The Philosophy Book

by DK Publishing

  Key works

  1896 Matter and Memory

  1903 An Introduction to Metaphysics

  1907 Creative Evolution

  1932 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

  See also: John Duns Scotus • Immanuel Kant • William James • Alfred North Whitehead • Gilles Deleuze

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Epistemology

  APPROACH

  Pragmatism

  BEFORE

  1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species puts human beings in a new, naturalistic perspective.

  1878 Charles Sanders Peirce’s essay How to Make our Ideas Clear lays the foundations of the pragmatist movement.

  1907 William James publishes Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, popularizing the philosophical term “pragmatism.”

  AFTER

  From 1970 Jürgen Habermas applies pragmatic principles to social theory.

  1979 Richard Rorty combines pragmatism with analytic philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

  John Dewey belongs to the philosophical school known as pragmatism, which arose in the US in the late 19th century. The founder is generally considered to be the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who wrote a groundbreaking essay in 1878 called How to Make our Ideas Clear.

  Pragmatism starts from the position that the purpose of philosophy, or “thinking”, is not to provide us with a true picture of the world, but to help us to act more effectively within it. If we are taking a pragmatic perspective, we should not be asking “is this the way things are?” but rather, “what are the practical implications of adopting this perspective?”

  For Dewey, philosophical problems are not abstract problems divorced from people’s lives. He sees them as problems that occur because humans are living beings trying to make sense of their world, struggling to decide how best to act within it. Philosophy starts from our everyday human hopes and aspirations, and from the problems that arise in the course of our lives. This being the case, Dewey thinks that philosophy should also be a way of finding practical responses to these problems. He believes that philosophizing is not about being a “spectator” who looks at the world from afar, but about actively engaging in the problems of life.

  Evolving creatures

  Dewey was strongly influenced by the evolutionary thought of the naturalist Charles Darwin, who published On The Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin described humans as living creatures who are a part of the natural world. Like the other animals, humans have evolved in response to their changing environments. For Dewey, one of the implications of Darwin’s thought is that it requires us to think of human beings not as fixed essences created by God, but instead as natural beings. We are not souls who belong in some other, non-material world, but evolved organisms who are trying to do our best to survive in a world of which we are inescapably a part.

  Everything changes

  Dewey also takes from Darwin the idea that nature as a whole is a system that is in a constant state of change; an idea that itself echoes the philosophy of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. When Dewey comes to think about what philosophical problems are, and how they arise, he takes this insight as a starting point.

  Dewey discusses the idea that we only think when confronted with problems in an essay entitled Kant and the Philosophic Method (1884). We are, he says, organisms that find ourselves having to respond to a world that is subject to constant change and flux. Existence is a risk, or a gamble, and the world is fundamentally unstable. We depend upon our environment to be able to survive and thrive, but the many environments in which we find ourselves are themselves always changing. Not only this, but these environments do not change in a predictable fashion. For several years there may be a good crop of wheat, for instance, but then the harvest fails. A sailor may set sail under fine weather, only to find that a storm suddenly blows up out of nowhere. We are healthy for years, and then disease strikes us when we least expect it.

  In the face of this uncertainty, Dewey says that there are two different strategies we can adopt. We can either appeal to higher beings and hidden forces in the universe for help, or we can seek to understand the world and gain control of our environment.

  "We do not solve philosophical problems, we get over them."

  John Dewey

  Appeasing the gods

  The first of these strategies involves attempting to affect the world by means of magical rites, ceremonies, and sacrifices. This approach to the uncertainty of the world, Dewey believes, forms the basis of both religion and ethics.

  In the story that Dewey tells, our ancestors worshipped gods and spirits as a way of trying to ally themselves with the “powers that dispense fortune.” This scenario is played out in stories from around the world, in myths and legends such as those about unfortunate seafarers who pray to gods or saints to calm the storm, and thereby survive. In the same way, Dewey believes, ethics arises out of the attempts our ancestors made to appease hidden forces; but where they made sacrifices, we strike bargains with the gods, promising to be good if they spare us from harm.

  The alternative response to the uncertainties of our changing world is to develop various techniques of mastering the world, so that we can live in it more easily. We can learn the art of forecasting the weather, and build houses to shelter ourselves from its extremes, and so on. Rather than attempting to ally ourselves with the hidden powers of the universe, this strategy involves finding ways of revealing how our environment works, and then working out how to transform it to our benefit.

