Shane Ralston

In this article, I formulate a Deweyan argument in support of guerrilla gardening, or the political activity of reclaiming unused urban land, sometimes illicitly, for cultivation and beautification through gardening. Historically, gardening movements in the United States have been associated with relief projects during periods of economic downturn and crisis, urban blight and gentrication, as well as nationalism, nativism and racism. Despite these last few unfortunate associations, the American philosopher John Dewey detached gardening from the nativist’s tool-kit, portraying it as a gateway for young people toward enriched adult experiences, not as a technique for assimilating immigrant children to a distinctly American way of life. One of those experiences that school gardening can prepare children for is political activism, particularly involvement in gardening movements. Dewey did not mention this collateral benefit. Nevertheless, an argument can be made that garden advocacy—or, more specifically, participation in politically-motivated gardening movements such as guerrilla gardening—is an acceptable interpretation, or elaboration, of what Dewey meant by “a civic turn” to school and community gardening.

Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations bridges the gap between philosophical pragmatism and international relations, two disciplinary perspectives that together shed light on how to advance the study and conduct of foreign affairs. Authors in this collection discuss a broad range of issues, from policy relevance to peacekeeping operations, with an eye to understanding how this distinctly American philosophy, pragmatism, can improve both international relations research and foreign policy practice

Parental overuse of portable technology poses a bonafide threat to the welfare and development of children. In the past decade, researchers have documented this phenomenon whereby parents pay far more attention to handheld electronic devices than to their children's safety and developmental needs. What most studies have failed to examine is the extent to which workers in privately owned and operated daycares also exhibit technology-induced distracted behavior. This article aims to identify the moral harm of caregivers' distracted behaviour in a private daycare setting or, more simply, the welfare effects of distracted daycare. First, with the assistance of recent research, the phenomenon of distracted caregiving is defined. Then, the documented harms of distracted caregiving in a daycare setting are catalogued. Next, an ethical analysis of the phenomenon of distracted daycare working is undertaken from four normative ethical perspectives: (i) ethical egoism, (ii) utilitarianism, (iii) principlism and (iv) care ethics. Five recommendations for reforming distracted daycares, each based upon one or more of the four ethical perspectives, inform the article's conclusions.

Why do average Americans recall the wise words of their politicians (e.g., John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you. . .”) but forget those of their political philosophers (e.g., John Rawls’s two principles of justice)? Notably absent from Sandel’s list is Benjamin Franklin, the author, printer, scientist, and statesman who led the United States through a tumultuous period of colonial politics, a revolutionary war, and its momentous, though no less precarious, founding as a nation. Lorraine Smith Pangle’s new book on Franklin seeks to remedy another glaring omission, namely, “that while so much attention has been paid to Franklin’s life, so little has hitherto been given to his political thought."

Environmental historian Kevin Armitage’s new book offers welcome relief to readers grown weary of anthropocentrism versus nonanthropecentrism debates and Muir-Pinchot-Leopold “third way” arguments. It will also find a receptive audience among those who have maintained all along that education is the key to addressing our environmental woes. In the United States, environmental education has a vibrant history. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a critical mass of policy makers, educators, scientists, and philosophers shared the belief that a curriculum based on the careful observation and study of nature should be taught in primary and secondary school classrooms. The “nature study movement,” as it was called, advanced an ambitious agenda for education reform based on a simple theory: children who develop a deep and abiding interest in the natural world mature into environmentally conscious adults and good citizens. Organized thematically, Armitage’s book lays out the meaning of nature study as well as its scientific and sentimental interpretations (introduction and chap. 1), the influence of progressive education on nature study (chap. 2), the connection between recapitulation theory and nature study (chap. 3), nature study and bird conservation (chap. 4), school gardening as an extension of nature study (chap. 5), the growth of nature photography in tandem with nature study (chap. 6), and finally nature study’s role in promoting agricultural reform (chap. 7). In case the significance of this progressive-era movement is still in doubt, the movement’s legacy can still be felt, Armitage contends, in the ideas of perhaps two of the most influential environmental thinkers of the past century: Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson (conclusion).

