ABSTRACT. Dewey has been regarded as the most significant philosopher and educator in China in the past one century, especially well-known in the field of educational research. It is found that before Dewey went to China in 1919, his writings have been introduced into China since 1911, when the first chapter of the book How We Think was translated by Liu Boming (刘伯明) and published on the journal The New Education (《新教育》) in Shanghai. From then on, the introduction and translation of Dewey's writings came out in China from time to time, aimed to provide experience to the New Education Movement at that time. Particularly, in 1919, Dewey started his 2-year visit, along with lectures around China, by which his philosophy of education has become the hottest issue in China, lasting for nearly 30 years, until 1950s. Actually, Dewey arrived in China on the Eve of the May Fourth Movement, in which Chinese people appealed for Democracy and Science, in order to build a democratic and developed country. According with this, Dewey’s philosophy of Democracy has attracted Chinese scholars most. After intercultural dissemination from US to China, there were quite a few different interpretations of Deweyan Democracy in China. Taking the translation of the masterpiece Democracy and Education as the example, the title was translated by different disseminators in different time, as ‘平民主义与教育’‘民本主义与教育’‘民主主义与教育’‘民主与教育’ chronologically. The divergence of different translation lied in the interpretation of Democracy. Some Chinese scholars interpreted it as a trend to pay great attention to the populace (‘平民主义’), while others thought that ‘Democracy’ was a guideline which means regarding the populace as the start point of policy making (‘民本主义’). Besides these opinions, there was an increasingly popular opinion that ‘Democracy’ was a kind of social model, far beyond the views towards populace (‘民主主义’‘民主’). On the other hand, there is a tradition in Chinese classes that students’ desks were unmovable and the layout of desks was quite strict and rigid, when teachers made effort to give knowledge to students as much as possible, ignoring the significance of activities and cooperation. Dewey’s visit to China motivated Chinese educational scholars to criticize this undemocratic educational mode strongly, and then they determined to creat a democratic educational atmosphere, such as, paying more attention to students rather than teachers, laying emphasis on group works and cooperation among students, etc. We have to say that Chinese scholars have realized their education was not democratic at all, exactly since Dewey went to China, and they would like to believe that their appeal to democratic education was from Dewey originally.

ABSTRACT. In this multimodal presentation, I share a collection of erasure poems on John Dewey’s (1938) Experience and education to evoke the notion of education as an “ever-present process” (p. 50), a pedagogical way of be/coming.

By integrating erasure poetry with videography and reflective-reflexive narratives, I explore what it means to be in presence (Rodgers, 2020) with students. I interlace the texts from the erasure poems with the moving images and piano improvisations to evoke the beauties of fleeting, fragmentary ways of at/tending to the curriculum-as-lived experiences (Aoki, 1986/1991/2005).

For me, writing erasure poems is an ever-present, continuous process of re/discovery. The re/creative process of interpreting Dewey’s work through the erasure poetry inspires me to re/create more space, time, and awareness to reflect on what is at the heart of teaching and learning. In lingering with Dewey’s philosophy of education, I am re/searching for more heartful ways of attending to students’ “present-self” (Dewey, 1902, p. 105). I wish to move closer toward the “presence of the beingness of teaching” (Aoki, 1992/2005, p. 190), a pedagogical “place where teaching truly dwells” (p. 1986/1991/2005, p. 164).

With those ideas in mind, my presentation is organized into the following five attitudes of presence (Rodgers, 2020): directness, wholeheartedness, open-mindedness, responsibility, and curiosity. I also draw from Greene’s (1977, 1984) and Palmer’s (1997/2017) writings to help me gain a deeper understanding of Dewey’s (1938, 1934) theories on experience.

In sharing my learning journey in search for more Deweyan inspirited teaching and learning, I hope to invite further conversations about the importance and need for more presenteness (Greene, 1984) in education, and explore possibilities for using poetic inquiry as an artful, living practice of re/examining and re/developing teacher praxis.

