Dewey's Methodology
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Date
2025-02-24
Authors
Ukai, Shunji
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation traces the development of Dewey’s methodology from the 1880s to the 1940s. The aim of the dissertation is twofold. First, it shows how traversing Dewey’s methodology indicates that the attempt to philosophize with Dewey necessarily culminates in a conception of philosophy that is against analytic philosophy and foundationalism. Second, it shows how philosophizing in Dewey’s wake irresistibly inclines toward protesting against totalitarianism for the sake of creating a more democratic culture. This dissertation achieves these aims by taking up Dewey’s major philosophical and religious predecessors in the dominant western tradition and how he moves away from them. The predecessors that I mainly take up are the following: materialism, Spinozism, Spencerism, Cartesianism, Leibnizianism, Kantianism, Christianity, and scholasticism. In the process of tracing Dewey’s engagements with these predecessors, I show how Dewey first arrives at the “psychological method,” then how he moves away from it for the sake of the “empirical method.” Essentially, Dewey abandons the “psychological method” because it reproduces the old type of philosophizing in which philosophy is taken to be a search to disclose some underlying ground. In the end of the dissertation, I return to the question of how Dewey’s methodology is against analytic philosophy and foundationalism, then to his anti-totalitarianism. Dewey’s methodology is against analytic philosophy insofar as it exhibits the same traits as the “method of intellectualism.” The methodology is against foundationalism because it reproduces the notion that the primary task of philosophy is to search out some underlying ground. Thinking with Dewey’s methodology is irresistibly anti-totalitarian because the unified empirical context that the “empirical method” ventures on to create exhibits democratic traits which are at odds with totalitarianism. I conclude this dissertation by conceptualizing the two as the tension between “democracy as a way of life” and “totalitarianism as a way of life,” and by showing that the Deweyan invitation to make the venture into experience may be reframed as an invitation to undertake “activism” against totalitarianism as a way of life.This dissertation includes previously published material.
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Keywords
democracy, empirical method, individuality, John Dewey, philosophical methodology, totalitarianism