James Garrison

Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking is riddled with unnecessary and confusing dualisms. He rigidly separates ‘critical skill’ and ‘critical spirit’, the philosophical and the causal, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and the moral and the epistemological. These dualisms are easily traced to his desire to defend an absolutist and decontextualised epistemology. To the Deweyan naturalist these dualisms are unnecessary. Appealing to the pragmatist notion of beliefs as embodied habits of action evincing emotion, I show how language, meanings and the mind, including the mind of the critical thinker, emerge from our biological being.

Harvey Siegel’s conception of critical thinking is riddled with unnecessary and confusing dualisms. He rigidly separates ‘critical skill’ and ‘critical spirit’, the philosophical and the causal, ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and the moral and the epistemological. These dualisms are easily traced to his desire to defend an absolutist and decontextualised epistemology. To the Deweyan naturalist these dualisms are unnecessary. Appealing to the pragmatist notion of beliefs as embodied habits of action evincing emotion, I show how language, meanings and the mind, including the mind of the critical thinker, emerge from our biological being.

This chapter presents a constructivist reading of Dewey's work by establishing a line of development between Dewey's 1896 essay on the reflex arc and the social constructivism explicit in his later works. It demonstrates the relevance of classical Pragmatism to current issues in the philosophy of education, highlighting key theoretical and conceptual components of the cultural construction of meanings, truth claims, and identities. It also looks into Dewey's short essay “Knowledge and Speech Reaction” to identify the connection between speech acts, the constitution of stimuli by responses, and the construction of knowledge objects by the operations of inquiry.

My paper concentrates on Peirce’s late essay, “Issues of Pragmaticism,” which identifies “critical common-sensism” and Scotistic realism as the two primary products of pragmaticism. I argue that the doctrines of Peirce’s critical common-sensism provide a host of commendable curricular objectives for democratic Bildung. The second half of my paper explores Peirce’s Scotistic realism. I argue that Peirce eventually returned to Aristotelian intuitions that led him to a more robust realism. I focus on the development of signs from the vague and indeterminate to the determinate and universal. The primary example will be the evolution of the very idea of number. I believe we will never arrive at the end of number history because we can never fully contain creativity. I draw similar conclusions for the idea of curriculum. Whether or not there is an end to the evolution of signs in Peirce is a matter of debate. I incline toward the opinion there is not, though I am unsure. I conclude by arguing that rationality itself is but the form and structure of poetic creation and that we should embrace paradox and even contradiction rather that become caught in totalizing and totalitarian end of history stories.

This paper is a further reflection on my dialogue with Larry Hickman, director emeritus of the Center for Dewey Studies, and Daisaku Ikeda, president of the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International (sgi). One surprising outcome of this dialogue is how similar Deweyan pragmatism is to many forms of Mahayana Buddhism such as sgi. Here I survey some similarities between Hickman’s philosophy of technology and Buddhism by emphasizing value creation and criticism. (Soka Gakkai means value creating society.) I then explore Peter D. Herschock’s, Buddhism and Intelligent Technology relying on Hickman to rectify Herschock’s philosophy of technology before discussing how Herschock’s insightful application of Buddhist ethics to ai and the internet accord with Hickman.

Hager and Beckett assert that a ‘characteristic feature of … assorted co-present groups is that their processes and outputs are marked by the full gamut of human experiences involved in their functioning’. My paper endorses and further develops this claim. I begin by expanding on their emphasis upon the priority of relations in terms of Dewey and Bentley’s transactionalism and Buddhist dependent co-origination and emptiness. Next, I emphasize the importance of embodied perspectives in acquiring meaning and transforming the world. Here, too, we will find surprising Buddhist connections. Finally, I examine the primacy of practice: how we acquire our minds and selves by participating in shared social practices. This stance is shared by philosophers as diverse as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey.

Three experts collaborate in this passionate and rewarding dialogue on the legacy of the great American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859 1952). Focused on growth and the creation of value within the context of real life, Dewey s pragmatic philosophy shares much with humanistic Buddhism. These similarities, which arise throughout the book, add richness to a dialogue already overflowing with faith in our capacity to find common ground and expand human well being in our rapidly globalizing world. For Dewey, individual and social potential alike are unlimited. Readers will come away ready to embrace rather than fear the increasing complexity of our world."

William James and Education is a dynamic collection of original essays spotlighting William James as a role model for bringing philosophy to bear on the persistent issues of life and education. Using James's philosophical ideas, the contributors evade the polarization and superficiality that permeate the debate around such educational issues as standards versus diversity, cultural consensus versus multiculturalism, religion versus science, and individual freedom versus social determinism. The result is a synthetic collection of essays offering original, unique, and useful insights. One of the most influential of American philosophers, William James is relevant today because he provides a way of understanding human behavior that is both rigorous and humane. James shows how we may soften and sometimes harmonize rigid ideological divisions, such as those plaguing contemporary education, with a pragmatic approach to issues of theory and practice. By reconsidering some of the roots of American thought in James's work, this volume points the way to valuing both uniqueness and universality, among other seemingly opposing concerns. The result is a lively weave of historical and contemporary thought, providing philosophical perspectives on the critical issues facing educators today.