Should ethics be taught in the high schools? Should high school faculty teach it themselves or invite college and university professors (or instructors) into the classroom to share their expertise? In this paper, I argue that the challenge to teach ethics in the high schools has a distinctly Deweyan dimension to it, since (i) Dewey proposed that it be attempted and (ii) he provided many valuable resources with which to proceed. The paper is organized into four sections. In the first, I summarize Jim Garrison’s account of Dewey’s philosophy as education and argue that it offers an exceptional tool-kit to someone interested in advocating for high school ethics pedagogy. The second section presents Dewey’s model for ethics instruction in a high school setting, as articulated in his only essay devoted specifically to the subject: “Teaching Ethics in the High School.” The third examines Peter Singer’s brief essay, “Moral Experts,” to see whether moral expertise is a sine qua non for teaching ethics in the high schools. In the fourth and concluding section, I propose that meeting the Deweyan challenge of teaching ethics in the high schools requires, first, preparing oneself to overcome the objection that such a project is naïve, utopian or just plain foolish and, second, organizing enthusiastic participants to develop and test a prototype, experimenting with various implementation strategies on a small scale before attempting a bolder and larger scale version of the project. Apropos of this second requirement, I showcase the Center for Education in Law and Democracy’s “The High School Ethics Project” in the state of Colorado.

In the past twenty years, scholarly interest in John Dewey's later writings has surged. While later works such as Art as Experience (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), and Freedom and Culture (1939) have received considerable attention, Knowing and the Known (1949), Dewey's late-in-life collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley, has been largely neglected. A common bias among Dewey scholars is that this work, instead of developing Dewey's Logic, departs from its spirit, reflects the overbearing influence of Bentley on Dewey (who was at the time an octogenarian), and, therefore, merits little serious scholarly consideration. However, Dewey and Bentley engaged in an extended correspondence, collected in John Dewey and Arthur Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence, 1932-1951 (1964), the result of which was no less than a watershed moment in Dewey's thinking on the experimental method of inquiry. The Logic was improved in ways that incorporated the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce's logic and developed Dewey's earlier work in a direction expressly intended by the aging pragmatist. Indeed, Dewey writes in correspondence with his co-author: "You [Bentley] shouldn't lean too heavily on the [1938] Logic; it wasn't a bad job at the time, but I could do better now [with Knowing and the Known]; largely through association with you and getting the courage to see my thing [logical theory] through without compromise" (Correspondence, 4:595, see also 184, 420, 481, 483-84). One of the few scholars of American pragmatism to acknowledge that Knowing and the Known was a watershed development in Dewey's thinking is Frank X. Ryan, author of an exciting new book, Seeing Together: Mind, Matter, and the Experimental Outlook of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, that clearly and concisely presents the revolutionary method developed in Knowing and Known: the transactional approach.

‘Puzzles’, ‘word games’, ‘logical anomalies’, whatever we call them, they perplex us and challenge our familiar patterns of reasoning. One of these puzzles, among many others, originated from the mind of an ancient Megarian logician, Eubulides of Miletus, and endures to the modern day.1 Its name, ‘sorites’, can be traced to the Greek word soros, meaning ‘heap.’ The answer to whether one grain of sand ‘is a heap’ or ‘is not a heap’ seems quite simple: it is not a heap. However, as we add grains to the one, at what future point does the non-heap become a heap? Our decision is fraught with uncertainty. Are the objects or the language we are using to describe them vague? In academic philosophy, the ancient Greek puzzle has gained the status of a paradox, as philosophers apply stoic and modern logic to these propositions considered to have vague predicates. The current debate has developed quite serious and wide-ranging implications, such as whether sorites issues provide adequate grounds for abandoning our standard ontology (or our understanding of what really exists), 2 and (germinating into another discipline) whether vagueness in the language of legal rules can generate disagreement as to whether there are right answers to questions of law. 3 Several unique solutions to the paradox have been proposed, yet all suffer from specific inadequacies that might, upon further reflection, disappear in the event that we endeavour to produce a synthesis. When we say that we are attempting to derive a synthesis, we seek to combine elements of two solutions for the sake of creating a new (and hopefully, though not necessarily, a better) one. The paradox of the sorites, or ‘the heap’, appeals to us because it challenges our assumption that we may categorically describe clear cases and their negations, yet fail to distinguish the borderline ones. I will demonstrate that some combinations of solutions are easy fits while others are extremely weak and awkward as attempts at resolving the paradox. Nonetheless, the process of synthesis produces three noteworthy combinations.

