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John Dewey's educational philosophy
John Dewey's educational philosophy
John dewey's educational philosophy and impact on society
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Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey receive the lion’s share of the create developing the philosophical tradition called Pragmatism. The idea originated in the US during the 70’s, when C.S. Peirce developed a methodical way of inquiring and working through thought. Peirce’s ideas break away from traditionally accepted philosophy of the time, such as Descartes, and he creates Pragmatism. These three men, considered by many as the forefathers of Pragmatism, did not see eye to eye on all issues. The idea of truth, what constitutes a truth, and how do you differ between a truth and a falsehood shows up in all of the philosopher’s writings. While they agree in some areas, each man has a different understanding of what is true. Peirce views truth as something attainable by the scientific method. Peirce believes that truth is “opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate.”(1) James has multiple kinds of truth and does not settle with one meaning. Dewey believes that something is true when it meets your expectations and something is false when it undermines them.
The oldest and most influential of the philosophers is S.C. Peirce, so I will go into his works first. The first work I will look at is “How to Make Ideas Clear.” In this essay, Peirce develops a method to bring clarity to ideas that would be hard to define in normal circumstances.
Peirce opens up the work by rebutting ideas and definitions from traditional philosophy. Peirce ironically challenges “logicians” for forming definitions of clearness that lack clarity, and then claims the logicians definition distinctness only has a place “in philosophies that have long been extinct.” (1) Clearness has been an afterthought of Philosoph...
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...he same ideas and eventually the all come back with the same conclusion. This idea is the foundation for Peirce’s views on truth and reality. “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality. (1) His explanation of truth and reality is an interesting one. Peirce only begins to talk about the scientific method for obtaining truth towards the end of the essay, but speaks about his method for clarity throughout. Earlier in the essay, Peirce defines reality through his clarification method and now defines it through the scientific method. The two methods seemingly cannot co-exist because in the scientific method opinion defines what is real, while opinion is “senselss jargon” in the clearness method. (1)
John Dewey
Now that we have a clear picture of the issues being discussed we need to talk about the philosophers. The first philosopher is William James born in New York City during the year of 1842. He was an American philosopher and psychologist, who developed the philosophy of pragmatism. He attended priv...
In the field of philosophy there can be numerous answers to a general question, depending on a particular philosopher's views on the subject. Often times an answer is left undetermined. In the broad sense of the word and also stated in the dictionary philosophy can be described as the pursuit of human knowledge and human values. There are many different people with many different theories of knowledge. Two of these people, also philosophers, in which this paper will go into depth about are Descartes and Plato. Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and Plato's The Republic are the topics that are going to be discussed in this paper.
(1) Kelly, Thomas (2005). “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement.” Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Eds. Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pg.1 – 36.
In what is widely considered his most important work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke establishes the principles of modern Empiricism. In this book he dismisses the rationalist concept of innate ideas and argues instead that the mind is a tabula rasa. Locke believed that the mind was a tabula rasa that was marked by experience and reject the Rationalist notion that the mind could perceive some truths directly, without sensory experience. The concept of tabula
...omprehensible knowledge of a particular sort. After derisively comparing those believers in sense-certainty's capabilities of Knowledge to animals and Eleusinian devotees, Hegel returns to his theme of Knowledge as communication through language, insisting that to make a claim about the knowledge contained in sense-certainty is: "not to know what one is saying, to be unaware that one is saying the opposite of what one wants to say" (Hegel, 109). Left with the thingness or being of sense-certainty as an undifferentiated, universal and unintelligible generality, Hegel concludes by abandoning sense-certainty in its own right and moving on to the next level of complexity, namely perception, or thingness as understood the properties that define it.
John Locke wrote An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1689. He strongly defends empiricism in this essay and states his views on human knowledge and true understanding. In Book II, Locke offers his theory of personal identity; namely the mind theory, also known as ‘the psychological criterion’, in the middle of his accounts of general identity where he draws lines between inert objects, living things and persons.
