Dewey's Logical Theory: New Studies and Interpretations

by F. Thomas Burke (Editor), D. Micah Hester (Editor), Robert B. Talisse (Editor)

Overview

Despite the resurgence of interest in the philosophy of John Dewey, his work on logical theory has received relatively little attention. Ironically, Dewey's logic was his "first and last love." The essays in this collection pay tribute to that love by addressing Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his logical thought in the 1938 volume, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. All the essays are original to this volume and are written by leading Dewey scholars. Ranging from discussions of propositional theory to logic's social and ethical implications, these essays clarify often misunderstood or misrepresented aspects of Dewey's work, while emphasizing the seminal role of logic to Dewey's philosophical endeavors.

This collection breaks new ground in its relevance to contemporary philosophy of logic and epistemology and pays special attention to applications in ethics and moral philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826513946
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2002
Series:	Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

D. Micah Hester is assistant professor of biomedical ethics and humanities at the Mercer University School of Medicine. His books include Community As Healing and On James .

F. Thomas Burke is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina.

Robert B. Talisse is assistant professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Larry A. Hickman
Editors' Introduction
I. Situations, Experience, and Knowing
1. The Aesthetics of Reality: The Development of Dewey's Ecological Theory of Experience
Thomas Alexander
2. Logic and Judgments of Practice
Jennifer Welchman
3. Experimental Logic: Normative Theory or Natural History?
Vincent Colapietro
4. The Logical Reconstruction of Experience: Dewey and Lewis
Sandra Rosenthal
5. Dewey and Quine on the Logic of What There Is
John Shook

II. Logical Theory and Forms
6. Prospects for Mathematizing Dewey's Logical Theory
Tom Burke
7. Designation, Characterization, and Theory in Dewey's Logic
Douglas Browning
8. Dewey's Logical Forms
Hans Seigfried
9. The Role of Measurement in Inquiry
Jayne Tristan
10. Qualities, Universals, Kinds, and the New Riddle of Induction
Tom Burke

III. Values and Social Inquiry
11. Achieving Pluralism (Why AIDS Activists Are Different from Creationists)
John Capps
12. The Teachers Union Fight and the Scope of Dewey's Logic
Michael Eldridge
13. Power/Inquiry: The Logic of Pragmatism
John Stuhr

Editorial Reviews

The material presented in this volume reflects a kind of sea-change in Dewey studies. It is not so much that these essays are uniformly positive or uncritical, for they are certainly not that. Their importance lies rather in the fact that serious scholarship on Dewey's logic, building on the solid advances won over the years by Thayer, Kennedy, Sleeper, Burke, and others, seems finally to have reached a critical mass. Perhaps even more important, when taken together these essays establish an important way-marker along a road that Dewey hoped his students would follow. They seek to push Dewey's ideas forward: to work out the consequences of his logic—his theory of inquiry—for a living philosophy.
—Larry A. Hickman, from the Foreword

From the Publisher