This collection stands out from what has come to resemble a cottage industry of volumes on global democracy and cosmopolitanism. Tan and Whalen-Bridge’s collection has the distinction of exploring whether Deweyan democracy, or the account of democracy inspired by Dewey’s writings and embraced by contemporary Deweyans, can be disseminated globally and across diverse cultures. According to the collection’s editors, the eleven essays share a single approach: ‘By examining the implications for conceiving of democracy as culture, rather than as something that precedes or follows from cultural formations, the essays in this volume consider Dewey’s adumbrations of democracy as one face of globalization’ (1). Since the volume is dedicated to the late Richard Rorty, it is unsurprising that the relevance of Rorty’s neopragmatism to Dewey’s pragmatism also emerges in several of the essays.

Despite Jon Elster’s caveat that the market potentially endangers the forum, Goodin insists that commercial innovations, such as the focus group and the market test, would actually strengthen democracy and citizen engagement. His thesis in this book is that governments should task members of smallscale deliberative bodies — or what he calls, in the singular, a ‘micro-public’, and what Robert Dahl before him termed a ‘mini-populus’ — to experiment with alternative solutions to public problems. While the book is a collection of previously published essays, many are extensively altered and rewritten to support this thesis and to round out a literature that has recently become increasingly oriented toward deliberative practice. Indeed, Goodin is more circumspect than some of the less praxis-focused deliberative theorists — for instance, Jürgen Habermas — concerning the capacity of deliberative forums to displace traditional democratic institutions: ‘Inevitably . . . deliberative democracy can only supplement rather than supplant the institutional apparatus of representative democracy as we know it’ (7-8). The book is organized into two sections, one concerning the design and function of small-scale deliberative bodies or micro-publics, and the other devoted to deliberative activities in macro-political institutions, including the translation of micro-public recommendations into sound public policy (what is often called ‘uptake’).

It is no secret that disputes between philosophers working in separate traditions do arise, especially along the analytic-continental fault line. Flashes of disagreement between analytic philosophers and pragmatists have also been witnessed in recent years. Many analytic philosophers allege that pragmatism lacks logical rigor or contains a naïve theory of truth (i.e., what is useful is true). Some pragmatists contend that analytic philosophy fails to address practical issues—what John Dewey called ‘the problems of men’—and endorses a faulty fact-value dichotomy. Many of these disagreements reflect mistaken views on both sides of the analytic-pragmatist divide, views that could easily be corrected through more open dialogue across the two traditions. Since at least the mid-twentieth century, analytic philosophers and pragmatists have reached out to each other in an effort to bridge the divide. When the founders of the analytic tradition, the logical positivists, immigrated from Austria and Germany to the United States during World War II, the stage was set for greater collaboration. Indeed, the logical positivist Otto Neurath invited the American pragmatist John Dewey to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences. This collaborative spirit finds expression in the present collection of essays. According to the editor, ‘(t)his volume aims to clarify the most recent developments in this process (of collaboration), focusing on the key theoretical issues in the revival of salient themes in the classic tradition of American philosophy within the context of analytical thought’ (xi).

This new book by Nathan Crick explores the integral relationship between philosophical pragmatism and rhetoric. Unlike Robert Danisch’s earlier work on the topic, Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric (University of South Carolina Press 2007), Crick’s project focuses almost exclusively on the rhetorical resources found in John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy. To trace the connections between pragmatism and rhetoric, the first obstacle the author must overcome is the time-honored tradition whereby philosophers denigrate rhetoric or sophistry because it deals only with appearance and persuasion, not with truth and knowledge. The second is that Dewey wrote very little about rhetoric per se, even though he highlighted the importance of communication to democracy in The Public and Its Problems (1927) and praised eloquence in Art as Experience (1940). Still, sparking a conversation between scholars of rhetorical studies and philosophical pragmatism, particularly Dewey’s version, is among the most significant goals of the work. ‘In fact’, Crick writes in the introduction, ‘one of the core arguments of this book is that it is only by bringing rhetoric to Dewey, and by creating something new through transaction, that we can produce a novel perspective on the arts of rhetoric and of democracy’ (10). The work is organized into three main sections: i) on rhetoric and politics, ii) on rhetoric and science and iii) on rhetoric and art. Download PDF