ABSTRACT. The village institutes inspired by Dewey, which used to operate in several different regions of Türkiye, in particular the ones existed between the years 1940-1946, constituted a wholly unique model offering education in and for villages whilst intending a social transformation through instructing locals on a variety of academic, daily, and ‘even’ art-related subjects e.g., on how to carry out agricultural practices (Arslan, 2018). Arguably, these ‘schools’ as educational organizations were not only places to teach and learn for the stakeholders but also to experiment with novel knowledge through doing. In fact, these institutes were highly symbolic given their exclusive architecture, the meanings and values attached to them by villagers alongside the policymakers and ‘authorities’. They were saviors of the young Republic at micro and macro levels, namely, for the very village and the region they were built in and for the whole country, particularly considering their additional function gained in time: Serving for the training of teachers for modern Türkiye. Upon their closure due to political/ideological reasons, these left out buildings ironically kept serving for the purposeful socialization of locals via becoming wedding venues and similarly yet sarcastically carrying forward farming-related work by turning into barns. Seventy-six years later in 2022, it has been officially announced that the Republic of Türkiye Ministry of National Education (MoNE) is working on an initiative concentrating on opening of village education units entitled “village public centers”, which will act as education departments. This decision is ‘found’ pivotal in particular vis-à-vis attaining education in rural areas, which is provided in the form of public training. It has also been shared that husbandry training programs are being organized for the local habitants again as a part of the plan. In light of the aforementioned chronicle, the present study attempts to delve into the societal and educational reasons and possible outcomes of the first-round opening and reopening “village public centers”, with an emphasis on the ‘endeavor’ toward de-mobilization of villagers i.e., ceasing the ever-continuing move to towns and cities, via adopting the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and generating ANT Analysis Diagrams (AADs) accordingly by “configuring ontologies” (Fenwick, 2010). ANT paves the way for varying actors to hold dissimilar attributes of e.g., power or influence (Bengtsson & Lundstrom, 2013). The AADs utilized will shed light to the power and influence attributes of the related actors in the networks like the MoNE of Türkiye, villagers, students, teachers and graduates of the village schools. This paper mainly explores the ‘old’ village schools of the mid-twentieth century in Türkiye and the village schools ‘reanimated’ in the new century- or those of the new millennium- through embracing the route(s) of extended case study method, which might help “connect present and past in anticipation of future” (p.5) and with a view to scrutinizing the lives of the native people, an analysis of context effects and effects of power will be carried out so that one of the instruments utilized and is being utilized politically as part of, for instance, a nation-building project (Burawoy, 2009) in Türkiye will be better understood. Using some salient notions of ANT i.e., symmetry and dualism (Jensen, 2020), this study then intends to put forth the gains out of analyzing a wider range of actors participate(d) in the attempts of networking and offers more insights into the implications of this very sociological thinking of relations for both educational leadership and governance (Kamp, 2018). Spillane et al., 2001 (p.24) pinpoints leadership “involves the identification, acquisition, allocation, coordination, and use of the social, material, and cultural resources necessary to establish the conditions for the possibility of teaching and learning” therefore we are of the opinion that casting light on the existence of village schools at present and in the past can help redefine their role for the community they serve for and beyond. It is believed that this outlook on the phenomenon will move our work much closer to the territories of ANTiES, namely, actor-network education studies (Landri, 2020). We hope that the current study enables us to see how the establishment of “village public centers” as a new policy initiative in education in Türkiye actually unfolds in villages and within the centers as education sites. It is hoped that the study can help researchers, decision-making bodies and practitioners make meaningful projections as to the ‘fate’ of the project dwelling on its raison d'être.

ABSTRACT. John Dewey’s legacy as the greatest advocate for using education as the primary means of cultivating democratic values and lifeways appears secure. However, in order to appreciate this legacy, we need to understand its sources, for Dewey’s efforts, worthy as they are for such a celebration as this, were nevertheless a continuation of a larger trend. In this paper, I shall argue that Dewey’s thoughts about democratic education trace in part to what might at first seem an unlikely source: Hegel. For while Hegel himself was no great friend of democracy, his chief proponent in America, William Torrey Harris (whom William James called “America’s foremost Hegelian”), fully recognized that Hegelianism, when applied to the American situation (and specifically its frontier states and territories), would have to “unfold Hegel out of himself.” Thus Harris promoted a self-determination that arises through the establishment of strong social institutions, while criticizing the “brittle individualism” that predominated at the nation’s founding, and that continued through its frontier phase. Education, or bildung, was Harris’ chief preoccupation, and his career centered upon strengthening the nation’s primary and secondary educational institutions. To borrow Dewey's words, philosophy, for Harris, really was the philosophy of education. And for good or for ill, when one compares Harris’ lectures on “The Philosophy of Education” with Dewey’s “My Pedagogic Creed,” one frankly discerns more of Harris than Dewey in the current curriculum and practices of US public primary and secondary schooling. Dewey, of course, was well acquainted with Harris and his work, both as US Commissioner of Education and as the editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Indeed, Harris was a mentor and close family friend (and longtime summer neighbors at the Glenmore Camp in the Adirondacks). Though Dewey registered some disagreement with Harris’ specific philosophy of education, the overall affinities strike me as much more salient. For instance, the roles of schools and schooling in Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) mirrors closely the roles that Harris envisions their playing in his own Psychologic Foundations of Education (1898). Moreover, Individualism, Old and New (1933) calls to mind Harris’ attempts to replace outdated, “brittle” conceptions of individualism with more robust notions grounded in our associated ways of living. On a more critical note, though one that cannot be ignored, Dewey also inherits from Harris and Hegel a somewhat troubling, colonialist picture of “savage” or tribal life. In short, just as Harris was trying to unfold Hegel out of himself to apply to the American scene in the late 19th century, we can see one of Dewey’s many aims to be that of attempting a further unfolding of Harris (and Hegel) to apply to the particular emerging concerns of 20th century America, an America marked by the closing of the American Frontier, the rise of mass-production, and the rapid urbanization of American life. This, I would argue, is the lasting significance of Dewey’s “permanent Hegelian deposit,” which should not be ignored as we, in an appropriate spirit of trust, work to unfold Dewey out of Dewey to meet the challenges of today.

