing. The paper then explains why interactionist rather than substantialist social ontologies provide the most promising starting point for building a social (...) ontology of democracy. It then introduces and examines the three notions of habits, patterns of interaction, and forms of social organization, conceived as the main pillars of an interactionist social ontology of democracy and briefly discusses some major implications of this approach for democratic theory. (shrink)

Contemporary analytic philosophy is dominated by metaphilosophical naturalism, the view that philosophy ought to be continuous with science. This naturalistic turn is for a significant part due to the work of W. V. Quine. Yet, the development and the reception of Quine’s naturalism have never been systematically studied. In this paper, I examine Quine’s evolving naturalism as well as the reception of his views. Scrutinizing a large set of unpublished notes, correspondence, drafts, papers, and lectures as well as published responses (...) to Quine’s work, I show how both internal tensions and external criticisms forced him to continuously develop, rebrand, and refine his metaphilosophy before he explicitly decided to label his view ‘naturalism’ in the late 1960s. (shrink)

Debates over the relative priority of experience and language have been among some of the most vexed, but also generative, disputes in pragmatist philosophy over the past few decades. These debates have, however, run into the ground such that both positions find themselves at a definitive standstill. I argue for a rejuvenation of pragmatism by way of moving beyond both the experience option (here represented by Dewey) and the linguistic turn in pragmatism (here represented by Brandom). We can move beyond (...) these two categories, I argue, by resuscitating the categorical conception that has always been at the heart of pragmatism all along: action or, as I prefer to put it, conduct. In this paper, I develop an argument for “conduct pragmatism” on the basis of a return to William James’s earliest statements of pragmatism, statements that indeed occur prior to the official announcement of “pragmatism” in 1898. I draw on a dispute with Charles Sanders Peirce over the best interpretation of pragmatism as well as on a number of James’s early psychological writings from the 1880s leading up to the Principles of Psychology of 1890. These texts definitively establish that the early James was what I call a “conduct pragmatist” well before his radical empiricism facilitated what was only a late turn toward the “experience pragmatism” that would come to impress Dewey and later scholars of classicopragmatism. The early James thus represents, I argue, a promising seed for a new third generation of pragmatism that may find its way beyond the endings of both experientialism and lingualism, as well as their impasses with one another. (shrink)

This article examines how Modern theories of mind remain even in some materialistic and hence ontologically anti-dualistic views; and shows how Dewey's pragmatism, anticipating Merleau-Ponty, 4E cognitive scientists and especially enactivism, repudiates these theories. Throughout I place Dewey’s thought in the context of scientific inquiry, both recent and historical and including the cognitive as well as traditional sciences; and I show how he incorporated sciences of his day into his thought, while also anticipating enactive cognitive science. While emphasizing Dewey’s continued (...) relevance, my main goal is to show how his scientifically informed account of perception and cognition combats skepticism propagated by certain scientific visions, exacerbated by commonplace notions about mind, that jointly suggest that human beings lack genuine access to reality. (shrink)

This article further systematizes the existential body, contributing to the ethnographic model of embodied objectivity. It situates embodiment as the foundation of knowledge, demonstrating its underdevelopment in anthropological literature. The paper explores the philosophical relationship between being-in-the-world and Merleau-Ponty’s body-proper, emphasizing the central role of embodied pre-objective signification in representational ethnographic knowing. This aspect is often insufficiently addressed, particularly in light of certain ethnographic applications of the epoché. The paper concludes that, given the oscillatory apprehension of embodiment, the use of (...) terms like “systematizing” and “inter-objectivity” adequately enhances its portrayal as a pre-objective phenomenon rather than an objective one. (shrink)

I argue that Quine’s naturalization of Lewis’s Kantian pragmatism should be understood in terms of Lewis’s attempt to de-psychologize pragmatist epistemology. Lewis wants epistemology to be a priori in order to be distinct from psychology. Quine’s criticisms of Lewis result in a picture that weakens the distinction between epistemology and psychology. Nevertheless, Quine’s naturalized Kantian pragmatism remains far more Kantian than is widely recognized, due to what Quine retains from Lewis.

