I can describe the beautiful image that built in my mind as I read John Dewey’s book “Experience and Nature” by describing a vision of reality as currents in the ocean of mind. Think of …
Communication and the Mind
I still have a few more thoughts about John Dewey’s profound book “Experience and Nature” to develop in this post and the next before I get to explain what hit me while I was reading …
Embracing Constant Flux
I am on a roll with John Dewey. I was reading through his book “Experience and Nature” for the second time and something finally clicked and I started to see what he was getting at. …
John Dewey and the “ends” of the Universe
The third of the founding American Pragmatists was John Dewey. In the early 1870’s while Charles Sanders Peirce and William James were busy brewing the original conceptions of what would become Pragmatism; John Dewey was …
What World Are We Talking About?
I have taken in a great deal of information over the past month or so and seemed time to step back and take yet another stab at my own current best-guess assimilation of this investigation. …
The Emergence of the Universe
In my last two posts I introduced Peirce’s phenomenology of thirdness. The American Pragmatists were exploring a perspective of unified emergence that was taking the implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory into the realm of metaphysics. …
The Individual and Society
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 –1831) was a leading figure in the movement of German Idealism initiated by Immanuel Kant and Hegel’s philosophy expanded on Kant’s theory of knowledge by adding a social and historical …
The Modern Problem of Goodness
American philosophy was a product of the Modern Age that had its precursor with the Italian Renaissance and its birth with the European Enlightenment. The Modern Age is characterized by the development of human reason …
Evolutionary Ethics and Karma
A continuous view of the universe seems to inherently evoke an ethical compulsion. When the boundaries between self and other, individual and society, inner and outer begin to dissolve into a single universe of continuous …
The Evolution of Freedom in the Universe
I am inspired by all of your thoughtful and provocative comments to my last post and captivated by this idea that what we experience as freewill is not actually a quality of a human being, …
What is a “something” anyway? further consideration of Darwin and Dewey
In my last post I wrote about Darwin’s recognition that the idea of separate species was just that, an idea. And, as Brian astutely commented on that post, that doesn’t mean that there is no …
Darwin and the Illusion of Separate Species
The American Pragmatists were all profoundly influenced by Darwin’s publication of “On the Origin of Species.” The originators of Pragmatism, including Charles Sanders Peirce who coined the term and William James who popularized it, were …
John Dewey and B.F. Skinner
I have been thinking more and re-reading Dewey’s paper on the reflex arc and wanted to add a second post with fuller thoughts. At the end of my last post I mentioned that Dewey’s conception …
John Dewey and the Unity of Mind and Matter
One of the challenges of the philosophy of Pragmatism is that it is too easy to reduce its complexity and subtlety to simple utilitarianism. Some of the same language that William James used to almost …
Conscious Evolution and Free Will?
Part of the controversy over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has always been its deterministic tone. Darwin saw evolution as happening through the combination of chance variation and natural selection. The theory goes something like …
John Dewey’s Evolutionary Ethics
I am continually amazed to find that John Dewey had such a profoundly awakened evolutionary philosophy. In his work to construct an evolutionary ethical sensibility, Dewey recognized that the efforts to create an ethics based …
The Curious Case of John Elof Boodin vs. Charles Darwin
The American philosophy of Pragmatism was in many ways a direct response to Darwin’s publication of “On the Origin of Species.” The early Pragmatists were trying to apply the same logic to philosophy that Darwin …
Two Generations of American Philosophy: Part 4
In the fourth instalment of my talk on the roots of American Philosophy I give a brief biographical account of the birth of the American philosophy known as Pragmatism and the contributions of its main …
Nature Mystics and Scientific Progressives
The European Enlightenment produced two responses; Scientific Rationalism and Romanticism. The Scientific Rationalism represented in the science of Sir Isaac Newton and the philosophy of John Locke. Romanticism produced the writing of Goethe in Germany …
John Dewey’s Insight
John Dewey was younger than William James, but they were contemporaries. Dewey was profoundly influenced by reading James’ book “Principles of Psychology” and became, along with James and Charles Sanders Peirce, the third of a …
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