...d the world and these crossings are the reason that religion and faith started to fade away while science and technology began to take a major part in people’s lives. This shift laid the foundation for reforming societies that put rational thinking and scientific thought as their cultural values. This intellectual interchange in the enlightenment period has historical significance on the world and that’s why today this time period is considered such important and meaningful. Cotes’s preface shows this kind of rational thinking that blossomed in this time period and Shaffer’s article shows that when this rational thinking was combined with the information order that made knowledge transportable from place to place it created great thinks like Newton’s Principia. Today it can be asserted that this information order was important as much as the people that used it.
John Locke's, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), was first criticized by the philosopher and theologian, John Norris of Bemerton, in his "Cursory Reflections upon a Book Call'd, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding," and appended to his Christian Blessedness or Discourses upon the Beatitudes (1690). Norris's criticisms of Locke prompted three replies, which were only posthumously published. Locke has been viewed, historically, as the winner of this debate; however, new evidence has emerged which suggests that Norris's argument against the foundation of knowledge in sense-perception that the Essay advocated was a valid and worthy critique, which Locke did, in fact, take rather seriously. Charlotte Johnston's "Locke's Examination of Malebranche and John Norris" (1958), has been widely accepted as conclusively showing that Locke's replies were not philosophical, but rather personal in origin; her essay, however, overlooks critical facts that undermine her subjective analysis of Locke's stance in relation to Norris's criticisms of the Essay. This paper provides those facts, revealing the philosophical—not personal—impetus for Locke's replies.
What exactly is “truth”? And how do we arrive at the truth? Over these past weeks I have successfully be able to study two different but very closely linked methods of arriving at what we human beings know as truth. Introduced to the method of pragmatism by William James, I have concluded that pragmatism uses an approach in which reason is used to find what is true but what also has to be considered is that the truth is subject to change. Which distinguishes it from Rene Descartes' method of pursuing what is true. Essentially they follow the same procedures. Although at the final moments of my research, I began to find myself pro-pragmatism. I disbelieve Descartes claim that the mind believes everything that is perceived through the human eye which leaves no room for an imagination. Both James and Descartes differ in some areas while maintaing similarities in others. Whether its concerning the way their visions are presented, their interpretations of the truth, or how applicable the idea of it is to our lives.
Locke's Essay is one of the classical documents of British empirical philosophy. His official concern is with epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Locke sees the u...
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Frechtman Bernard. New York: Kensington Pub., 1976. Print.
Hume, D. (1748). Skeptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding. In T.S. Gendler, S. Siegel, S.M. Cahn (Eds.) , The Elements of Philosophy: Readings from Past and Present (pp. 422-428). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
James, William. "Pragmatism." Columbia University, New York. January 1907. Lecture. Web. 24 Feb 2012.< http://www.authorama.com/book/pragmatism.html>
Moore, Brooke Noel., and Kenneth Bruder. "Chapter 6- The Rise of Metaphysics and Epistemology; Chapter 9- The Pragmatic and Analytic Traditions; Chapter 7- The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." Philosophy: the Power of Ideas. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2011. Print.
ABSTRACT: The notions of representationalism and antirepresentationalism are introduced and used in contemporary philosophical discussions by Richard Rorty to describe his and the neopragmatists' attitude toward traditional problems of epistemology. Rorty means that the history of philosophy shows that there are no final answers to the traditional questions about knowledge, truth, and representation; consequently, they should be rejected. Rorty thinks such questions should be eliminated from philosophy since there is no possibility to get outside of our mind and language. We cannot say anything about a mind-transcendent or language-transcendent, nonlocal or eternal reality. Hilary Putnam agrees with Rorty on this, but not with the conclusion that we should reject traditional philosophical questions. For Putnam, the epistemological questions are worthwhile asking and, although we cannot find the final correct answers, we should continue our investigations as if there were final answers. Our struggles with those problems can lead to refinements of the formulations and to cognitive developments. Putnam proposes a quasi-realism which is often called "internal realism." Rorty rejects every refinement of realism as still realism and believes that the questions of knowledge, truth, and representation lead to regresses ad infinitum or to circular reasoning.