Reconstruction in Philosophy

"In Dewey we get what we might think of as a philosophical system of pragmatism. He is the first one who is a fulltime philosopher. He cites philosophy, he gets his PhD in philosophy, he spends his career in philosophy departments. He’s the most systematic of the three we’ve discussed so far. Peirce has a broad-reaching philosophical mind and made several attempts to put together a philosophical system, but because of his inability to find a steady academic job or steady work, the writing is not systematic. James is off doing all kinds of different things in philosophy and in psychology. Reconstruction in Philosophy is, I think, Dewey’s best single book articulation of the whole view. One gets the whole picture, or at least as good a picture of the whole as one can get, given how big the whole is. Dewey is born in 1859 and he dies in 1952. He’s a prolific philosopher, and his full corpus fills 37 very large volumes. He’s also a social activist and an education reformer so he’s a busy, busy guy. Here’s the way the book works: Dewey is, among pragmatists, again committed to these two strands: it’s a conception of meaning and it’s an epistemology. Dewey is most overt, though, in bringing into the foreground a commitment that had been doing a lot of work but had not been a central focus of discussion for pragmatism before him, which is that this is a book that’s about what philosophy is, as much as it’s a book about philosophy. Just look at the title, Reconstruction in Philosophy . This book takes, as one of its central objectives, to bring under philosophical scrutiny the standing conception of what philosophy is, or what philosophers do, or what philosophers are aiming for. Dewey thinks that pragmatism is a challenge to traditional conceptions of philosophy from within philosophy. He thinks it’s a philosophical challenge to traditional conceptions of philosophizing. That’s a perfect way to articulate what Dewey sees as the target. Dewey is opposed to any conception of philosophy that begins from a conception of human beings as separate or standing apart from the world. Oftentimes when we talk about describing the world, we’ve already committed to a conception of the person giving the description as somehow a spectator. That’s right: a lot of philosophical problems replicate this conception, that there’s a thing inside and there’s a thing outside and the problem is to hook these things up in the right way. Think about Plato: there’s a whole other world that’s somewhere else, that our world is somehow connected to, and it’s not clear how it’s connected to the real world and the philosopher’s job is to figure that out. But the pragmatist is concerned with human activity and human practices, and the Deweyan pragmatist in particular is going to say, “No, no, no. Philosophy is and always has been, whether it has realized it or not, a social endeavour. It is the project, ultimately, of together, communally, solving our problems here and now, or conducting ourselves cooperatively and rationally here and now.” Reconstruction and Philosophy is an indictment of standard conceptions of philosophy and the indictment says the following: Traditional modes of philosophy have understood themselves in this detached, spectator, sense, when in fact what they’ve been doing is performing a very distinct social service, which is providing an intellectual cover for inherited hierarchy and for oppression. It’s a deeply subversive book. It’s got a social agenda that we would at the very least today recognize as deeply social democratic. It’s also in line with Marx’s comment about changing the world [“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”] – proper philosophy has, as its mission, reconstructing the way the world is. One of the discussions one gets in this book, especially about knowledge and science, is that our culture is pervaded with, for example in America, the distinction between white collar and blue collar. In philosophy, we draw a distinction between ‘ episteme ’ and ‘ techne ,’ with episteme being the theoretical kind of knowledge which traditionally is what philosophy is interested in, and techne being the mechanics’ knowledge. Dewey thinks traditional philosophy has tried to exalt theoretical knowledge and downplay technical knowledge. Dewey thinks that’s backwards. All knowledge begins with dirty hands, with doing things, with getting dirt under your nails. The theory stuff comes later. That’s the message of the book."