Showing posts with label John Dewey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Dewey. Show all posts
John Dewey / Theory of Experience / Hands-on thinking
Old ideas give way slowly, for they are more abstract logical forms than categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply and grained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction persists, though history shows it to be a hallucination, that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But, in fact, intellectual progress usually occurs through shear abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume. An abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them. We get over them.
[John Dewey — min 1:00]
[...] Dewey's reconstruction of philosophy aims to reconstruct our environment, even our lives. The point of philosophy, Dewey reminds us, is not to make theory practical. The point is to make practice intelligent.
[min 13:00]
[...] Philosophy has to become primarily a method, rather than a system. We should think of philosophy as intelligent methods of inquiry rather than an over arching system of beliefs.
[John Dewey — min 20:00]
[...] Experience is a unified exchange or transaction between organism and environment. It's an active unity between subject and object. [...] Dewey doesn't use the common word 'experience' in its conventional sense. For Dewey, experience is neither simply the subject that experiences nor the object that is experienced. It's not merely the interaction between subject and object that exists separately from their interaction. Instead, subject and object are unified and related. They're partial features in the ongoing unity that is experience.
[min 25:50]
[...] Experience is double barreled in that it recognizes in its primary integrity in no division between act and material, subject and object. But contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. Thing and thought, as [William] James says, in the same connection, are single barreled. They refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience. [...] An organism does not live in an environment. It lives by means of an environment.
[John Dewey — min 26:30]
[...] Dewey's view about good and bad methods of inquiry has three important consequences. First, contrary to most previous philosophy, we can't derive the way we ought to think from some laws of logic or some rules of reason. Instead, our logic and our rules must be derived from actual inquiries. Put in philosophical terms, our epistemology must be derived from our metaphysics. Put more plainly, our theories have to be derived from our actions.
[min 31:10]
[...] The problem reduced to its lowest terms is whether inquiry can develop in its own ongoing course, the logical standards and forms to which further inquiry shall submit. [...] A problem well put is half solved.
[John Dewey — min 32:12]
[...] Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is, in fact, an event, a process. The process, namely, of its verifying itself. Its verification. Its validity is the process of its validation.
[John Dewey — min 45:46]
[...] Dewey agrees with James that truth is made and that inquiry makes it. There are no final absolute truths. For him, truth always must be justified by applying it to the most recent circumstances.
[min 46:10]
[...] School must extend into society and society must reach into the school. Otherwise genuine education can't take place. Instead, we produce bookishness, molder activity without meaning, specialized knowledge without the intelligence to direct it in. Pseudo intellectual spirit rather than a social spirit. [...] When real social concerns enter the classroom, there's an immense change of atmosphere. [...] Dewey also stresses that our society must be formerly educated to live a free democratic life. A free society, he emphasizes, doesn't happen naturally and effortlessly. It has to be educated to understand and appreciate freedom.
[min 01:02:42]
[...] If we train our children to take orders, to do things simply because they're told so, and fail to give them confidence to act and think for themselves, we are putting an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcoming the present defects of our system and of establishing the truth of democratic ideals. Our state is founded on freedom. But when we train the state of tomorrow, we allow it just as little freedom as possible. Children in school must be allowed freedom, so that they will know what its use means when they become the controlling body. It is fatal for a democracy to permit the formation of fixed classes. There must not be one system for the children of parents who have more leisure, and another for the children of those who are wage earners. The over bookish education for some and over practical education for others, brings about a division of mental and moral habits, ideals and outlook. The democracy which proclaims quality of opportunity as its ideal, requires an education in which learning and social application, ideas and practice, work and recognition of the meaning of what is done, are united from the beginning and for all.
[John Dewey — min 01:03:52]
