โ Scribed by Kai Sammet
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Once upon a time, philosophical naturalism was a robust pan-discipline enterprise. Its advocates promoted the method of empirical science in an all-out battle for the new twentieth century against entrenched theological and conservative forces. In America, the battle started late but proved to be decisive. The early champions of naturalism, like Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and W. K. Clifford, were British; America had slumbered in idealistic dreams for an extra generation. Not until Dewey's generation, born around the time of the Civil War and its aftermath, would naturalism find its footing in academia. Ironically, the acknowledged leader of American naturalism started out as a Hegelian idealist. John Dewey's respect for the natural and social sciences took him places where idealism could not go, but he never forgot its snares and seductions. Even while the succeeding generation raised the banner of realism during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Dewey saw well how this realistic movement was still trapped in dualistic Cartesian premises about consciousness, selfawareness, and agency. Dewey's naturalism went deeper and spread its roots wider than any other of that era, precisely because his philosophy worked in tandem with, and took much inspiration from, many of the major developments in the social and biological sciences. This once-upon-a-time story has a sad ending: the last 50 years forgot Dewey and abandoned robust naturalism. Philosophy settled for a thin eliminative materialism and individualistic epistemology that largely ignored the sciences, mitigated only by a recent flurry of interest in cognitive science.
The story of the origin and maturation of Dewey's philosophical naturalism deserves to be told, and not just because of Dewey's deserved stature. The tale would teach us how philosophy could be again -how philosophy could rejoin cooperative efforts with the sciences. No scholar, until now, has attempted an account of Dewey so that such cooperative achievements are displayed in due proportion. Dalton has accomplished a tremendous feat of research and exposition, indebting not just scholars of pragmatism but also those intrigued by interrelationships among philosophy, behavioral psychology, neuropsychology, physics, sociology, education, and politics. Utilizing the vast resources of the Center for Dewey Studies and its editions of his writings and correspondence, Dalton painstakingly uncovers the numerous connections Dewey made with scholars across physics, psychology, neurology, and education, including Niels Bohr, Myrtle McGraw, Lawrence Frank, and many more scientists who could supply Dewey with news of cutting-edge research. But Dewey was no latecomer to science. Dalton's tale starts with Dewey's early years advancing functional psychology with James Angell and George Mead. Dewey grasped the many dilemmas confronting a naturalistic philosophy, chief among them the most intractable problems of human reason and consciousness. By forging strong supports between the study of the brain's development and functioning and the study of the psychological processes essential to intelligence, Dewey constructed a viable pragmatism opposed to both dualism and reductionism. Humans are neither rational spirits trapped in material bodies nor mechanical automatons following out preprogrammed instructions: we are adaptive manipulators of our environment who improve our problem solving skills to advance culture. That this view is no surprise to scholars in the
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