Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism. Manicas - - Lexington Books. A Reply to Russell. Tom Burke - - University of Chicago Press. Matthew Festenstein - - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. John Dewey's Aesthetic Philosophy. Serge Grigoriev - - History and Theory 53 3: Philosopher of Science and Freedom.
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Sign in to use this feature. John Dewey began working on the book in The text went through several intermittent evolutions until it was eventually lost in His working titles for the book can give us some insight into these evolutions. Dewey first entitled it The Philosophical Science.
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He then named it A Science Became. He finally settled on the unwieldy Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. This last title is loosely descriptive of the hypothesis of the book.
Dewey believed that the philosophy of his day was deeply infected with quasi-problems it had inherited from its unmodern beginnings. This infection was most obvious in the growing technicality and hyperspecialization surrounding the theory of knowledge. For Dewey, there was something shockingly out of touch with this focus of interest.
In a time when scientific discoveries were changing the world, philosophy was still bogged down with problems that had changed little since the time of Plato. Science was being carried forward by a community of inquirers utilizing an experimental method to examine, and acquire knowledge about, nearly everything. Philosophy was still asking if knowledge was even possible. The rediscovered book has two distinctive parts. The first is a cultural history that describes how certain contemporary to Dewey quasi-problems of philosophy developed from ancient and medieval attempts to understand and categorize the world.
The core of the argument in the first half of the book is easy to explain, yet difficult to accept. Dewey begins by saying that ancient culture determined ancient philosophy, and not the other way around.
John Dewey, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy
For instance, he believed that the political, economic and intellectual stratification of ancient Greece into the aristocracy, the military, the merchants, and the slaves , fed into and determined the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle who were both aristocrats. The stratification of ancient Greek culture is not in question. The famous early democracy of Athens was a democracy only for the intellectual and economic elite. Much of the physical labor that supported this democracy was done by those who were not able to participate politically.
In this model, the work of the intellect was the unquestioned higher and the practical labor of the body was the lower. Those who used their intellect, and could avoid the messy world of the practical, would remain unsullied: Truth, beauty, and even true reality, were found in this higher realm.
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The lower realm of mining and farming and building was important to life, but could never lead towards the higher experience. It seems likely that anyone will be influenced by their culture in their thinking, and that Plato and Aristotle would be no different. There is nothing wrong with Plato and Aristotle modeling their philosophy on their culture, and in fact Dewey believed it was impossible for them to do otherwise. Then what had been a philosophy inspired by a stratified culture became accepted by medieval thinkers as a vision of reality.
John Dewey, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy
They adopted the earlier model where all that was lower was fallen, and all that was higher was divine. Truth, beauty, and reality were to be found not in the fields or mines, but only in heaven. Dewey identifies many unfortunate consequences of this unreflective phase. The philosophy of both Plato and Aristotle that the medieval thinkers accepted, relegated the body to a lower level. More importantly, they relegated the work done by the body to a lower level. The very people who supported and drove the culture and economy were looked down upon.
Miners, farmers, and even doctors, were associated with the body. So unfortunately the results of their work were never related to knowledge.