Through a close reading of the works of John Dewey and Aldo Leopold, I demonstrate that it is possible to reframe debates about the environment in language better suited to robust and inclusive public discourse. There are at least two ways of framing the instrumental relationship between human and environmental health: (i) in terms of control and (ii) in terms of restraint. On the one hand, means of control are associated with an anthropocentric view of environmental value: the environment has worth only insofar as it provides resources for human benefit. On the other hand, means of restraint reflect greater concern for environmental health, sustainable living, non-anthropocentric (whether eco- or bio-centric) environmental value and lifestyles in harmony with nature, similar to the rhythmic relationship between human and environment captured in the writings of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. While John Dewey defends an instrumentalism of control, Aldo Leopold supports an opposing instrumentalism of restraint. At first blush, these two concepts appear to form a dualism, as incompatible dyads in a permanently bifurcated relationship. However, the matter is not quite so simple--or so I argue. Dewey and Leopold's concepts of environmental instrumentalism prove more compatible than this simple control/restraint dichotomy suggests. Nevertheless, it is helpful to frame environmental issues in terms of these two competing instrumentalism. To test the distinction's usefulness, I examine the wilderness debate, the global warming controversy and a more local matter, attempting to frame these environmental discourses in terms of an instrumentalism of control and an instrumentalism of restraint.

H. L. A. Hart’s (1907-1992) influence on contemporary philosophy is not restricted to the philosophy of law. As the book’s sub-title suggests and the table of contents confirm, he wrote widely on matters social, political and moral, not just legal. Probably best known for The Concept of Law (1961), Hart also authored a collection of essays on Jeremy Bentham (Essays on Bentham,1982), two books on the morality of criminal law based on his exchange with Lord Patrick Devlin (Law, Liberty and Morality, 1963) and The Morality of the Criminal Law, 1965), one on punishment (Punishment and Responsibility, 1968), a treatise as well as a collection of essays on jurisprudential theory (Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence, 1953, and Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy, 1983), and finally a volume on legal causation, co-authored with Tony Honoré (Causation in the Law, 1959). The book under review here, on Hart’s legacy, is divided into six sections: the first is devoted to Hart’s general jurisprudential theory; the second to his writings on criminal law; the third to legal causation; the fourth to concerns of justice; the fifth to legal, political and moral rights; and the sixth and final section to matters of toleration and liberalism.

With Spanish the third most widely spoken language in the world, one would expect more Spanish translations of important texts in American philosophy. Given the recent publication of a Spanish translation of The Public and Its Problems (1927), more people have access to John Dewey’s ideas about democracy than ever before. A broader readership might bring greater inclusivity to the existing debate over the significance of Dewey’s legacy for democratic theory. For the past few years, this debate has raged almost exclusively between English-speaking scholars. Many have responded to the arguments of Richard Posner, the law professor and Circuit Court judge who delivered a scathing critique of Dewey’s legacy in his book Law, Pragmatism and Democracy (2003). Even if new readers of The Public and Its Problems fail to join the debate, they will at least be better equipped to evaluate Posner’s arguments with some appreciation for the object of his criticism. Hopefully they will come to acknowledge Dewey’s contribution as a vital thread in the tapestry of thought making up contemporary currents in democratic theory—currents that University of Toronto professor Frank Cunningham collectively labels “democratic pragmatism.” See his Theories of Democracy (Routledge, 2002). Ramon Del Castillo’s introduction to the translation captures the rich context of Dewey’s work on democratic theory. It places the book in the proper historical milieu, 1920s America at the time of the height and decline of American Progressivism. It also juxtaposes The Public and Its Problems against Lippmann’s two earlier works, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).

Environmental studies is a highly interdisciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers, ecologists, biologists, sociologists, activists, historians and professionals in public and private environmental organizations. It comes with no surprise, then, that the follow-up to Nelson and Callicott’s original anthology The Great Wilderness Debate (1998) features essays from authors in a broad array of disciplines. While there is considerable overlap between the two volumes, this new version offers forty-one essays, five of which are new additions, organized into four sections. What constitutes wilderness? Is wilderness real or social constructed? What kinds of values are served—recreational, aesthetic, scientific, or others—by protecting wild areas? While many commentators trace these questions back to an exchange in the 1990s between two environmental ethicists, J. Baird Callicott and Holmes Rolston III, the debate over the wilderness idea actually has older roots. At least in the U.S. context, it travels back in time to the earliest part of the twentieth-century, when the American public, politicians and ecologists were pressed to justify why wilderness areas should be set aside in a new National Park system. Since then, the fundamental question fuelling the ‘Great Wilderness Debate’ is whether what is being preserved is actually wilderness. Is there such a thing or place as wilderness, that is, a quintessentially non-human or wild setting untainted by human influence? If so, why do we believe such areas deserve protection?

