In the current crisis of liberal democracy, Confucianism has been cited as offering superior alternative models of government. With the resources from Dewey’s Pragmatism, this paper defends democracy, which should not be equated to de facto liberal democracies, as desirable for Confucian societies. It examines the affinities between Confucian and Dewey’s conception of the person and community and argues for an understanding of democratic values that brings together Dewey’s democratic values and Confucian ideals of personal cultivation and virtuous governance.

Post-truth has become a commonplace strategy. No longer are objective facts viewed as having evidentiary value; scientific knowledge is on a par with emotions or personal beliefs. We intend to show that in the context of post-truth, those proffering and receiving an assertion do not care about the truth-value of the assertion or about the best way to gather evidence concerning it. Such attitudes raise several questions about how relativism can be a corrupting influence in contemporary democracies. We will analyse (...) Steve Fuller’s use of the term «post-truth» – especially, the political connotations about epistemic democracy that he highlights. Instead, we offer a pragmatist defence of the truth and an alternative meaning of epistemic democracy. (shrink)

John Dewey’s theory of truth is widely viewed as proposing to substitute “warranted assertibility” for “truth,” a proposal that has faced serious objections since the late 1930s. By examining Dewey’s theory in its historical context – and, in particular, by drawing parallels with Otto Neurath’s concurrent attempts to develop a non-correspondence, non-formal theory of truth – I aim to shed light on Dewey’s underlying objectives. Dewey and Neurath were well-known to each other and, as their writing and correspondence make clear, (...) they took similar paths over the mid-century philosophical terrain. I conclude that Dewey’s account of truth is more principled, and more relevant to historical debates, than it first appears. (shrink)

Many recent writers on democracy have lamented its decay and warned of its imminent death. We argue that the concerns are focused at three different levels of democracy. The most fundamental of these, celebrated by Tocqueville and by Dewey, recognizes the interactions and joint deliberations among citizens who seek sympathetic mutual engagement. Such engagement is increasingly rare in large-scale political life. In diagnosing and treating the problems, we recommend returning to the debate between Lippmann and Dewey, in which many of (...) the concerns now prominent were already voiced. This inspires the main work of the paper – the reconstruction of Dewey’s conception of democracy as a ‘mode of associated living’. We focus on the thesis that democracy is educative and explicate Dewey’s notion of growth, showing how democratic education contributes to three important functions: the capacity for sustaining oneself, the enrichment of individual experience, and the ability to enter into cooperative discussions with fellow citizens. Dewey’s conception of democratic education is directed at fostering particular virtues and, if citizens come to possess them, the need for Lippmann’s ‘omnicompetent individual’ vanishes. We conclude by suggesting that Dewey’s project of educating democratic character is pertinent for addressing the disaffection of our times. (shrink)

This article surveys recent work in pragmatism and political theory. In doing so, it shows both how recent work on pragmatism has secured the view that at its core is a set of arguments about the character of democracy – although the character of those arguments is open to debate and reimagination – and how pragmatist arguments have been reinterpreted and deployed to address contemporary concerns and approaches. This charts a terrain of live disagreements rather than settled opinion.

This dissertation puts American philosophers and social reformers, Jane Addams (1860-1935) and John Dewey (1859-1952), in conversation with contemporary social and political philosopher, Iris Marion Young (1949-2006), to argue that an account of deliberative equality must make conceptual space to name the problem of ‘communicatively structured deliberative inequality’. I argue that in order for participatory democracy theory to imagine and construct genuinely inclusive deliberative spaces, it must be grounded in a relational ontology and pragmatist feminist social epistemology. The literature has (...) largely developed deliberative inequality in terms of access (e.g., participation costs) and ‘impoverished capacities’ for political participation (e.g., political-process illiteracy; public debate skills). This literature has failed to appreciate the communicative dimensions of deliberative inequality. Individuals who occupy historically stigmatized social groups may participate at a communicatively structured disadvantage in participatory forums not because of their own impoverished capacities, but because of the identity-prejudiced stereotypes of their interlocutors. Chapter 1 situates Young’s communicative democracy in contemporary deliberative democracy literature and shows the inadequacies of liberal individualism, assumed by much of traditional deliberative theory, for naming and addressing the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality. Chapter 2 draws on literature in feminist and resistance epistemologies as well as the social identity approach within contemporary social psychology theory to flesh out the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality. Here, I provide a relational ontology of prejudice and examine it’s impact on one’s epistemic and deliberative standing. Chapter 3 draws on the work of Addams and Dewey to develop a relational ontology of political agency as well as the pragmatist feminist epistemology of communicative democracy. Addams and Dewey, like Young, saw exclusion as a serious social and political problem, and they looked to democratic norms and practices as a resource for social justice. Thus, Chapter 4 looks to Addams and Dewey’s writings and Addams’s leadership at Hull House as a resource for communicative democracy, and more particularly, for addressing deliberative inequality and imagining and constructing inclusive deliberative spaces in light of the problem of communicatively structured deliberative inequality. (shrink)

Careful reading of John Dewey’s The Public and its Problems reveals a weak point at the stage when a given public became self-aware and proceeded to seek representation in the institutions of the state. Aside from a general emphasis on art and science, Dewey’s political theory offered no concrete discussion of the means suitable for this phase of the democratic process. Furthermore, the dichotomy between violence and the peaceful means of art and science left no space for the affirmation of (...) nonviolence – the method most capable of amplifying democracy during the decade following Dewey’s death. Accordingly, the article hypothesizes a novel rendition of nonviolence from the standpoint of Dewey’s understanding of art as social inquiry, compares it with Martin Luther King Jr.’s theory and practice of nonviolent dramatization, and ends by presenting a Deweyan reading of the civil rights movement in terms of the framework contained in The Public and its Problems. (shrink)