ABSTRACT. Friedrich Nietzsche (b. 1844) and his younger, longer-lived American contemporary John Dewey (b. 1859) have, each in their own way, shaped what William James might have called a “strenuous mood” in 20th-century philosophy: an insistence that responsive openness to experiential existence (rather than logical formalism) opens the way for philosophical investigation of the increasingly problematic notion of truth. They lived and worked during the rise of laboratory science in German and American universities. Here, under the pressure of the microscope and calculating machine, correspondence theories of truth—adaequatio rei et intellectus—no longer possessed sufficient explanatory power or theoretical adequacy. In science, knowledge now advanced by empirical experimentation aided by powerful mathematics, with scant regard for the conceptual hinterwelten of Plato’s conceptual cavern. Critical idealist philosophies tried to keep up by formalizing this process or giving it logical grounding: connections from concrete, yet contingent, fact back to abstract, but secured, truth. Questioning the possibility of making this link were both Dewey and Nietzsche. Contemporaries did not take long to notice the similarities in their arguments for a truth that remained ever open to experimental revision while eschewing a priori grounding. Already by 1911, René Berthelot had been struck by a resemblance between Dewey’s and Nietzsche’s theories of truth. Nietzsche achieved celebrity status around the same time the pragmatists began to earn recognition as a distinct school of philosophy in their own right. In 1914, for example, a University of Illinois doctoral dissertation by Denton Geyer could compare C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey under the common rubric of a pragmatist theory of truth. Hence, when Walter Kaufmann re-introduced Nietzsche to America after two rounds of world war with Germany, Kaufmann took pains to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s epistemology was not wholly foreign to pragmatist conceptions; somewhat later, Richard Rorty made the converse transatlantic move of showing that American pragmatism had antecedents in European romanticism. Parallels between Dewey’s and Nietzsche’s theories of truth have continued to draw scrutiny down to the present day. Yotam Lurie has noted the resonances in their theories of value, while Paul Fairfield has highlighted to great effect Dewey’s and Nietzsche’s trenchant critiques of academic philosophy and their remarkably parallel answers to the question of what it means to be a philosopher. Building on Fairfield’s insightful recent work, I here focus on Dewey and Nietzsche’s insistence that a philosopher must maintain an active, involved stance toward truth. To do so, I offer a close reading of two short texts, separated by two decades, in which Dewey and Nietzsche ask the same question (allowances made for English-German translation): “why is truth a problem” (Dewey), or how and when did “truth become aware of itself as a problem” (Nietzsche)? The texts from which these questions spring are Dewey’s “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth” (1909) and “The Problem of Truth” (1911), versus Nietzsche’s “Fable of the True World,” included in Twilight of the Idols (1888-89), which echoes “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873).

ABSTRACT. The term ‘soul’ can be found throughout John Dewey’s work, particularly when he discussed self-realization and meaningfulness, both of which are integral to his understanding of growth and that which is educative.1 To the uninitiated reader, though, Dewey’s references to soul not only can be confusing, but his early work in particular can be misinterpreted through a religious context.2 Steven Rockefeller’s analysis underscores the problem of ambiguity with this and similarly related concepts: “The terms ‘soul,’ ‘self,’ and ‘spirit’ all signify generally the same thing in young Dewey’s writings,” but he adds that “the different terms each have their own special emphasis.” Drawing specifically from Dewey’s Psychology, Rockefeller briefly details these nuances in a footnote.3 Further into his analysis, Rockefeller states, “Students of Dewey’s philosophy are often left puzzled by just what he means by the self in his mature thought.”4 While scholars have written extensive analyses on the development of his philosophy of spirit and metaphysics, there remains an absence of philosophical explication on Dewey’s conception of soul. So, what did he mean when he wrote of ‘soul’? What is the soul’s relation to spirit? Was it metaphysical or ontological in nature for Dewey? What might the characteristics of a naturalized soul be? These are some of the clarifications we have sought to make through this ongoing inquiry.

Our study has been conducted via a close read and textual analysis of some Dewey’s most prominent works. Specific attention has been paid to locating the places where he elaborated on and distinguished between soul, spirit, and self.5 Importantly, our search has been guided by the personal correspondence between Dewey and Lyle K. Eddy, which we accessed from the archive at The Center for Dewey Studies. As a result of our analysis, we argue that Dewey used the term soul in three distinct ways: soul as natural tendencies and incipient energy; soul as a recognizable qualitative unity; and soul as the meaningful unity of an ideal when it plays out in reality. Importantly, the third definition leads Dewey into the realm of the aesthetic, which we believe can be used to make sense of not only the ideal in one’s growth and flourishing, but it can lay the groundwork for the ideal in those relationships that are truly educative.6 Perhaps most importantly, the framework for a naturalized soul can provide language through which to reconsider aspects of learning experiences that genuinely matter to human flourishing, ones that are grounded in a fuller sense of human becoming for the individual and society. This paper presents the framework for a Deweyan conception of soul and describes how spirit functions within and between these three distinctions.

