The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

In the first chapter of Pragmatism, William James outlines two philosophical temperaments. He argues that though one's temperament modifies one's way of philosophizing, its presence is seldom recognized. This statement by James led me to Plato's Sophistes, especially the relationship between temperament and being. Although Plato describes certain temperaments, I hold that the main topic is being. The ancients restricted All to real being, e.g., the tangible or the immovable. This reading of the Sophistes puts a different face on the first chapter of Pragmatism. However, if we allow James to speak to present-day philosophers as well as his turn of the century audience, then this reading of the Sophistes will clarify the current philosophical temperament. Neither James nor the contemporary philosopher is satisfied with any restriction on All; for this reason, both lack interest in being. Being, once the richest word, no longer satisfies the philosopher's greedy temperament.

This paper shows how my introductory courses in philosophy were "reformed" by adopting the Peircean notion, as interpreted by Royce, of "community of interpretation." The paper has three main parts. The first sets forth the Peircean/Roycean notion of personhood as active membership in a community of interpretation. T he second spells out the implications of this idea for a theory of pedagogy, one that gives precedence to activities that promote "induction into" the community of interpretation over "introduction to" the subject matter. The third enumerates the specific technique that I adopted to implement the new pedagogical understanding. As a guiding principle for a philosophy of education, the community of interpretation offers specific criteria by which to judge the adequacy of the way a course is structured and presented in the syllabus, how classes are conducted, and how students are tested. The paper tells how the guiding concept is shared with the students in the syllabus to create a common understanding of what a philosophy class should be, and what is expected of them. The community of interpretation implies that lectures be minimized and that dialogue be maximized, requiring a constant discipline of exploring the intersection of concerns between students and major philosophers in the tradition. Finally, testing must become occasions for interpretation rather than mere recall of information about philosophers and their ideas. The pedagogical discipline entailed by the notion of a community of interpretation is judged to be the best way for students to discover and nurture their own autonomous philosophical voices.

In this paper I address some of John Dewey’s more generally applicable criticisms of the philosophic "tradition," and show how his criticisms stem from his naturalistic approach to philosophy. This topic is important because Dewey gives great insight into discussions that are relevant today regarding the role of philosophy. In 1935 he anticipated many of the criticisms of the "later" Wittgenstein regarding the establishment of post facto standards as a cause, the separation of language from behavior and the privatization of mind—yet Dewey still finds use for metaphysics or "thinking at large." I believe the essence of Dewey’s criticisms are found in a few key distinctions. Therefore, I cover the history of philosophy with blanket criticisms of the blanket categories of "classical" and of "modern" thought. For Dewey, the fundamental error characteristic of both Greek and Modern thinking is the artificial bifurcation of our thoughts, feelings and actions from the natural world. As I see it, the heart of this metaphysical mistake is captured by the distinctions he draws between the "instrumental" and "consummatory," and between the "precarious" and "stable."

Criticisms of analytic philosophy have increased in intensity in the last decade, denouncing specifically its closing in on itself, which results in barrenness and ignorance of real human problems. The thought of C. S. Peirce is proposed as a fruitful way of renewing the analytic tradition and obviating these criticisms. While this paper is largely a reflection on Hilary Putnam’s study of the historical development of analytic philosophy, not only can some of its main roots be traced back to Peirce, but also the recent resurgence of pragmatism can be regarded as a pragmatist renovation of the analytic tradition. Further, Peirce’s thought offers suggestions for tackling some of the most stubborn problems in contemporary philosophy, thereby enabling us to shoulder once more the philosophical responsibility which has been abdicated by much of twentieth-century philosophy. The most accurate understanding of Peirce is to see him as a traditional and systematic philosopher, but one dealing with the modern problems of science truth, and knowledge from a valuable personal experience as a logician and an experimental researcher in the bosom of an interdisciplinary community of scientists and thinkers.

I argue that the modernist notion of a human self (or subject) cannot easily be post-modernistically rejected because the need to view an individual life as a unified ‘narrative’ with a beginning and an end (death) is a condition for asking humanly important questions about its meaningfulness (or meaninglessness). Such questions are central to philosophical anthropology. However, not only modern ways of making sense of life, such as linear narration in literature, but also premodern ones such as tragedy, ought to be taken seriously in reflecting on these questions. The tradition of pragmatism has tolerated this plurality of the frameworks in terms of which we can interpret or ‘structure’ the world and our lives as parts of it. It is argued that pragmatism is potentially able to accommodate both the plurality of such interpretive frameworks—premodern, modern, postmodern—and the need to evaluate those frameworks normatively. We cannot allow any premodern source of human meaningfulness whatsoever (say, astrology) to be taken seriously. Avoiding relativism is, then, a most important challenge for the pragmatist.

Schools are expected to transmit knowledge to younger generations. They are, however, also increasingly criticized for distributing socalled inert knowledge, i.e., knowledge that is accessed only in a restricted set of contexts even though it is applicable to a wide variety of domains. The causes of limited knowledge transfer are mostly attributed to the disembeddedness of learning situations in schools. Instructional procedures that result in learning in the sense of being able to recall relevant information provide no guarantee that people will spontaneously use it later. "Authentic learning," acquiring knowledge in the contexts that (will) give this knowledge its meaning, is now being presented as an alternative. Underpinning these reform proposals is not only a (growing) concern with efficiency, but is also a new epistemological theory, labelled as constructivism. This paper will, first, focus on the layout of and diverging perspectives within recent constructivist research in education. Next, the epistemological approach of John Dewey will be discussed, which takes as its starting point the relation of knowledge to action. Finally, we will indicate what a Deweyan approach might add to the constructivist research in education.