‘Dewey in 90 Minutes’ by Paul Strathern is an very short and brief guide book to John Dewey and his pragmatism philosophy and thought. The main content ‘Dewey’s Life & Works’ is a biographical description of Dewey’s life along with his works and pragmatism thought. ‘Life & Works’ describes from Dewey’s childhood, teaching in high school, influenced by Neo-Hegelianism, Charles Sanders Peirce and discoveries of science (by Max Planck, Boltzmann, Madame Curie, Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman), through Dewey’s experimental psychology and instrumental type of logic, what is his pragmatism viewpoint, method of pragmatism and his educational philosophy, to his commitment to communists and U.S.S.R..
In pages 39 and 40, Strathern summarize Dewey’s viewpoint of pragmatism viewpoint, I’ll to quote it. ‘Essential to this view of knowledge was Dewey’s notion of “fallibilism” There was no certain knowledge, there were no eternal fixed principle or rules. Everything had to be tested to discover its fallibility. In this way knowledge progressed, in all fields. Here we come to the core of Dewey’s theory of knowledge which as we have seen reaches out into all realms of human endeavor.’ ‘Dewey himself admits “that my idea of experience and hence of empirical method is naturalistic.” That is, it insists that all our experience is derived from the world of nature and nothing else. His emphasis is on the biological. “For many years I have… maintained that the key to a philosophical theory of experience must proceed from initially linking it with the processes and functions of life as the latter are disclosed in biological science.” He goes on to explain: “The things of experience are produced… by interaction of organism and environing conditions.” He also maintains that “the self, the ‘subject’ of action, is a factor within experience.”’
This book is good and concise introduction to John Dewey and American pragmatism, and more difficult and detailed than other Strathern’s ‘Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series’. I recommend this book for beginners of pragmatism and who want to know doctrine of Dewey and pragmatism, and his thinking of science.
Dewey in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series)
Paul Strathern
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, September 24 2002
90 pages $7.95
ISBN: 978-1-56663-475-5
Contents:
Dewey’s Life and Works
Afterword
From Dewey’s Writing
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
Chronology of Dewey’s Life and Times
Recommended Reading
Index