ABSTRACT. This paper reconstructs Dewey’s view of conceptual change and shows its implications for both the theory of inquiry and for the theory of education. The importance of conceptual frameworks and conceptual change in Dewey’s theory of inquiry has been overlooked. Yet, in How We Think (1933) and Logic (1938), Dewey insists on the crucial role played by conceptions or conceptual structures in the process of inquiry. In the terminology of the Logic, all inquiry makes use of previously established factual materials (existential propositions) and conceptual tools or structures (universal propositions). In many inquiries, including scientific ones, such propositions are simply “taken and used” (LW12:144) without being reexamined. However, Dewey always warned against taking conceptual frameworks for granted: “Failure to examine the conceptual structures and frames of reference which are unconsciously implicated in even the seemingly most innocent factual inquiries is the greatest single defect that can be found in any field of inquiry” (LW12:501). Crucially, Dewey thought that the development of knowledge involves the creation, revision, and expansion of such conceptual structures (MW10:3, LW12:139, LW12:343) as well as their application in particular inquiries. There is therefore something like a distinction between mere belief revision and conceptual change in Dewey’s logic, more subtle than Kuhn’s distinction between normal science and extraordinary science (Kuhn 1962). In the Logic, Dewey describes a more dialectical and continuous process of iterative improvement of existential and universal propositions (LW12:275-276).

After presenting Dewey’s views on conceptual change and its distinction from mere belief revision, I draw the implications of Dewey’s conception of conceptual change for the theory of education, showing the analogies that can be made between the process of inquiry as found in science and the process of learning as found in education. While some have warned against drawing such analogies (Rusanen and Pöyhönen 2013), I will argue that Dewey’s theory of conceptual change provides insights into the learning process at the individual level. Crucially, this involves relying on Dewey’s theory of concepts, which combines inferentialist, operationalist, and instrumentalist aspects (Burke 2022), rather than on the philosophical theory of concepts developed by philosophers such as Burke, with its representationalist elements, or on the psychological theory of concepts defended by Machery (2009), which tends to reduce conceptual change to belief revision.

I focus on two kinds of implications of Dewey’s notion of conceptual change for education. First, on the learning process, which, as Dewey writes of “intellectual advance”, can either be “organized around old conceptions”, or require “qualitative rather than quantitative change; alteration, not addition” (MW10:3). Second, on the transmission of established knowledge to students, which can be better achieved by making explicit the conceptual frameworks at play in the curriculum and how they determine the questions and answers arrived at in each field under study. This fosters a form of perspectivism and pluralism (by showing how different conceptual frameworks can be used to approach a subject-matter), while avoiding a slide into an easy relativism (by showing that once the conceptual frameworks are chosen, the answers and solutions are objective).

ABSTRACT. Dewey introduced to pragmatism innovative conceptions of knowledge and knowing that added something important to Peirce’s and James’s respective discussions of belief and truth. Namely, achieving knowledge includes but is something more than establishing beliefs (à la Peirce) or truths (à la James) as upshots of experience and inquiry.

For Peirce (1878), inquiry moves toward attainment of fixed belief, toward the settlement of opinion, and toward the establishment of secure conduct (rules of action, effective and efficient habits, etc.). “Belief is a rule for action [in short, a habit] … The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise” (EP1, 129). Dewey (1916, echoed in 1917) points out that a “habit” is a predisposition to act in future circumstances more easily and effectively in ways not unlike past ways of acting in similar circumstances (MW9, 349). This by itself does not easily accommodate changed and changing conditions to any great extent other than to acknowledge that such habits are always subject to modification.

But inquiry for Dewey aims at more than fixed beliefs. It also aims at achieving knowledge, where knowledge is attunement to connections among things so as to be “in a position to introduce the changes that will readapt [a habit] to new conditions” (MW9, 349). … “[W]hile a habit apart from knowledge supplies us with a single fixed method of attack, knowledge means that selection may be made from a much wider range of habits” (MW9, 350). “In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available in other experiences (MW9, 349). In short, (1) knowing is an ability to freely (effectively, efficiently) use one’s justified beliefs as means to solving new kinds of problems (to resolve new difficulties, to successfully deal with new cases in light of similar or not-so-similar prior cases). (2) By “justified” is meant “objective, disinterested, self-critical.” It is the latter that makes existing beliefs freely available for use in new circumstances in that they may be held up for criticism but remain open in that light to being assessed for their potential usefulness (as rules of action) in new circumstances.

