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>>RICHARD RORTY: My uncle and aunt who taught at the University of Wisconsin were friendly
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with Max Otto, who was a disciple of Dewey's, and who tried to write a sort of practical
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version of pragmatism, bringing pragmatism more closely in touch with public life.
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I read Otto at the time that I met him but I don't remember his works very well now.
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The only other philosophy professor who I was in touch with in my teens was Sidney Hook,
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who was a friend of my parents. So, as it happened, the only philosophy professors I
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met when young were disciples of Dewey.
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At an early age I knew there was such a thing as pragmatism, but as soon as I got to Chicago
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I was told that it was a bad thing because people like Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was
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chancellor of the university, and Mortimer Adler, who was an influential figure on the
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Chicago scene, were inclined to say that Dewey was a relativist, and that we needed moral
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absolutes.
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There was a lot of neo-Thomism in the air, and Leo Strauss was also an opponent of pragmatism.
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So, between Adler's neo-Thomism and Strauss's quasi-Platonism, there was a good deal of
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anti-pragmatism around.
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So I suppose at Chicago I learned more what was wrong with pragmatism than what was right
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about it.
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Until he was thirty he was still a believing Christian and tried to arrange his philosophical
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thoughts around the truths of Christianity.
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After he broke with the Christian religion, between the ages of, let's say, thirty and
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eighty, he produced a series of books on various topics, which I don't think fall neatly into
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periods.
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Everyone has his favorite Dewey books.
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My favorite is Reconstruction in Philosophy and A Common Faith, which, separated by a
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considerable period.
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Other people like Experience and Nature.
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I don't.
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His prose is remarkably boring.
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It's very difficult to assign Dewey to students because they go to sleep halfway through the
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assignment.
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He wasn't exactly a bad writer and there are occasionally some vivid phrases and some quotable
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bits, but compared either to James or Royce, he's a bore.
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I think that if you ask about the influence of Hegel in the period after Darwin, there
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are various figures who tried to put Hegel and Darwin together and of these Dewey was
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perhaps the most successful.
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That is, he shared Hegel's historicism and Darwin's naturalism and managed to synthesize
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the two.
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I think that James and Schiller and Dewey thought of themselves as fomenting an intellectual
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revolution, which was partially successful in the culture as a whole, but not particularly
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successful within the boundaries of philosophy departments.
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I'm not sure that the philosophical world was much interested in this enterprise so
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Dewey has never been very popular among his fellow philosophy professors, but he happened
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to be the intellectual who best spoke up in public for the social democratic measures
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of the progressive era and New Deal.
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So he was an important figure in American public life even though the philosophy professors
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didn't have any great use for him.
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He kept up a steady stream of articles on the political issues of the day, trying to
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see the events of his time as leading up to a better America of the future.
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He had a utopian vision of social democracy and, indeed, participatory social democracy,
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a dream that will probably never come true.
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But by keeping that utopian vision before the public he did influence the public mood
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to some extent.
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It's true that the United States didn't approach the kind of welfare state that became the
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norm in Europe in the period after the Second World War.
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On the other hand the difference between this U.S. in 1905 as the progressives were getting
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started and in 1965 after Johnson had gotten the civil rights legislation passed is enormous.
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So there was a very considerable shift toward the political left in the first half of the
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twentieth century and Dewey had as much with that as any other American intellectual.
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I don't think you can single Dewey out as having made a particular political contribution.
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He just stood for the right causes for a long, long time.
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He was in favor of women's suffrage.
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He was against racial discrimination.
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He was in favor of increasing the power of the trade unions.
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These were all things that came to pass more or less in the course of his lifetime.
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I don't think you can find much of a connection between what Dewey said to the philosophy
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professors and what he said to the general public.
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The questions that he took up in response to people like Russell or Royce are just too
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remote from politics for one to claim that the one presupposed or entailed the other.
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In general I don't think there's much connection between the kinds of things philosophy professors
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talk about to their colleagues and the kinds of things they talk about when they play a
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role in public affairs.
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Philosophical ideas are confined to one percent of the population and they tend to be cosmopolites
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who are not easily identified with their country.
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I think democratic governments are run by experts.
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The only question is which experts are going to be in power at any given moment.
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Dewey's dreams of participatory democracy will never come true.
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I think American universities and Western universities generally have served society
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very well indeed.
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They've supplied experts who could then be associated with politicians who were voted
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in or voted out by the masses.
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That's the best we can expect.
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