  Dewey points out that it is important to realize that we can never completely control our environment or transform it to such an extent that we can drive out all uncertainty. At best, he says, we can modify the risky, uncertain nature of the world in which we find ourselves. But life is inescapably risky.

  We no longer employ sacrifice as a way to ask for help from the gods, but many people find themselves offering up a silent promise to be good in return for help from some higher being.

  A luminous philosophy

  For much of human history, Dewey writes, these two approaches to dealing with the riskiness of life have existed in tension with each other, and they have given rise to two different kinds of knowledge: on the one hand, ethics and religion; and on the other hand, arts and technologies. Or, more simply, tradition and science. Philosophy, in Dewey’s view, is the process by means of which we try to work through the contradictions between these two different kinds of response to the problems in our lives. These contradictions are not just theoretical; they are also practical. For example, I may have inherited innumerable traditional beliefs about ethics, meaning, and what constitutes a “good life”, but I may find that these beliefs are in tension with the knowledge and understanding that I have gained from studying the sciences. In this context philosophy can be seen as the art of finding both theoretical and practical responses to these problems and contradictions.

  There are two ways in which to judge whether a form of philosophy is successful. First, we should ask whether it has made the world more intelligible. Does this particular philosophical theory make our experience “more luminous”, Dewey asks, or does it make it “more opaque”? Here Dewey is agreeing with Peirce that philosophy’s purpose is to make our ideas and our everyday experience clearer and easier to understand. He is critical of any philosophical approaches that ultimately make our experience more puzzling, or the world more mysterious.

  Second, he thinks we should judge a philosophical theory by asking to what exten
t it succeeds in addressing the problems of living. Is it useful to us, in our everyday lives? Does it, for instance, “yield the enrichment and increase of power” that we have come to expect from new scientific theories?

  Scientific experiments, such as those performed by Benjamin Franklin in the 1740s, help us gain control over the world. Dewey thought philosophical theories should be equally useful.

  A practical influence

  A number of philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, have criticized pragmatism by claiming that it has simply given up on the long philosophical quest for truth. Nevertheless, Dewey’s philosophy has been enormously influential in America. Given that Dewey places such an overriding emphasis on responding to the practical problems of life, it is perhaps unsurprising that much of his influence has been in practical realms, such as in education and in politics.

  "Education is not an affair of telling and being told, but an active and constructive process."

  John Dewey

  JOHN DEWEY

  John Dewey was born in Vermont, USA, in 1859. He studied at the University of Vermont, and then worked as a schoolteacher for three years before returning to undertake further study in psychology and philosophy. He taught at various leading universities for the remainder of his life, and wrote extensively on a broad range of topics, from education to democracy, psychology, and art. In addition to his work as a scholar, he set up an educational institution—the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools—which put into practice his educational philosophy of learning by doing. This institution is still running today. Dewey’s broad range of interests, and his abilities as a communicator, allowed his influence on American public life to extend far beyond the Laboratory Schools. He wrote about philosophy and social issues until he died in 1952 at the age of 92.

  Key works

  1910 How We Think

  1925 Experience and Nature

  1929 The Quest for Certainty

  1934 Art as Experience

  See also: Heraclitus • Charles Sanders Peirce • William James • Jürgen Habermas • Richard Rorty

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Philosophy of history

  APPROACH

  Naturalism

  BEFORE

  55 BCE Lucretius, a Roman poet, explores the origins of societies and civilizations.

  1730s The Italian philosopher Giovanni Vico claims that all civilizations pass through three stages: the age of the gods; the age of artistocrats and heroes; and democracy. This is due to “an uninterrupted order of causes and effects.”

  1807–22 Georg Hegel writes of history as the continual progress of mind or spirit.

  AFTER

  2004 In his book, Memory, History, Forgetting, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur explores the necessity not only of remembering, but also of forgetting the past.