This nicely captures what we want to achieve in the classroom, not just to convey readily retrievable information (currently accepted beliefs) into students’ heads but to foster students’ abilities to utilize such information creatively in novel situations. Not just to make them believers, but to make them knowers.

But there is a problem here. There is nothing in this account of Dewey’s conception of knowledge to rule out false knowledge, i.e., an ability to freely use justified but false beliefs to address new problems. A related problem is that Dewey edges closely to making the same kind of mistake that James made when he chose to emphasize a conception of truth that is really nothing more than Peirce’s conception of belief, creating a terminological confusion that has hobbled pragmatism ever since. In this talk I intend to show how Dewey can avoid both of these lines of criticism. It is proposed here that knowing and knowledge should be thought of as ideals, in line with Peirce’s account of truth, whereas what Dewey often refers to as knowing is better termed understanding (following Elgin 2009).

ABSTRACT. In this presentation I will be making the case that Theory of Knowledge (ToK) class of the two year International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IBDP) is a good instanation of Deweyan principles that should be imitated and promoted by philosophers, educators and other scholars interested in Dewey. The IBDP is a globally available educational program for students in their final two years of high school education. The IBDP requires all learners to take a ToK class. It is a class that covers topics covered in traditional academic philosophy with a radically pluralist approach that I argue is more descriptive than prescriptive. The ToK curriculum aims at encouraging the student to think of themselves as a knower and understanding their biases. It is a process of self-discovery which stands in stark contrast to traditional academic philosophy’s attempt to persuade the learner of their viewpoint by advancing a doxographic account of philosophy. ToK supports the autonomy of the learner more than traditional academic pedagogy. The flaw with the pedagogy of traditional academic philosophy is that its theorist-first approach leads to students accepting the system of an individual theorist wholesale or reject the project of philosophy altogether. In a traditional academic setting, a philosopher introduces students to the subject of philosophy by doing guided readings of a few different theorist’s work. This approach allows the philosopher to go more in-depth but it sacrifices breadth. ToK employs a concept first approach that allows students to consider a very broad range of issues and epistemology without going into depth on the ideas of particular theorists. ToK’s concept first approach is more aligned with Deweyan principles of instrumentalism and experimentation than academic pedagogy. It allows students to experiment with their own ideas about how knowledge is formed rather than copying the work of another. Think this is an interesting approach because the experimental phase of philosophical learning is often reserved for those who have dedicated themselves to studying philosophy in particular whereas ToK is a class required for all learners. This is a good reflection of the central role philosophy and epistemology plays in all knowledge making. The IBDP provides students with the foundation for college by encouraging them to put philosophy at the center of their learning. ToK provides a context for all other learning to take place. My expansive and radical view is that a course like this should be a part of general education for all members of society. Thanks to the internet we live in an epistemic democracy where citizens decide for themselves what to believe. The problem is the vast majority of people have no experience in epistemology. Epistemology has traditionally taken place in the ivory tower where access can be a major issue. Classes like ToK could democratize access to epistemology to the masses. It could empower them to make informed judgments for themselves and help combat the spread of disinformation online.

ABSTRACT. Lipman’s proposal of the methodology of Philosophy for children (P4C) is best understood within a Deweyan and pragmatist framework because many of P4C key elements were “built unapologetically on Deweyan foundations,” (Lipman 2008, 150) and are intimately connected to the pragmatist philosophical tradition. The presentation begins by putting forward how Lipman identifies some of the ways in which P4C is built upon Dewey’s educational and philosophical legacy. Then it complements Lipman’s testimony by indicating how the Deweyan framework in present in the practical application of the program. The second part of the presentation argues that the notion of tertiary qualities, which was very much present in Lipman’s early philosophical work and which appears several times in the first edition of Thinking in Education (1995), is progressively transformed into the crucial mode of caring thinking in Lipman’s work. After describing the notion of tertiary qualities in Dewey and how it appears in Lipman’s work, it is possible to show that tertiary qualities are at the core of understanding the intersection of moral and aesthetic judgement. It is in this continuous search for thinking well and integrating critical, creative and caring thinking that the role of philosophy can be fully acknowledge in its impact in aesthetic and moral education. The notion of tertiary qualities appears only once in the second and last edition of Lipman work Thinking in education (2003). However, this unique mention is decisive for a good understanding of what happens in a philosophy session in the Community of inquiry. By showing how Lipman’s work interconnects critical, creative and caring thinking (Lipman 2003), it is can more easily be pointed out how philosophy can aid aesthetic and moral education by way of logic. The conclusion points out the force of narratives in helping self-corrective thinking by how they provide emotional depth to the subject matter and how they enable transferring it insights from caring thinking to moral and aesthetic judgments. The last part of the presentation argues that the various formats of P4C, which have been developed since its first implementation by Lipman, Sharp and Matthews, must seek to recognise its Deweyan foundations and establish their own philosophical foundation if they want to honor the contribution of philosophy for the education for thinking (Mendonça 2022). That is, while the classical version of Philosophy for Children can easily be described as having Dewey’s philosophical and educational work as its theoretical basis it also requires that other formats of the program deliberately specify their philosophical grounding

