Human Nature And Conduct

by John Dewey

Overview

John Dewey(1859 1952) was anAmerican philosopher, psychologistandeducational reformerwhose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy ofpragmatismand one of the founders offunctional psychology. He was a major representative ofprogressive educationandliberalism.In 1894 Dewey joined the newly foundedUniversity of Chicago(1894 1904) where he developed his belief in an empirically based theory of knowledge, becoming associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitledThought and its Subject-Matter, which was published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective titleStudies in Logical Theory(1903). During that time Dewey also initiated theUniversity of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to actualize the pedagogical beliefs that provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Social Progress(1899).In 1899, Dewey was elected president of theAmerican Psychological Association. From 1904 until his retirement in 1930 he was professor of philosophy at both Columbia Universityand Columbia University'sTeachers College.In 1905 he became president of theAmerican Philosophical Association. He was a longtime member of theAmerican Federation of Teachers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788822815040
Publisher:	Stargatebook
Publication date:	08/23/2017
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Human Nature And ConductJohn Dewey "Give a dog a bad name and hang him." Human nature has been the dog of professional moralists, and consequences accord with the proverb. Man's nature has been regarded with suspicion, with fear, with sour looks, sometimes with enthusiasm for its possibilities but only when these were placed in contrast with its actualities. It has appeared to be so evilly disposed that the business of morality was to prune and curb it it would be thought better of if it could be replaced by something else. It has been supposed that morality would be quite superfluous were it not for the inherent weakness, bordering on depravity, of human nature. Some writers with a more genial conception have attributed the current blackening to theologians who have thought to honor the divine by disparaging the human. Theologians have doubtless taken a gloomier view of man than have pagans and secularists. But this explanation doesn't take us far. For after all these theologians are themselves human, and they would have been without influence if the human audience had not somehow responded to them. Morality is largely concerned with controlling human nature. When we are attempting to control anything we are acutely aware of what resists us. So moralists were led, perhaps, to think of human nature as evil because of its reluctance to yield to control, its rebelliousness under the yoke. But this explanation only raises another question. Why did morality set up rules so foreign to human nature? The ends it insisted upon, the regulations it imposed, were after all outgrowths of human nature. Why then was human nature so averse to them? Moreover rules can be obeyed and ideals realized only as they appeal to something in human nature and awaken in it an active response. Moral principles that exalt themselves by degrading human nature are in effect committing suicide. Or else they involve human nature in unending civil war, and treat it as a hopeless mess of contradictory forces. We are forced therefore to consider the nature and origin of that control of human nature with which morals has been occupied. And the fact which is forced upon us when we raise this question is the existence of classes. Control has been vested in an oligarchy. Indifference to regulation has grown in the gap which separates the ruled from the rulers. Parents, priests, chiefs, social censors have supplied aims, aims which were foreign to those upon whom they were imposed, to the young,