Since 1979, when Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature appeared, there has been a flood of new scholarship on the philosophy of John Dewey. Surprisingly, little of this scholarship has thus far made its way into the field of education, where Dewey's philosophy has traditionally had a wide influence. Many of the authors of this collection are philosophers who have created some of the most original and influential work in this new scholarship. Five of them -- Larry Hickman, Thomas M. Alexander, Raymond D. Boisvert, and J.E. Tiles -- have written major books that have received wide international acclaim. Among the philosophers of education some, like Philip W. Jackson, are among the best known names in the entire international field, and have kept pace with Deweyan scholarship for many years. Others are younger scholars who know the new scholarship well. Finally, two prominent feminists contribute important new work on Dewey, expanding the domain of the new scholarship on Dewey. One of them, Susan Laird, has had her work cited in the new biography of John Dewey by Robert Westbrook.

The Undiscovered Dewey explores the profound influence of evolution and its corresponding ideas of contingency and uncertainty on John Dewey's philosophy of action, particularly its argument that inquiry proceeds from the uncertainty of human activity. Dewey separated the meaningfulness of inquiry from a larger metaphysical story concerning the certainty of human progress. He then connected this thread to the way in which our reflective capacities aid us in improving our lives. Dewey therefore launched a new understanding of the modern self that encouraged intervention in social and natural environments but which nonetheless demanded courage and humility because of the intimate relationship between action and uncertainty. Melvin L. Rogers explicitly connects Dewey's theory of inquiry to his religious, moral, and political philosophy. He argues that, contrary to common belief, Dewey sought a place for religious commitment within a democratic society sensitive to modern pluralism. Against those who regard Dewey as indifferent to moral conflict, Rogers points to Dewey's appreciation for the incommensurability of our ethical commitments. His deep respect for modern pluralism, argues Rogers, led Dewey to articulate a negotiation between experts and the public so that power did not lapse into domination. Exhibiting an abiding faith in the reflective and contestable character of inquiry, Dewey strongly engaged with the complexity of our religious, moral, and political lives.

This collection includes original studies from scholars from thirteen nations, who explore the epistemic features figured in John Dewey's writings in his discourses on public schooling. Pragmatism was one of the weapons used in the struggles about the development of the child who becomes the future citizen. The significance of Dewey in the book is not about Dewey as the messenger of pragmatism, but in locating different cultural, political and educational terrains in which debates about modernity, the modern self and the making of the citizen occurred.

. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.

This is the first book to consider John Dewey’s early philosophy on its own terms and to explicate its key ideas. It does so through the fullest treatment to date of his youthful masterwork, the Psychology. This fuller treatment reveals that the received view, which sees Dewey’s early philosophy as unimportant in its own right, is deeply mistaken. In fact, Dewey’s early philosophy amounts to an important new form of idealism. More specifically, Dewey’s idealism contains a new logic of rupture, which allows us to achieve four things: • A focus on discontinuity that challenges all naturalistic views, including Dewey’s own later view; • A space of critical resistance to events that is at the same time the source of ideals; • A faith in the development of ideals that challenges pessimists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and • A non-traditional reading of Hegel that invites comparison with cutting-edge Continental philosophers, such as Adorno, Derrida, and Zizek, and even goes beyond them in its systematic approach; In making these discoveries, the author forges a new link between American and European philosophy, showing how they share similar insights and concerns. He also provides an original assessment of Dewey’s relationship to his teacher, George Sylvester Morris, and to other important thinkers of the day, giving us a fresh picture of John Dewey, the man and the philosopher, in the early years of his career. Readers will find a wide range of topics discussed, from Dewey’s early reflections on Kant and Hegel to the nature of beauty, courage, sympathy, hatred, love, and even death and despair. This is a book for anyone interested in the thought of John Dewey, American pragmatism, Continental Philosophy, or a new idealism appearing on the scene.

John Dewey is considered not only as one of the founders of pragmatism, but also as an educational classic whose approaches to education and learning still exercise great influence on current discourses and practices internationally. In this book, the authors first provide an introduction to Dewey's educational theories that is founded on a broad and comprehensive reading of his philosophy as a whole. They discuss Dewey's path-breaking contributions by focusing on three important paradigm shifts – namely, the cultural, constructive, and communicative turns in twentieth-century educational thinking. Secondly, the authors recontexualize Dewey for a new generation who has come of age in a very different world than that in which Dewey lived and wrote by connecting his philosophy with six recent and influential discourses (Bauman, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, Levinas, Rorty). These serve as models for other recontexualizations that readers might wish to carry out for themselves.

Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.