ABSTRACT. John Dewey’s sojourn in China from 1919 to 1921 happened to intersect with the May Fourth/New Culture Movement in Chinese history. Such a historical coincidence brought about a fascinating conversation between Deweyan pragmatism and China of the May Fourth era. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Dewey’s Chinese devotees strived to adopt, transport, and apply Deweyan pragmatism to Chinese education on a wide range of issues, including literary revolution, higher education reform, civic education cultivation, and rural education.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that educational encounter is an evolving process of two-way cultural communication. This article sheds light on the cross-cultural philosophical dynamics between China and John Dewey during the May Fourth period. In this paper, I examine the ways in which Chinese social institutions, cultural customs, and political climates in a given historical context interacted with John Dewey’s American pragmatism. While analyzing Dewey’s role in China’s education and cultural reforms during the May Fourth time, this paper aims to explore how Chinese social, political, and educational factors intertwined to exert a profound effect on Dewey’s democratic thinking. In other words, the crucial question that this work seeks to answer is: How did Dewey and Chinese scholars worked together to build up a mutual learning relationship during the May Fourth time?

In addition, an inquiry into Dewey’s interaction with the May Fourth period has promise for helping Deweyan scholars from both China and U.S. better understand each other and construct a positive vision for the mutual engagement between both countries’ educators. Furthermore, in a broad sense, understanding Dewey’s involvement with the May Fourth/ New Culture Movement will be conducive to acknowledging the strong connections between Dewey’s philosophy and social, political, and educational situations.

This paper will borrow the ideas from Intercultural Adaption Theory as a theoretical frame to analyze how Dewey and China could earn a mutual learning experience from each other. This theory emphasizes the idea that after exposing in a certain style of culture for a while, people learn to develop the ideas, rules, values, among other themes of that culture (Lauring, 2011). In other words, most of researchers define intercultural adaptation as the process, through which persons in cross-cultural interactions change their communicative behavior to decrease the probability of being misunderstood (Dillard, 1990). In keeping with Intercultural Adaption Theory, this study is favorable to better understand the substance of Dewey’s educational and democratic thought from a perspective of cultural pluralism, through an investigation of how Dewey approached Chinese society and culture.

Of note, documentary research will play a dominant role in my work. In line with this methodology, my work relies on interpreting the essays and letters, which had been written by Dewey during his Chinese visit between 1919 and 1921. At the same time, Dewey’s lectures on education in China will be regarded as the significant data for this paper. In addition to those primary sources, other relevant works as the secondary sources by some Chinese or American researchers will also be considered.

ABSTRACT. “In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience is made explicit. […] The deliberate cultivation of this phase of thought constitutes thinking as a distinctive experience. Thinking, in other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous.” (Dewey 1916, 170). This quote from Democracy and Education shows surprising. terminological and semantical affinities with Robert Brandom’s account of the expressive role of logic in Making it Explicit, as well as, what counts in this context, with the notion of recollection and expression, as formulated in A Spirit of Trust:

“Recollection is the basis of Hegel’s account of expression: the relation between what is implicit and the explicit expression of it. He understands both the cognitive and the practical phases of experience as the emergence into (greater) explicitness of what can recollectively be seen to have been implicit all along.” (Brandom 2019, 18).

While in other contexts, the incompatibility between Brandom's inferentialism and Dewey's pragmatism has been emphasized, both by Brandom himself (Brandom 2011) and in the secondary literature (Faerna 2014, Hildebrand 2017), this paper aims to highlight a significant convergence that arises in spite of, and beyond, such incompatibility. Specifically, the use of the term “expression” in Brandom's quoted excerpt suggests an interpretation in terms of aesthetic experience as defined by Dewey, echoing Hegelian terms, as one in which “[t]he end, the terminus, is significant not by itself but as the integration of the parts”, while “[i]n an intellectual experience, the conclusion has value on its own account” (Dewey 1980. 55 – the same opposition is to be found in Hegel's Phenomenology – see Hegel 1977, 2-3).

Accordingly, it appears that Dewey's notion of education, as “recapitulation and retrospection” (Dewey 1916, 84) and “reconstruction and reorganization of experience” (ibid. 89), as well as Brandom’s notion of recollection, as the work of “edifying semantics” (Brandom 2019, 636) and of “transforming the past into history” (ibid., 17), can both be conceived as the building of traditions, as a specific means through which humans “maintain themselves by renewal” (Dewey 1916, 1). More importantly, they can be both understood in terms of aesthetics of production, akin to a collective artwork, where the acts of invention and preservation (see Brandom 2019, 6-7) are not carried out synchronously and continuously by the same individual but rather diachronically and periodically by different individuals. This seems to be implied by the following excerpt from Democracy and Education: “All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it” (Dewey 1916, 7).