Umberto Eco’s philosophical project, which culminates in the development of a systematic and philosophically relevant semiotics, has a perplexing and problematic debt to and link with pragmatism in its many forms. Indeed, his apparent relation to pragmatism as such is in fact quite tangential if we ignore the pivotal role of Peirce in defining and supporting Eco’s explicit semiotic turn. But Eco claimed that John Dewey’s Art as Experience, the foundation of a distinctively pragmatist aesthetics, was a major factor in (...) his early philosophical movement away from certain premises of the aesthetic tradition that held sway during his student days. Eco engages Dewey in surprising and enlightening ways in his early books, but the trail of Dewey is gradually ‘lost.’ It is this trail, wandering through different contexts, that I follow in this paper. I also indicate how Dewey’s work could have played a larger role in Eco’s mature aesthetic thought and that we should see the absence of Dewey to represent a lost opportunity for emphasizing and enriching the pragmatist side of a semiotic approach to aesthetics. (shrink)

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest.... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted (...) as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. Michel Foucault (1988b, 154). (shrink)

The paper argues that Dewey’s ethics are based on a naturalistic theory of value. This unusual interpretation questions the anti-naturalist reading of Dewey in the wake of Richard Rorty and other neo-pragmatists. In order to defend this interpretation, I develop a genealogy of Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism: It has a ’father’ in the progressivist movement, and a ’sister’ in the Chicago Sociology. A closer look at Frank L. Ward, Albion Small, W. I. Thomas and Robert Park helps to reconstruct the political (...) dynamics of the progressivist programme of naturalistic values. This contextualization may also correct some of the shortcomings of Dewey’s own version: Some pragmatic sociologists spelled out the noncomformist individualism more clearly than Dewey’s philosophy did. Finally I suggest that this approach is still relevant today. (shrink)

The study analyzes the theoretical basis of the Philosophy for Children (P4C) program elaborated by Matthew Lipman. The aim is, firstly, to identify the main philosophical and pedagogical principles of P4C based on American pragmatism, and to locate their pedagogization and possible problems in Lipman’s thinking. Here the discussion is especially targeted to the thinking of John Dewey and George H. Mead as well as Lev Vygotsky, whom Lipman himself names as the most pivotal sources for his own thinking. On (...) the other hand, the study aims at opening up new perspectives and thematizations on P4C from the viewpoint of the continental tradition of thought. The essential principles of P4C connected with reasonableness and judgment are ultimately interpreted as a neo-Aristotelian effort to contextualize philosophy by tracing it back to moderation, the man’s ability to consider and solve problems that he meets in practical life kata ton orthon logon — by doing right things in the right place at the right time in the right way. This phronetic idea of ‘humanizing modernity’ combined with the evolution of the adult-child concept is argued to be one of the conditions for the possibility of P4C, yet leaving unsolved the basic problems involving pedagogical action as such. John Dewey’s ideas arising from the critique of the modern philosophy of consciousness, focusing on the significance of philosophy in practical human life and linked to the basic nature of human knowing and intellectual growth and, further, to the ideal of a democratic community, are shown to form the main intellectual sources of P4C. Dewey’s philosophy as a general theory of education means a solid linking of the concepts of experience and inquiry to the practice of education. This is based on the naturalistic conception of man according to which man is built in dynamic transaction with his environment, experiencing the true meanings of his ideas in the consequences of his actions as he tries to solve problematic situations. So, inquiry as a method of reflective thinking forms the basis for education based on intellectual growth. A condition for it is a context meaningful for the child in which the paradigm of inquiry can be realized authentically. It is therefore important in education to provide circumstances that stimulate the child’s curiosity, initiating a process of inquiry that further enables, through the formation of reflective habits, the development of a democratic community. The purpose of the pedagogical interaction taking place in the process of inquiry is to produce educative experiences for the child, making the pedagogical relationship vanish at the same time. The idea is that in pedagogical action the child’s subjectivity, his desire and impulses are adapted to the tradition, yet generating at the same time a prospective, reflective habit, thus freeing the educatee to think intelligently for himself. The study shows the articulation of these principles in Lipman’s practical effort to convert the classroom into a community of inquiry, but it also argues that the above-mentioned Bildung theoretical core problem of pedagogical action, related to its paradoxical special characteristics to produce autonomous subjectivity, is not thematized. In connection with this issue, the educational thinking of Kant and Hegel is discussed especially from the viewpoint of philosophy teaching. To provide a new perspective for the discussion, the study outlines the community of inquiry as an ‘educative space’ from the viewpoints of the pedagogical relationship typical of hermeneutic pedagogy and of non-reflective functional structures and phenomena based on pedagogical intuition that are linked to it. (shrink)

