Larry Hickman

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What was the state of Pragmatism studies when you first encountered pragmatism? Larry A. Hickman – After completing my undergraduate degree in psychology I decided that I wanted to study philosophy. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent a year taking philosophy courses at the University of Texas in Austin. The faculty included Charles Hartshorne, who was co-editor of the Peirce Collected Papers. There was also David L. Miller and George Gentry, b...

A matter that is easily and usually overlooked is that the formative Pragmatists, especially C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, owed a significant debt to the Utilitarians. In this book, which its foreword tells us is an expansion of the 1983 John Dewey Lecture, James Gouinlock provides an exposition of the work of one Utilitarian, John Stuart Mill, on the subject of free speech in a democratic society. He then explores the ways in which Dewey "reconstructed" Mill's position, and the connections between Mill's concept of liberty and Dewey's notion of social intelligence.

This article begins with a brief attempt to ascertain Nicholas Rescher's position with respect to the different versions of pragmatism mounted by Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. I then suggest that despite Rescher's self-described fealty to Peirce, his views are in some ways closer to Dewey's constructivism than he has acknowledged. I conclude, however, that his treatment of truth is quite different from Dewey's "warranted assertibility." Rescher's concept of truth appears to alternate somewhat inelegantly between truth-as-correspondence-to-fact and truth-as-trans-horizonal-limit

After reviewing current proposals for standardized testing in K-12 education (United States) and for imposition of free-market economic and business models on higher education (Texas, Florida, and the United Kingdom), I argue that both types of proposals rest on flawed pedagogical assumptions and tend to undermine educational practices that promote the development of global citizens. I suggest that John Dewey was aware of the type of challenges now faced by educators and that he provided tools for blunting the force of these proposals and moving educational practice toward more desirable ends.

Just as the Hegelians of the nineteenth century divided themselves into left and right, so it is with twentieth-century interpreters of Dewey. The captain of the left is of course Richard Rorty, who regularly announces the death of metaphysics and toasts the longevity of rhetoric. The agenda of the other side, the Deweyan right, has now been ably advanced by Raymond Boisvert's Dewey's Metaphysics, which presents Dewey in the role of a post-Darwinian Aristotle. Like Aristotle, Boisvert writes, Dewey both presented a coherent account of ontology and articulated a set of categories. But whereas Aristotle was concerned with substance and accident, Dewey's units of discourse are "event" and "form."

In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modern philosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers at the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work. In Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Dewey argues that modern philosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment. Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy

Let me begin by thanking the society’s officers: President Kathleen Knight-Abowitz, President-Elect Len Waks, immediate past President Deron Boyles, Secretary-Treasurer Kyle Greenwalt, membership and development officer Mark Kissling, and of course student liaison Matt Ryg and webmaster Zane Wubbena. I know that their many efforts on behalf of this society are much appreciated by all of us.In 1955, when Will Herberg published his influential book, Protestant–Catholic–Jew, it could be said with some confidence that an essay in American religious sociology could claim exhaustive coverage by restricting its analysis to those three faiths. Scarcely a decade later, however, that formula would be obsolescent. The 1960s...