A much-needed consideration of methodology in comparative philosophy.

Between World War I and World War II, the students of Columbia University's John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge built up a school of philosophical naturalism sharply critical of claims to value-neutrality. In the 1930s and 1940s, the second-generation Columbia naturalists and their students who later joined the department reacted with dismay to the arrival on American shores of logical empiricism and other analytic modes of philosophy. These figures undermined their colleague Ernest Nagel's attempt to build an alliance with (...) the logical empiricists, accusing them of ignoring the scholar's primary role as a public critic. After the war, the prestige of analytic approaches and a tendency to label philosophies either???analytic??? or???Continental??? eclipsed the Columbia philosophers??? normatively inflected naturalism. Yet in their efforts to resist logical empiricism, the Columbia naturalists helped to construct a sturdy, canonical portrait of???American philosophy??? that proponents still hold up as a third way between analytic and Continental approaches. (shrink)

This dissertation will compare the concept of nature as it appears in the philosophies of the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese daoist Zhuangzi and will defend two central claims. The first of these is that Dewey and Zhuangzi share a view of nature that is non-reductive, philosophically liberal, and more comprehensive than the accounts recurrent in much of the Western tradition. This alternate conception of nature is non-reductive in the way that it avoids the physically mechanistic outlook underwriting (...) much of contemporary Anglo-American thought. It is philosophically liberal in that it accepts a more generous and progressive position than predominant Western orthodoxies. And, it is more comprehensive in scope insofar as it draws as much from the social sciences as it does from the natural sciences. The second claim defended will be that the synoptic vision gained from such a comparison offers a new heuristic program for research into the philosophical position known as naturalism, a program that can, at once, avoid the scientistic tendencies of the current, mainstream treatment of nature and reconnect with earlier, more inclusive models. Where Dewey's and Zhuangzi's ideas converge, one finds similarities in the prescriptions each made for human action, and where they differ, one finds mutually complementary insights. Finally, this heuristic will be used to refute various interpretations of Dewey and Zhuangzi that tend to understate or ignore the importance of nature within their schemes. (shrink)