A traditional association of judgment with "reason" has drawn upon and reinforced an opposition between reason and emotion. This, in turn, has led to a restricted view of the nature of moral judgment and of the subject as moral agent. The alternative, I suggest, is to abandon the traditional categories and to develop a new theory of judgment. I argue that the theory of judgment developed by Justus Buchler constitutes a robust alternative which does not prejudice the case against emotion. (...) Drawing on this theory I then develop how to conceptualize the ways in which feeling and emotion can be (or be components of) moral judgments. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of the relationship between technology and art in human existence from a Deweyan perspective. The central idea is that Dewey’s aesthetics is a useful instrument for critically reflecting on that issue. Starting from the tenets of Dewey’s aesthetics, the discourse focuses on “imaginative recovery” and “inhabiting,” two key notions for interpreting and managing technology from an aesthetic perspective. The article seeks an answer to the question of whether new technology (particularly ai) is a useful tool (...) or not in art and, ultimately, for the fulfilment of human life. (shrink)

As business ethics is grappling with criticisms of its relevance for ethical practice, it may find perspective and direction in various conceptions of ethos. While ‘ethics’ is rooted in ‘ethos’, a term with a long and rich history of interdisciplinary research, conceptions of ethos are so far scarcely discussed in business ethics. The purpose of this conceptual article is to explore the potential of a pivot towards business ethics as an ethos-driven practice, drawing on John Dewey’s work. First, it introduces (...) four conceptions of ethos from interdisciplinary research and explores their varied resonance in business ethics. Second, it offers a unified conception of ethos that builds on John Dewey’s approach to economics, moral life and ethics, particularly on his understanding of habits and forms of valuation. It is then argued that understanding ethos in terms of ‘valued modes of embedded, embodied and associational conduct’ encourages business ethics to engage in the intelligent, practical and meaningful reconstruction of evolving business practices. The article concludes that an ‘ ethotical turn’ for business ethics would not only invigorate practical, corporeal and environmental perspectives but also open the field to interdisciplinary insights and ideas. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between three elements—personality, character, and script—to interpret the idea of someone's identity. A common way to deal with this relationship is in terms of a duality, but a tripartite analysis works better. The article relies heavily on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, with the aid of Simone Weil and Charles Sanders Peirce.

Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on contesting intellectualism, and its key assumption of mindedness as (...) representation. We then outline distinctive insights from both traditions regarding the nature and role of habits, in order to put forward a habit-based epistemology as an alternative to the Cartesian idea-based epistemology that has dominated modern philosophy. We pay particular attention to the work of classical pragmatist C.S. Peirce, arguing that his semiotics, which analyses sign-use as habit, shows how theorists of embodied cognition can break a certain false dichotomy between embodiment and logical or intellectual structure which has prevented them from fully theorising propositional knowledge. In this way, our work both augments and challenges the Dewey/Merleau-Ponty connection that has been much more extensively explored by the field. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT John Dewey argued in his Art as Experience that the significance of art as experience was of incomparable importance for the adventure of philosophical thought. He claimed that while both move in the medium of imaginative mind, art provides a “unique control” for the “imaginative ventures of philosophy.” In this article I examine, relying on a range of sources, some pivotal implications of this claim and especially how various forms of art and aesthetic experience can exemplify and further ways (...) of formulating, presenting, and critically engaging focal issues, both methodological and substantive, of the tasks of philosophy. The originary context of philosophy is agonistic, wresting meaning from the noise of meaninglessness or discerning order in a seeming world of chaos, not merely that of winning an argument. Both philosophy and art have attempted to fill a “hole in sense” by various practices, discursive in the case of philosophy and nondiscursive or “presentational” in the case of art. But art forms offer us models for a plurality of philosophical approaches to the task of enabling us to maintain and restore our existential and experiential balance within what Dewey called the “moving unbalanced balance of things.”. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 64 Heft: 2 Seiten: 165-192.

