James Scott Johnston

A study of the development of Dewey's logic from 1916-1937 leading up to his final 1938 book on the subject. By 1916, Dewey had written two volumes on logical theory. Yet, in light of what he would write in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, much remained to be done. Dewey did not yet have an adequate account of experience suitable to explain how our immediate experiencing becomes the material for logical sequences, series, and causal relations. Nor did he have a refined account of judging, propositions, and conceptions. Above all, his theory of continuity--central to all of his logical endeavors--was rudimentary. The years 1916-1937 saw Dewey remedy these deficiencies. We see in his published and unpublished articles, books, lecture notes and correspondence, the pursuit of a line of thinking that would lead to his magnum opus. John Dewey's Later Logical Theory follows Dewey through his path from Essays in Experimental Logic to the publication of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, and complements James Scott Johnston's earlier volume, John Dewey's Earlier Logical Theory.

James Scott Johnston's incisive study draws on a holistic reading of Kant: one that views him as developing and testing a complete system (theoretical, practical, historical and anthropological) with education as a vital component. As such, the book begins with an extensive overview of Kant's chief theoretical work (the Critique of Pure Reason), and from that overview distils crucial discussions (the role of practical reason; the claims of the third antinomy) for his moral theory. An extended discussion of Kant's moral and political theories and the place of pedagogy in it follow, with attention to all of Kant's important moral works as well as his chief religious work, Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason. A discussion of culture and character follows, chiefly through a discussion of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint, together with certain lectures and published essays on history and politics. Finally, an extensive discussion of Kant's published works on education, together with only recently published letters and announcements (in English), is provided. This culminates in Johnston's estimation of what a Kantian education, systematically conceived, might look like: an education that is attentive to theoretical, moral, cultural-historical, and pedagogic domains of Kant's thinking.

In this paper, I discuss the Ontario College of Teachers’ most recent versions of the Standards of Practice with William Hare’s counsel on being open-minded regarding open-mindedness in mind. Specifically, I insist that the use of the Standards of Practice as guidelines for working through cases of professional and ethical issues requires yet another rule to indicate when to deviate from this or that standard. In this way, open-mindedness consists of developing and following rules to indicate when and where specific standards should be bypassed. These rules vary, however, one source of these can be found in what Barbara Herman has called, “Rules of Moral Salience”—rules that guide us in our day-to-day moral decision-making and that we draw on when called upon to make moral-ethical judgments. What this means for various ethics (ethics of care; Kantian-type ethics, psychological and/or developmental accounts of ethics) is also broached.

These are exciting times for the philosophy and historiography of German Idealism. While in the first half of the 20th century, scholars have been content to provide stand-alone works on single thinkers, we see since Dieter Henrich’s Hegel im Kontext a trend that involves the setting of thinkers side by side in a constructive dialogue. While not every thinker gets an equal share of the time, the trend is towards more equitable exegeses. Rethinking German Idealism is no exception. While the editors did not set out to overtly juxtapose various thinkers and programs of German Idealism in the text, they did set out to create a dialogue amongst them, and the upshot of this dialogue serves nicely as an example of such juxtaposition.

Katrin Flikschuh presses Karl Amerik’s notion of recursive justification into service with respect to the question whether nomads have an obligation to enter statehood. Flikschuh answers in the negative, and claims that nomads, who have not entered into the civil condition, cannot be expected to conform to the obligations of statehood. I agree with Flikschuh’s claim, and provide further support through Kant’s arguments in the Lectures on Logic that such obligations as statehood are objective criteria of judging, and require the raising of subjective claims to practical reality—a condition that cannot be meet on the part of settlers alone.