ABSTRACT. One would be hard-pressed to think of two philosophers more responsible for revivifying interest in pragmatist philosophy in general and John Dewey in particular than Richard Bernstein and Richard Rorty. Bernstein’s publication of John Dewey in 1966 and Rorty’s Philosophy and Mirror of Nature in 1979, where he declared that Dewey was one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century, sent a shot across the bow of the then reigning analytical and continental traditions. More than this, both shared much in common. As Bernstein noted later in his career, “Rorty has been a dialogical partner and friend for more than fifty years since we were both undergraduates at the University of Chicago.” Elsewhere, Bernstein, effusive about the significance of Rorty’s work on his own thought, wrote that “No other contemporary philosopher has influenced me in such a creative manner. As I developed my own interpretation of pragmatism, I frequently felt I was addressing Dick directly and indirectly seeking to meet his penetrating challenges. Some of our philosophical disagreements were quite sharp, but they were always productive conversations that deepened our friendship and mutual affection. Similarly, Rorty, on the occasion of Bernstein’s 70th birthday in 2002 stated that "Richard Bernstein and I are almost exact contemporaries, were educated in mostly the same places by mostly the same people, have been exalted by many of the same hopes, and have been talking to one another about how to fulfill those hopes for more than fifty years. We share not only many enthusiasms, but the vast majority of our convictions, both philosophical and political. Both, importantly for this essay, saw themselves as working in the tradition of Deweyian pragmatism. Yet, as Bernstein noted, there were often “sharp” disagreements between them about how Dewey’s thought was to be appropriated and for what purposes. While never shy about pressing forward and defending his positions against critics, sometimes quite acerbically (see Rorty’s response to Susan Haack in Rorty and Pragmatism), Rorty’s responses to Bernstein criticism’s are, interestingly, commonly muted, as if to say there really isn’t anything of substance that separates my views from yours. Yet, Bernstein disagreed. Bernstein did think there were substantive disagreements between his philosophical appropriation of Dewey and Rorty’s. Who is right? If Bernstein is right, as I will argue, why do these conceptual disagreements matter? In short, what philosophical and practical implications follow once we disentangle Bernstein’s “Dewey” from Rorty’s “Dewey”? To answer these questions, I’ll begin by first sketching Bernstein’s criticism’s of Rorty and Rorty’s response. I’ll argue that the tensions and philosophical disagreements between Rorty and Bernstein’s are a result of the way each situates their ideas within a particular narrative of the history of philosophy and the significance and role that pragmatism plays in that history. In doing so, this will allow us to see, not just where the tensions between them lie, but also how each conceives of the nature of philosophical practice. Taking my bearings in the last section from Dewey’s claim that philosophy is best defined “as the general theory of education”, I will draw out the implications of both Bernstein’s “Dewey” and Rorty’s “Dewey” for educational practice.

ABSTRACT. There are at least two broad stories about the legacy of John Dewey’s educational thought in the middle decades of the twentieth century: one of public backlash, “back to basics,” and a rediscovery of disciplinary rigor, another of the persistence of progressive and pragmatist approaches in colleges of education and some of the “new” curricular reforms. However, these stories tend to be cultural or political, and neither offers a particularly satisfying explanation of how Deweyan ideals persisted, faded, or evolved on their intellectual merits.

The following paper will follow one strand of Dewey’s impact on education—namely, the conception of “religion” put forward in A Common Faith (1934)—as interpreted in the work of the philosopher Philip H. Phenix (1915-2002). Phenix began his academic career in Dewey’s orbit: he first read Dewey’s educational writings while finishing seminary; earned his doctorate at Columbia University (1950) under the direction of Herbert W. Schneider, a student of Dewey’s; and spent most of his career at Teachers College, where Dewey’s work featured prominently in his writing and teaching. Yet, while Dewey’s mode of thought made a great impression on him, Phenix remained a pointed critic of pragmatism, a philosophy that he found insufficiently oriented toward questions of transcendence, intrinsic worth, and ultimate meaning. (He would criticize Dewey along the same lines the he did William Heard Kilpatrick, complaining about his “anti-metaphysical metaphysics.”)

Instead, Phenix adapted elements of Dewey’s religious thought (particularly around the role of symbolic language and the relationship between faith and experimentation) and extended them into the work of existentialist writers such as Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich (with whom Phenix studied at Union Theological Seminary). In doing so, he subsequently reinterpreted (one might even say “re-sacralized”) elements of Dewey into traditional disciplinary categories, providing an intellectual and spiritual bridge from the non-disciplinary approaches associated with progressive education and the resurgence of academic study in the 1960s and 1970s. This shift became the backbone of Phenix’s best-known book, Realms of Meaning: A Philosophy of the Curriculum (1964). However, this paper will will trace Phenix’s reception and translation of Dewey’s religious thought throughout his career, from early comments on A Common Faith (1934) to his less well-known books, Religious Concerns in Contemporary Education (1959), Education and the Common Good (1961), and Education and the Worship of God (1966). In addition to published sources, it will use notes and personal correspondence from the Phenix family’s private collection.