  In The Life of Reason (1905), the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Santayana’s naturalistic approach means that he sees knowledge and belief as arising not from reasoning, but through interaction between our minds and the material environment. Santayana is often misquoted as saying that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and this is sometimes understood to mean that we must do our best to remember past atrocities. But Santayana is actually making a point about progress. For progress to be possible, we must not only remember past experiences, but also be able to learn from them; to see different ways of doing things. The psyche structures new beliefs through experiences, and this is how we prevent ourselves from repeating mistakes.

  Real progress, Santayana believes, is not so much a matter of revolution as of adaptation, taking what we have learned from the past and using it to build the future. Civilization is cumulative, always building on what has gone before, in the same way that a symphony builds note by note into a whole.

  Progress is only possible through an understanding of the past coupled with a sense of possible alternatives. The AT&T Building, New York, uses old architectural patterns in new ways.

  See also: Georg Hegel • Karl Marx • William James • Bertrand Russell

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Ontology

  APPROACH

  Existentialism

  BEFORE

  c.500 BCE The Buddha claims that all life is marked by suffering and offers the Eightfold Path as a route to release from its causes.

  c.400 CE Saint Augustine asks how there can be suffering in a world created by a good and all-powerful God.

  AFTER

  1940 The Irish author and scholar C.S. Lewis explores the question of suffering in his book The Problem of Pain.

  20th century Unamuno’s philosophy of suffering influences other Spanish writers such as Federico García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez, and the British author Graham Greene.

  The Spanish philosopher, novelist, and poet, Miguel de Unamuno, is perhaps best known for his book The Tragic Sense of Life (1913). In this he writes that all consciousness is consciousness of death (we are painfully aware of our lack of immortality) and of suffering. What makes us human is the fact that we suffer.

  At first glance, it may seem as if this idea is close to that of Sidhartha Gautama, the Buddha, who also said that suffering is an inescapable part of all human life. But Unamuno’s response to suffering is very different. Unlike the Buddha, Unamuno does not see suffering as a problem to be overcome through practicing detachment. Instead he argues that suffering is an essential part of what it means to exist as a human being, and a vital experience.

  If all consciousness amounts to consciousness of human mortality and suffering, as Unamuno claims, and if consciousness is what makes us distinctively human, then the only way we can lend our lives a kind of weight and substance is to embrace this suffering. If we turn away from it, we are not only turning away from what makes us human, we are also turning away from consciousness itself.

  Love or happiness

  There is also an ethical dimension to Unamuno’s ideas on suffering. He claims that it is essential to acknowledge our pain, because it is only when we face the fact of our own suffering that we become capable of truly loving other suffering beings. This presents us with a stark choice. On the one hand, we can choose happiness and do our best to turn away from suffering. On the other hand, we can choose suffering and love.

  The first choice may be easier, but it is a choice that ultimately limits us—indeed, severs us from an essential part of ourselves. The second choice is more difficult, but it is one that opens the way to the possibility of a life of depth and significance.

  See also: Siddhartha Gautama • St Augustine of Hippo • Martin Heidegger • Albert Camus • Jean-Paul Sartre

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Ethics

  APPROACH

  Pragmatism

  BEFORE

  4th century BCE Aristotle explores the ancient Greek ethical concept of eudaimonia or “human flourishing.”

  1845 Publication of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave boosts support for the abolition of slavery in the United States.

  Late 19th and early 20th century Pragmatists, such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, argue that we should judge the value of ideas in terms of their usefulness.

  AFTER

  1950s and 1960s Martin Luther King Jr., as a leader of the African-American Civil Rights movement, adopts a policy of non-violent direct action to address social segregation.

  In 1957, close to the end of his long life, the American academic
, political radical, and civil rights activist, William Du Bois, wrote what has become known as his last message to the world. Knowing that he did not have much longer to live, he penned a short passage to be read at his funeral. In this message, Du Bois expresses his hope that any good he has done will survive long enough to justify his life, and that those things he has left undone, or has done badly, may be taken up by others to be bettered or completed.

  “Always,” Du Bois writes, “human beings will live and progress to a greater, broader, and fuller life.” This is a statement of belief rather than a statement of fact. It is as if Du Bois is saying that we must believe in the possibility of a fuller life, or in the possibility of progress, to be able to progress at all. In this idea, Du Bois shows the influence of the American philosophical movement known as Pragmatism, which claims that what matters is not just our thoughts and beliefs, but also the practical implications of these thoughts and beliefs.