I shall characterize normative functionalism and contrast it with its causal counterpart. After tracing both stripes of functionalism to the work of the classical American pragmatists, I then argue that they are not exclusive alternatives. Instead, both might be required for an appropriately illuminating account of human rational activity.

Technological developments increasingly enable monitoring and steering the behavior of individuals. Enforcement of the law by means of technology can be much more effective and pervasive than enforcement by humans, such as law enforcement officers. However, it can also bypass legislators and courts and minimize any room for civil disobedience. This significantly reduces the options to challenge legal rules. This, in turn, can impede the development of legal systems. In this paper, an analogy is made with evolutionary biology to illustrate (...) that the possibility to deviate from legal rules and existing norms is sometimes necessary for the further development of legal systems. Some room to break the law, for instance, through civil disobedience or imperfect enforcement of the law, will ensure sufficient variation. This allows for properly evolving legal systems that can continue to provide fair solutions, even when society and concepts of fairness further develop. (shrink)

Do moods have intentional objects? If so, what kinds of intentional objects might they have? Some theorists hold that moods are objectless affective states, not ‘about’ anything. Others argue that moods are directed toward a maximally general object like ‘the world’, and so they are about everything, in some sense. In this article, I advance a new theoretical account of the intentional object of moods. According to what I call the ‘present-situation view’, moods are directed toward, or about, the present (...) situation. In other words, a mood is essentially an interpretation of one’s current situational context. As such, our moods change over time in a way that tracks our changing sense of how things are going, here and now. This article aims to make the case that the present-situation view, so understood, offers unique theoretical resources to describe and explain how we experience moods and how they change over time, while also suggesting a helpful way to think about the functional role moods play in our broader cognitive architecture, and pointing toward promising directions for future research into the ways that moods can be experienced, managed, and shared. (shrink)

Le féminisme est un mouvement théorique et politique pluriel et en perpétuelle évolution. Aussi ce travail se situe dans les champs de la philosophie de l’éducation et plus particulièrement au sein des débats entre plusieurs courants philosophiques se réclamant du féminisme. Il cherche à évaluer l’intérêt de deux de ces approches philosophiques au regard de la construction d’une pédagogie féministe. Se trouve ainsi comparées l’approche de la théorie critique (proche du marxisme matérialiste et de l’école de Francfort) et l’approche pragmatiste (...) (issue des travaux de Jane Addams et John Dewey) par rapport au problème du “consciousness-raising” en pédagogie. Ce dernier présente en effet des difficultés à l’approche critique qui seront exposées dans la première partie de l’argumentation. L’hypothèse de notre travail est que le pragmatisme peut apporter des outils théoriques répondant à ses difficultés et venant ainsi compléter ceux de la théorie critique au profit de la pédagogie féministe. Ainsi la deuxième partie de notre argumentation se concentre sur l’intérêt épistémique de ces outils pédagogiques que propose le pragmatisme. Ces derniers sont rendus possibles par la valorisation épistémique de la perplexité et de l’empathie, et nous verrons en quoi ils permettent d’augmenter l’efficacité du “consciousness-raising” lors des pratiques pédagogiques quotidiennes. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders semiotic modelling in light of recent scholarship on Charles Peirce, particularly regarding his concept of proposition. Conceived in the vein of Peirce’s phenomenological categories as well as of his taxonomy of signs, semiotic modelling has mostly been thought of as ascending from simple, basic sign types to complex ones. This constitutes the backbone of most currently accepted semiotic modelling theories and entails the further acceptance of an unexamined a priori coherence between complexity of cognition and complexity of (...) signification. Following recent readings of Peirce’s post-1900 semiotic, we engage in a discussion as to what are the limits of this approach. From Stjernfelt’s conception of the dicisign in nature, we derive a perspective that affords understanding the practice of modelling as a reciprocal interplay between decomposition of complexity and recombination into further complexity. This discussion is facilitated by the recent extrapolation of the constructivist concept of scaffolding in biosemiotics research. Cognition, we argue, begins with a fundamental irritation of trying to make sense of a structure that is more complex than what can directly be derived from experience and, in so doing, urges meaning-seeking processes. The yet unknown object is decomposed into more tangible objects and is subsequently reassembled from these more manageable conceptions of the object. In support of our argument, we discuss the notions of semiotic competences and resources in light of such a naturalized account of meaning-making. (shrink)

