PHGA 7257 Dewey and Rorty: Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Future of Philosophy
Professor Judith Green
Mondays, 4:30 – 6:30 pm
“Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large task for our philosophy.”
-- John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (1917)
“Dewey, but not Russell, can adopt Locke’s suggestion that role of the philosopher is that of an under-laborer, clearing away the rubbish of the past in order to make room for the constructions of the future. But Dewey would have admitted, I think, that the philosopher is occasionally able to fuse this janitorial role with the role of prophet. Such a combination is found in Bacon and Descartes, both of whom combined the attempt to clear away Aristotelian rubbish with visions of a utopian future. Similarly, the effort of Dewey to get philosophy out from under Kant, of Habermas to untangle it from what he calls “the philosophy of consciousness,” and of Derrida to liberate it from what he calls “the metaphysics of presence” are intertwined with prophecies of the fully democratic society whose coming such extrication will hasten.”
-- Richard Rorty, “The Future of Philosophy” (1995)
Both Dewey and Rorty have focused on democracy as a key reason for their adoption of pragmatist philosophical methods and the goal for their efforts to influence the coming into being of a cosmopolitan world future. However, they disagreed in some important ways about what philosophical pragmatism entails, about the meaning of democracy, and about the public roles of philosophers. In this seminar, we will read selections from Dewey’s and Rorty’s essays and books that continue to have great influence, focusing on Dewey’s pragmatist reconstruction of philosophy (including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics) and Rorty’s neo-pragmatist reframing of these same domains in light of later developments in philosophy and in global living.We will pair these with readings with essays by contemporary thinkers who critically engage Dewey and Rorty from a partially shared pragmatist standpoint, including essays by Hilary Putnam, Robert B. Brandom, Donald Davidson, Jurgen Habermas, Susan Haack, Richard J. Bernstein, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Shannon Sullivan, Cornel West, and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Treating a deeper actualization of democracy as Dewey’s and Rorty’s shared concern, we will read my own new book, Pragmatism and Social Hope, as an aid to assessing the relative merits of their sometimes converging, sometimes rival philosophies
Each week, seminar members will write brief reflections on the readings, sharing responsibility for leading discussions. Each will compile an annotated bibliography and write a publishable review of a recent book related to Dewey’s and Rorty’s work. Finally, each member will write a twelve-page essay suitable for conference presentation or submission to a journal.
Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, ed., The Essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, ed., The Essential Dewey, Volume 2: Ethics, Logic, Psychology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
Judith M. Green, Pragmatism and Social Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).