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Dewey's Conception of Being and Philosophical Reflection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Richard Gotshalk
Richard Gotshalk
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Extract

In the following pages I should like critically to consider certain aspects of John Dewey's thought as set forth for the most part in Experience and Nature. In particular, I should like to discuss the conceptions of being and of philosophieal reflection which underlie his delineation of human agency as located in nature and as essentially characterized by reference to the problematic. I select these ideas both because they concern something fundamental philosophieally and because one can see in Dewey's development of them both the strength and weakness of his philosophieal reflection.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , September 1964 , pp. 142 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1964

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References

1 Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1958), pp. 75,Google Scholar 97, no, 140, 163, 262, 275. This is an unaltered republication of the second edition of the original. In footnotes hereafter I shall refer to it as EN.

2 EN, p. 75, 413.

3 EN, pp. 271–273.

4 EN, pp. 176–182, 258–261.

5 EN, pp. 303–304, 308.

6 EN, p. 8.

7 Essays in Experimental Logic (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.), pp. 6–8.Google Scholar This is an unaltered republication of the 1918 edition. In footnotes hereafter I shall refer to it as EEL.

8 EN, pp. 252–253, 256–261, 266–271, 369–371.

9 EEL, pp. 9–12.

10 EN, pp. 372–376.

11 EN, pp. 3–5.

12 Quest for Certainty (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1929), p. 23.Google Scholar

13 EN, pp. 91–95, 129–130, 131–139.

14 EEL, pp. 8–10 (footnote).

15 EN, pp. 231–233.

16 The tendency of Dewey to attempt to objectify the human situation is shown not only in his characterization of experience but in his description of man's situation and his activities in it in fundamentally biological and behavioristic terms.

17 EN, p. 128.

18 EEL, pp. 8–10 (footnote), where Dewey suggests that the “problem” of reality is rooted in confusion of a differential and a general use of the term “real.” This seems to imply that, the confusion being recognized, there remains no legitimate question of being as such.

19 EN, pp. 276–277.

20 The term “problem” is often used with the implication that what one is dealing with can be gotten out in front of the mind's eye. Thus Gabriel Marcel wished to distinguish “problem” from “mystery” in order to preserve the character of that with which philosophieal reflection is concerned and to prevent it from being reduced to a technical problem. See Being and Having, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951),Google Scholar trans, by Katharine Farrer, pp. 100–101, for example. I have not done this but wished to preserve the usage of the terms “problem” and “problematic,” even though, in the case of philosophieal as against scientific problems, there is a major difference. Dewey, however, seems to wish to reduce all that is problematic to the form of problem found in natural science.