This study examines the Foucauldian notion of “parrhesia” within the context of curricular practices through a renewal of scholarly interest in Islamic metaphysics as represented by the Avicennean modalities of reality: necessity, contingency, and possibility. It explores the role of contingency in advancing educational practices that generate inclusive dissemination of knowledge that captures the language of Tajdeed (legitimate renovation) in Islamic education. This article argues that contingency, as a causality-oriented modality, determines whether meaning is relative or absolute, while necessity, as (...) an acknowledgment of universal truth, slips into demagoguery that can be used to canonize strict textualism and absolutism. Contingency is defined here as a practice that stimulates synthesis and dialogical understanding of knowledge. Accordingly, the study asks the following questions: How does infusing the Avicennean concept of contingency into curriculum practices offer opportunities for inclusivity and free speech? How can revisiting Islamic cosmological modalities help Muslim educators and curriculum writers move into the broader path of inclusive pedagogies? From an educational position, the article introduces a curriculum of metaphysics that advocates the implementation of contingency, which is considered essential to parrhesia and democracy. It also draws attention to an anti-metaphysical attitude that is generally present in curriculum theorizing. Accordingly, Metaphysics is invoked to challenge a state of flux or hegemonized assumptions; hence, metaphysics validates parrhesia. (shrink)

The field of science communication is plagued by challenges. Communicators face the difficulty of responding to unjustified public skepticism over issues like climate change and COVID-19 while also acknowledging the fallibility and limitations of scientific knowledge. Our goal in this paper is to suggest a new model for science communication that can help foster more productive, respectful relationships among all those involved in science communication. Inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, we develop an experience model, according to which (...) science communication consists in people’s experiences with science and the meanings they develop from those experiences. Three principles are central to the model: experience is cumulative, context matters, and audiences have agency. We argue that this model has significant implications both for communication research and practice, which we illustrate by applying it to the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. We show how science communicators can help to identify and alleviate structural factors that contribute to skepticism as well as fostering opportunities for meaning making around shared experiences. (shrink)

Pragmatists views, like those of John Dewey’s about music, emphasize the social nature of musical sensibility, instrumental expressions and adaptation to changing circumstances. Indeed, expectancy and violations of those expectations in music are tied to memory and human development. Cephalic (mind/brain/body) factors that underlie what we expect, and variation on the expected, inhere in musical experiences. Music is a piece of nature and is tied to movement and dance and rooted in social contact. Music of course serves many functions in (...) our lives. From the first sounds to some of the last, human well-being and music are ripe across the life cycle of human experience. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special section on Cora Diamond’s significance for education and educators. The introduction is meant to be the beginning of a conversation, and—to that end—the special section editors suggest lines of connections that philosophers of education might draw between their work and the work of Cora Diamond. Their list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it is meant to suggest Diamond’s far-reaching significance for education and educators.

On the last page of the chapter "The Challenge to Philosophy," in Dewey's 1934 Art as Experience, we find the following passage: "My intention throughout this chapter has not been to criticize various philosophies of art as such, but to elicit the significance that art has for philosophy in its broadest scope. For philosophy like art moves in the medium of imaginative mind, and, since art is the most direct and complete manifestation there is of experience as experience, it provides (...) a unique control for the imaginative ventures of philosophy. … The significance of art as experience is, therefore, incomparable for the adventure of philosophical thought". This is precisely what... (shrink)