As the title suggests, this collection addresses the very topical subject matter of environmental ethics by bringing together a host of unique voices. In the editor’s words, ‘[t]he essays collected here represent a joint effort in dealing with this problem [of global environmental conservation and protection]. All contributors to this volume agree that what we urgently need now is global awareness of the environmental crisis we are facing’ (9). While a thread of consensus weaves throughout, what is more striking is the diverse and colorful tapestry of approaches these essays yield on a single theme. The first four essays articulate the ethical injunction to conserve and protect the natural environment in terms of various axiological and methodological commitments: normative, biocentric, aesthetic and empirical. In the final five essays, the thematic emphasis shifts ever so slightly. A plurality of perspectives on environmental conservation and protection emerges from different theological commitments, at times reflecting and at other times transcending individual—Christian/Western, Islamic/Middle Eastern, Buddhist/Eastern, and (in the final two essays) Daoist/Eastern—cultures.

In chapter 8 of The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal, Victor Kestenbaum disputes the naturalistic-instrumentalist reading of John Dewey's A Common Faith. Rather than accept the orthodox reading, he challenges mainstream Dewey scholars to read Dewey's theism from a phenomenological perspective. From this vantage, Kestenbaum contends that Dewey was wagering on transcendence, gambling on an ideal realm of supersensible entities, and hoping that the payoff would be universal acknowledgement of "a widening of the place of transcendence and faith in every area of his philosophy." In a long-neglected correspondence between John Dewey and Albert Balz, Dewey responds to Balz's misreading of his logic as a correspondence theory of truth by stating that through the translation of all the ontological into the logical in the context of inquiry, he is "on the side of the angels." I argue that Dewey is accomplishing much the same thing in A Common Faith by naturalistically unifying the real and the ideal under the heading of the religious. In this respect, Dewey's naturalism and instrumentalism, rather than Kestenbaum's transcendentalism, is firmly "on the side of the angels.".

What makes serious scholarship in this area especially daunting is that there is no single authoritative statement of Dewey’s ethics. Indeed, the puzzle pieces of Dewey’s ethical theory are distributed throughout the 37 volumes of his collected works (The Collected Works of John Dewey 1882–1953, Early, Middle and Later Works, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1987, hereafter CW). Pappas assures his readers that a cohesive account of Dewey’s ethics is not a mirage: ‘Even though Dewey never wrote a single comprehensive and definitive rendition of his moral thought, he had a coherent and complex view worth reconstructing and reconsidering today’ (p. 300). The book is organized into three thematic sections: (i) the metaethics or what Pappas calls ‘the methodological commitments that form the basis of Dewey’s reconstruction of moral theory’ (p. 301), (ii) the metaphysics of Dewey’s ethics or those generic traits that pervade morally problematic situations and (iii) the normative ethics, extending to Dewey’s democratic ideal and its justification within experience.

Standard methods for teaching Deliberative Democratic Theory (DDT) in the philosophy classroom include presenting theories in the historical order in which they originated, by theorist (or groups of theorists) or in various thematic categories, including criticisms of the theories. However, if Simone Chambers is correct and DDT has truly entered “a working theory stage,” whereby the theory and practice of deliberation receive equal consideration, then such approaches may no longer be appropriate for teaching DDT. I propose that DDT be taught using the Critical Friends (CF) discussion protocol. This protocol enables high quality deliberation in the context of a supportive intellectual community. The key advantage of my proposal is that the CF pedagogical framework empowers students to conceive DDT through the lens of their own and others’ deliberative practices. By referring to a rather than the strategy, this proposal does not specify the single right way to teach DDT, but suggests one among a field of possibilities.

The distinctive trait of this newest addition to Joseph Margolis’ magnificent oeuvre of thirty books is its broad-ranging and highly partisan approach to evaluating contemporary trends in Western philosophy. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses the trifecta of competing philosophical traditions: pragmatism, continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Based on the book’s title, the reader can easily forecast the winner: pragmatism. Margolis directs Part 2 to the goal of reclaiming naturalism as an antidote to the ailments of all three philosophical traditions. Part 3 concerns the enduring challenge that Immanuel Kant’s model of transcendental reason and G. W. F. Hegel’s subsequent critique pose to contemporary philosophy. The book’s thesis is that pragmatism has lost its distinctly American quality. In its more recent incarnations, pragmatism (or neopragmatism) has been continually cross-pollinated with elements in the continental and analytic traditions. Moreover, this open-ended capacity for hybridization is what constitutes pragmatism’s advantage.