ABSTRACT. In "Logical Positivism and Pragmatism," C.I. Lewis concisely defines pragmatism as the view that “…there can be no final separation of questions of truth of any kind from questions of the justifiable ends of action." In this paper, I am interested in the "justifiable ends of action" constituting craft practices, particularly those in American life. The study of thinking-in-action as productive of material culture and of labor and craft that embody "the enduring, basic human impulse ... to do a job well for its own sake" is what I call "banausic pragmatism."

Pragmatists typically study the implications of Lewis's definition for non-material culture; they are interested in how culture is constructed through the interplay of beliefs, identities, values, rules, morals, religion, and language. This is all worthwhile and interesting work. However, I am interested in exploring the uses of Deweyan philosophical and educational theory to reconstruct Deweyan "anti-intellectualism." This stance subordinates knowledge relations in our inquiries to experience more broadly understood. The anti-intellectualist philosopher "starts from acts, functions, as primary data, functions both biological and social in character; from organic responses, adjustments." For banausic pragmatism, a lifeworld of work and craft practices mediates between a biological layer of meaningful experience and the social dimension of non-material culture.

In the first part of this paper, I contrast the presuppositions of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition with Dewey’s views. Arendt shares a key commitment in her transactional understandings of “nature” and “culture.” A theory of the human condition no theory of human nature, she writes, because theories of human nature in their metaphysical aspect leave out the contexts of lived experience: birth and death, to be sure, but also the contexts of labor, work (production of material goods) and action. Because of her insistence that material culture is also phenomenologically significant to the vita activa, Arendt’s work provides support to banausic pragmatism. However, Arendt also values lives of “action”—intellectual activity in the public sphere—above those of labor and work. This, I argue is importantly not consonant with the distinct sense of Deweyan “anti-intellectualism” that I defend.

In the second part of the paper, I compare Dewey’s views with those of sociologist Richard Sennett. The latter support banausic pragmatism by emphasizing the importance of material culture. He interprets Arendt’s concerns in The Human Condition as fear that a “culture founded in man-made things risks continual self-harm.” Sennett’s narrative sociology in the tradition of C. Wright Mills often focuses on craft and labor under capitalism. In particular, Sennett is concerned with the details of how shifts in patterns of labor and employment—and the worker’s alienation from the products of her labor—affect shared norms and individual character of American workers. Citing Raymond Tallis’s notion that “The hand is the window on to the mind,” Sennett provides further clarity to Dewey’s stress on the virtues cultivated by inclusion of hand-work and crafting in educational settings by providing concrete examples of how technique and expression are intimately connected.

ABSTRACT. As social media platforms are increasingly treated as “digital commons” or “digital town squares,” and the ways in which users interact with one another through information communications technologies give rise to disparate digital publics, it becomes necessary to evaluate the ways in which this new digital age structures the kinds of transactions among members of society envisioned by Dewey as necessary for the flourishing of democracy as a way of life and not merely a mode of social and cultural organization. To this end, this panel will consist of three different approaches to Deweyan democracy in the digital age.

The first approach to Deweyan democracy in a digital age will re-examine Dewey’s work in “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us” in light of the ways in which contemporary society is saturated by Big Data and processes of Datification. To this end, this approach will address the question of how the increasingly digital social environment. This presentation will also engage Dahlberg’s observation that digital communication can closely approximate deliberative democracy through information sharing, rational debate, and public opinion formation by relying on effective rules of engagement, moderation systems, and interactive software tools to question whether Deweyan democracy as a way of life is possible in our new digital environment.

The second approach to Deweyan democracy in a digital age employs a critical framework incorporating a Deweyan focus on the roles of journalism and the free press for democracy and the social knowledge of publics. The task of inquiry as mediated through information communication technologies is strengthened by a Deweyan understanding of the public as news protagonist whereas the Deweyan resistance to either/or dichotomies, fractious conceptual debate, and traps of static conception of individualism, offer alternative to the various "Socratic Web" solutions to current problems of online misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda.This approach brings in constitutive connections of role of journalism and the press highlighting that many of the democratic fostering roles of the press that are now in part taking place via online news, blogs, social media makes it clear that some of these aspects of ICTs are those of a much-altered contemporary press of today.

The final approach will focus on Dewey’s observation in his piece, “Racial Prejudice and Friction” that “The simple fact of the case is that at present the world is not sufficiently civilized to permit close contact of peoples of widely different cultures without deplorable consequences.” Thus, as was the case in Dewey’s era, the modern proliferation of information communications technologies and social media as an essential part of our social environment has resulted in “carrying old political and old mental habits into a condition for which they are not adapted, and all kinds of friction result.” Thus, what is necessary is the intentional organization of our digital social environments to ensure the fostering of habits that enable robust forms of transactions with different cultures.