James Garrison

"We become what we love," states Jim Garrison in Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. This provocative book represents a major new interpretation of Dewey's education philosophy. It is also an examination of what motivates us to teach and to learn, and begins with the idea of education of eros (i.e., passionate desire)-"the supreme aim of education" as the author puts it-and how that desire results in a practical philosophy that guides us in recognizing what is essentially good or valuable. Garrison weaves these threads of ancient wisdom into a critical analysis of John Dewey's writings that reveal an implicit theory of eros in reasoning, and the central importance of educating eros to seek "the Good." Chapters: Plato's Symposium: Eros, the Beautiful, and the Good • Care, Sympathy, and Community in Classroom Teaching: Feminist Reflections on the Expansive Self • Play-Doh, Poetry, and "Ethereal Things" • The Aesthetic Context of Inquiry and the Teachable Moment • The Education of Eros: Critical and Creative Value Appraisal • Teaching and the Logic of Moral Perception This book can be used in graduate courses in foundations, teacher education, philosophy of education, qualitative research, arts and education, language and literacy, and women and education. Jim Garrison is Professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is pastpresident of the John Dewey Society and a winner of the Society's Outstanding Achievement Award.

The reason the title of my paper is not Making Meaning Together Bridging Theory and Practice is that there is nothing to bridge. Theory and practice are simply sub-functions within the larger function of making meaning, knowledge, and value in our lives, although few thinkers have ever conceived it as such. The philosophy of John Dewey is a striking exception. Theory and practice unite within his account of production, or if you prefer, his account of construction and reconstruction. It indicates a constructivism far beyond anything found in the contemporary educational conversation. In “Construction and Criticism,” Dewey writes, “I have used the word construction rather than creation because it seems less ..

Science educators and those who investigate science learning have tended, for good reason, to focus their attention on students' conceptual development, Such a focus is, however, too narrow to provide full and proper understanding of the complexities of original science learning. Recently developmental cognitive psychologists have called on the work of postpositivistic philosophers of science, especially Thomas Kuhn, to bolster their research into conceptual development in science acquisition. What these psychologists have not recognized is that Kuhn's position is actually a derivative of Wittgenstein's methodological nominalism, a viewpoint far more favorable to behaviorism than cognitive psychology. After drawing out some of the consequences of this fact for the developmental cognitive psychologist program for studying science learning, we suggest our own radical alternative. Drawing on Floden, Buchmann and Schwille's idea of “Breaking with Everyday Experience” we propose an alternative notion of original science learning in terms of Alfred Schutz's modification of Williams James' many worlds thesis. The many worlds thesis will allow us to better understand students' difficulty in learning idealized worlds such as science, worlds that represent a discontinuous break with ordinary everyday practical experience.

My article is a rejoinder to Gert Biesta’s, ‘“This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours”. Deconstructive pragmatism as a philosophy of education.’ Biesta attempts to place Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction in ‘the very heart’ of John Dewey’s pragmatism. My article strives to impress Deweyan pragmatism in the heart of Derridian deconstruction. It does so by offering Dewey’s denotative, naturalistic, empirical perspectivalism as an alternative to Derrida’s anti-empirical quasi-transcendentalism for understanding otherness and difference. The first section of my article shows Biesta offers a catastrophically mistaken and confused argument. The second section imprints Deweyan pragmatism in the heart of Derrida’s deconstruction. Dewey specifically makes philosophical use of a version of the genetic method he calls the ‘empirical denotative method’ to trace the exclusions as well as the inclusions of our perspectival selections driven by our finite embodied needs, interest, desires, and purposes. We may derive the trace of quasi-transcendental différance from the trace of empirically perspectival inclusions and exclusions. Specifically, différance is a reified hypostatic abstraction. Next, I respond to Biesta’s claim that since the metaphysics of presence still entangles Dewey, he cannot appreciate the fact that presence depends on absence. Actually, presence in Dewey always depends on absence. Finally, we will find that Biesta’s own deconstructive pragmatism flounders on his commitment to self-refuting relativism.

This chapter presents an edited e-mail discussion based on the philosophical conversations at a conference held in Cologne, Germany, in December 2001. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the contributors discuss selected questions about their contributions, roughly following the sequence of the chapters in Part II of this book. Second, the contributors ask more general questions about Dewey, Pragmatism, and constructivism. Finally, the chapter ends with brief statements about why Dewey is still an indispensible thinker for them. As they clarify their differences and seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from Pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points, in ways designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. In their views, the concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical Pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism.

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.

My paper focuses on the following famous passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” (OTL 1). I will show that John Dewey entirely agrees with this statement. Dewey and Nietzsche has a rich and novel understanding of metaphor, metonymy, simile, and such that they use to comprehend the creation of linguistic meanings, the identity of things, the creation of objects (essences, eidos, etc.), cause and effect, free will, and necessity as serving anthropomorphic purposes. My conclusion presents Dewey as a gay scientist joining Nietzsche in making creative use of the genetic method. The result of is a surprisingly poetic and rhetorical interpretation of Dewey that should not astonish anyone who reads him carefully. We arrive at this radical reading of Deweyan pragmatism by a metaphorical transfer from Nietzsche as the more familiar source domain to Dewey as the target domain. All along the way, things will fall into place if we carefully distinguish our anoetic experience of existence from the cognitive linguistic meanings, identities, and essences we create from our experience of existence.

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate

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."

walt whitman writes: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature”. Naoko Saito is an American philosopher and something of a Whitmanesque philosophical poet. Saito’s book is “the product of many years spent reading and studying American philosophy”. She further indicates: “Mostly I have done this from a remote part of the world—far from America across the Pacific Ocean—and, like so many others, in a language that is not my own”. Saito is a scholar in and of translation.Saito states that the “tensioned relationship between Dewey and Emerson, and more broadly pragmatism and American transcendentalism... is carried forward into the present...

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.

Drawing on John Dewey and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book employs philosophy as a conceptual resource to develop new methodological and analytical tools for conducting in situ empirical investigations. Chapter one explores the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Dewey. Chapter two exposits Deweyan ideas of embodiment, the primacy of the aesthetic encounter, and aesthetically expressive meaning underdeveloped in Wittgenstein. Chapter three introduces the method of practical epistemological analysis and a model of situated epistemic relations to investigate the learning of body techniques in dinghy sailing. The concluding chapter introduces a model of situated artistic relations to investigate the learning of artistic techniques of self-expression in the Swedish sloyd classroom.