Alexander V. Stehn

To publish a Spanish translation of Richard Bernstein’s work on John Dewey, most of which was originally published as a book in 1966, may seem strange given the passage of nearly fifty years. But we are living in strange times. Many scholars have come to acknowledge the “resurgence” of pragmatism in the 1990s after it was “eclipsed” by analytic philosophy beginning in the 1940s. And given that Dewey was the only person prominently developing the pragmatic tradition at the time, the recent surge of interest in Dewey’s philosophy seems only natural. However, as Nancy Fraser perceptively warns us: “The most important lesson for those proposing to revive pragmatism today is this: There is not one, but several different pragmatisms. We had better know which of them we want to revive.” A parallel point could be made concerning Dewey: not one but several Deweys circulate, even among Dewey scholars themselves. But there is no question that: 1) Bernstein’s visions of both Dewey and pragmatism are worth publicizing, and 2) Spanish is the second most natively spoken language in the world. From these two premises, the simple conclusion follows that Bernstein's Dewey should exist in Spanish. In addition to the excellent translation by Alicia García Ruiz, Ramón del Castillo has performed the admirable service of providing a learned and painstakingly documented historical introduction to this edited volume, which includes two additional essays on Dewey from 1986 and 2010, thereby gathering all of Bernstein’s writings on Dewey into a single Spanish edition for the first time.