Reconstruction is a central notion in Dewey’s account of inquiry and in his metaphilosophical commitments. In his work, Dewey made a call for reconstruction of philosophy, in the reconstruction of central notions of the discipline, like knowledge, logic, truth, the good, reason, and experience. Inquiry itself is reconstructive, according to Dewey, involving the transformation of an indeterminate situation into one which is determinate and understood. Dewey’s philosophical views should therefore be of interest to those taking part in the recent turn (...) towards revisionary philosophical methodologies, like conceptual engineering, explication, and amelioration. In light of the recent developments in revisionary methodologies, I aim to explore Dewey’s conception of concepts in relation to the conceptual engineering literature, suggesting that it provides a useful conception of concepts for conceptual engineering, and to suggest a Deweyan model of philosophical inquiry where concepts are the objects of inquiry. In both cases, I hope to show a productive interaction between Dewey’s ideas and contemporary discussions of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Against those who identify genealogy with reductive genealogical debunking or deny it any evaluative and action-guiding significance, I argue for the following three claims: that although genealogies, true to their Enlightenment origins, tend to trace the higher to the lower, they need not reduce the higher to the lower, but can elucidate the relation between them and put us in a position to think more realistically about both relata; that if we think of genealogy’s normative significance in terms of a (...) triadic model that includes the genealogy’s addressee, we can see that in tracing the higher to the lower, a genealogy can facilitate an evaluation of the higher element, and where the lower element is some important practical need rather than some sinister motive, the genealogy can even be vindicatory; and finally, that vindicatory genealogies can offer positive guidance on how to engineer better concepts. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the controversy over the legacy of Kantian moral philosophy in Dewey’s German Philosophy and Politics. It argues that the polemical reaction to Dewey’s book by Julius Ebbinghaus, reiterated through Axel Honneth and Ebbinghaus’s student Georg Geismann, is based on talking at cross-purposes. While Dewey’s reading of Kant is, indeed, flawed, Ebbinghaus and Geismann misconceive Dewey’s argumentative intent. Nevertheless, the controversy serves to clarify Dewey’s line of argument and to discuss parallels with and differences from the world war (...) genealogy and the Frankfurt School’s theory of immanent critique. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that the role of Hegel’s Emptiness Charge in German Philosophy and Politics should be considered in light of Dewey’s theory of growth. Accordingly, Dewey’s book is not merely a piece of “world war literature”, first, because its line of argument also appears in books by Dewey, which are surely not part of this category, and second, because the Hegelian Emptiness Charge is a variant of what Dewey calls a philosophical fallacy. (shrink)

Recent developments in contemporary pragmatist thought have the potential to help reshape our understandings of pragmatism in philosophy of education. We first survey the development of pragmatism as founded in experience, moving through linguistic pragmatism, to a newer actionistic approach in conduct pragmatism. Conduct pragmatism prioritises action over both experience and discursive thought in ways that can be central to educational activity and projects. Conduct pragmatism so conceived has the potential to alter and shift how philosophers of education relate to (...) pragmatist thought and in the second part of the paper we outline some of these potentials. We indicate the possibilities for pragmatist philosophy of education to engage with diverse bodies of thought, moving away from an insular focus on one or two philosophers, and a diversity of locations where philosophy is active and conducted. (shrink)

This essay critically examines contemporary discussions of pragmatism in history. First of all, as for the ‘practice before knowledge’ argument, I point out that historical inquiry cannot be properly explained by the argument whose validity is grounded in the instinct nature of practice because historical research is a contingent, intellectual behavior. About the ‘self-correcting’ argument, I maintain that historical inquiry cannot be rendered self-correcting by the pragmatic test of truth that is, in nature, future-oriented and consequentialist given that the main (...) goal of history is to produce, not predictions or plans of action, but retrospective beliefs, which makes the mechanism of verification through action inapplicable to history. My view on the ‘disciplinary consensus’ argument is that showing how historical beliefs are produced and confirmed within the discipline does not necessarily amount to an explanation of why we should go through the whole process. (shrink)

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...

Big Data’s calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preceding, separate, and independent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through practices of governance and, from there, throughout myriad dimensions of everyday life. (...) In this paper, I explicate Big Data’s ontology of hyperindividualism by contrasting it to a coconstitutive ontology that prioritizes relationality, context, and interdependence. I then situate the ontology of hyperindividualism in its genealogical context, drawing from Patrick Joyce’s history of liberalism and John Dewey’s pragmatist account of individualism, liberalism, and social action. True to its genealogical provenance, Big Data’s ontological politics of hyperindividualism reduces governance to the management of atomistic behavior, undermines the contribution of urban complexity as a resource for governance, erodes the potential for urban democracy, and eviscerates the possibility of collective resistance. (shrink)

This article investigates “impaired insight,” a controversial psychiatric category describing a mad person unable to know his or her madness. Like “moral insanity” and other concepts before it, impaired insight offers a way to link the disparate logics of human responsibility in psychiatry and the law. I attribute its development to changes wrought by deinstitutionalization, the rise of antipsychotic medication, and patient incarceration in penal settings. In a system that aims to govern psychiatric patients through their freedom, the logic of (...) impaired insight introduces a wrinkle: can a person make an informed choice to refuse treatment if madness itself impairs awareness of illness? Drawing on tools from the sociology of science, I trace the process by which researchers recast psychodynamic “denial” as a neurological and therefore non-volitional “impairment” in the 1990s. I then show how social movement actors mobilized the materialized form in the legal and policy fields in the 2000s, bringing insight science to bear upon the very questions of custodial management and patient rights that gave birth to it. At stake is this dilemma: how can societies that simultaneously privilege individual responsibility and somatic accounts of behavior govern those at the border of legal capacity, and with what justification? (shrink)