John McGowan is a prolific humanities scholar whose writings engage topical issues in political philosophy, literary criticism and rhetorical studies. In Pragmatist Politics, American liberal democracy and its contentious philosophical commitments are his chosen subject-matter for a second time. What distinguishes this recent treatment from the one previous—aptly titled American Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press 2007)—is its more thorough grounding in the homegrown American philosophy known as pragmatism. In the introduction, McGowan announces the primary aim of his project: ‘Pragmatism, a philosophy of possibility tied to a commitment to liberal democracy, provides me with the opportunity to articulate in these pages a more expansive vision of what our polity might be’ (xii). Besides ‘a more expansive vision,’ the author catalogues those challenges that the American polity faces today, from culture wars to environmental crises, from wars on drugs and terrorism to the failings in the policy agendas of both the political right and left. So, the question arises: What makes American liberalism capable of ameliorating, if not settling, seemingly intractable policy problems without sacrificing citizens’ effective freedom? The author provides an answer to this question in five chapters, the majority of which can be found in the initial three: the first, ‘The Philosophy of Possibility,’ explores American pragmatism’s potential as a resource in the fight against ideological extremism; the second, ‘Is Progress Possible?’ addresses how hope and progress shape a political environment in continual flux; the third, ‘The Democratic Ethos,’ speaks to the way of life that democracy engenders; and the final two chapters, titled ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Liberal Democracy as Secular Comedy,’ treat the topics of how to alleviate human suffering and bring a healthy dose of humor to the tragedy of liberal politics, respectively.

Originally published in 1927, John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems is a landmark work in pragmatist political philosophy. Today many commentators appreciate it as the mature expression of the American pragmatist’s democratic theory (though at least two later essays are perhaps more representative). It is also considered a classic text for students of twentieth-century American political thought. The book was originally a series of lectures given at Kenyon College in 1926. Many of its central ideas grew out of debate Dewey had with a fellow public intellectual, Walter Lippmann. Besides its inclusion in the collected works (1996, edited by Larry Hickman), the only other edition to be released was by Swallow Press in 1954, containing Dewey’s half-page foreword (1927) and his twelve-page afterword (1946). With the arrival of Penn State Press’ new edition, introduced and edited by Melvin L. Rogers, The Public and Its Problems receives a monumental facelift. It includes a chronology of Dewey’s life events, an editorial note, and Rogers’ introduction to the work, subtitled ‘Revisiting the Public and Its Problems’.

What Talisse refers to as his “pluralist objection” states that Deweyan democracy, or John Dewey’s theory of democracy as contemporary Dewey scholars understand it, resembles a thick account, that is, a theory establishing a set of prior restraints on the values that can count as legitimate within a democratic community, and thus is incompatible with pluralism, at least insofar as contemporary political theorists define that term. In this paper, I argue that by undermining the pluralist objection, a reunion of Deweyan democracy and pluralism—two ideas that have been torn asunder by Talisse’s misreading of Dewey andDeweyans—becomes possible.

In this article, I outline a teaching demonstration that lasts approximately twenty-two minutes, which a candidate can employ when interviewing for a position in ethics. Since job openings in ethics, and especially applied ethics, are becoming increasingly common, I think that this outline will be helpful to many candidates deliberating about the topic and structure of their future teaching demonstrations. This demonstration is also especially well-suited to a search at a teaching institution, whether a community college, state college, or state university, where faculty and administration place more emphasis on success in pedagogy than success in research and publication. In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions for ways to adapt this outline for a longer teaching demo.

Most contemporary deliberative democrats contend that deliberation is the group activity that transforms individual preferences and behavior into mutual understanding, agreement and collective action. A critical mass of these deliberative theorists also claims that John Dewey’s writings contain a nascent theory of deliberative democracy. Unfortunately, very few of them have noted the similarities between Dewey and Robert Goodin’s theories of deliberation, as well as the surprising contrast between their modeling of deliberation as a mixed monological-dialogical process and the prevalent view expressed in the deliberative democracy literature, viz., that deliberation is predominantly a dialogical process. Both Dewey and Goodin have advanced theories of deliberation which emphasize the value of internal, monological or individual deliberative procedures, though not to the exclusion of external, dialogical and group deliberation. In this paper I argue that deliberative theorists bent on appropriating Dewey’s theory of moral deliberation for political purposes should first consider Goodin’s account of ‘deliberation within’ as a satisfactory if not superior proxy, an account of deliberation which has the identical virtues of Dewey’s theory— imaginative rehearsal, weighing of alternatives and role-taking—with the addition of one more, namely, that it operates specifically within the domain of the political