John Dewey Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

American Democracy in Crisis: Q & A on Tocqueville, Douglass, Dewey, and Arendt

Liberal institutions, abolition democracy, and civic virtue

February 1, 2023 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Juliet Hooker, William Milberg, James Miller and Deva Woodly

If we think about the way that liberalism anchors democracy, it largely relies on rights and institutional design. Just as a descriptive matter, it’s the case that the institutions that have been designed and the regime of rights that has been conceived, including the regime of human rights that has ...

Democracy

Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

How John Dewey’s notion of social intelligence can remake contemporary politics

January 31, 2023 • by Deva Woodly

For Dewey, the notion of social intelligence is that human beings are able to shape and change the world through the understandings that they gain from the fund of human knowledge that exists: old ideas combined and related through the world as we experience it, and latched onto something new. ...

Inventing and Implementing a World We Wish to Share

Activism

The Power of Black Feminist Pragmatism

Why the Black Lives Matter movement is the best alternative to the anti-democratic, white supremacist, authoritarian capture of the United States

January 20, 2022 • by Deva Woodly

The Black Lives Matter movement is not a “new social movement” that focuses on cultural transformation while eschewing policy intervention, nor is it fashioned after “old style,” “traditional” social movements that attempt to move policy while deemphasizing the need for deep changes in public understandings of the problems facing polities ...

Activism

On Coming to Terms

What form should a “post #BlackLivesMatter” movement take?

January 19, 2022 • by Christopher Paul Harris

BlackLivesMatter” world, it won’t be one where the current constellation of movement organizations simply disappear or become ineffective in their attempts to bring Black people closer to liberation....

Activism

Reckoning with Deva Woodly’s Reckoning

What kind of coalition must the Left forge in order to defeat Trumpism and whatever comes after it?

January 18, 2022 • by Sidney Tarrow

Black Lives Matter was not born in the streets, even if it sometimes moved there following the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014, and again after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. But the movement, after these intense episodes of protest and direct action has not stayed in ...

Reckoning with Deva Woodly’s <em>Reckoning</em>

Philosophy

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

A series of lectures belatedly published in English sheds new light on the mind of a moralist

September 14, 2021 • by Laura Nelson

1 Richard Rorty, the American philosopher and public intellectual who died in 2007, is perhaps best known as “the philosopher who predicted Donald Trump.” In Achieving Our Country, a book articulating his reflections on the possibilities and prospects for democracy in the United States, Rorty worried that economic inequality, coupled with ...

A New Perspective on Richard Rorty’s Philosophy

Education

The Enigma of Rescue

On a recent history of The New School for Social Research

July 30, 2020 • by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson ...

Feature

Why John Dewey Should Matter to Historians

The role of knowledge and truth in the Constitutional order was Dewey’s central project

May 6, 2019 • by David A. Hollinger

This essay was originally published on May 6 2019. These Truths: A History of the United States is the book that Henry Steel Commager tried to write forty years ago, but did not. Commager’s 1979 volume, Empire of Reason, took seriously the Enlightenment foundation for the nation, but his account of the many ...

Education

What Does It Mean to Educate Adults?

The Case of the New School

November 6, 2018 • by Julia Foulkes

There is much in question about the future of higher education, but one trend is clear: the average age of undergraduates is rising. As a college degree replaces a high school degree as the basis for more jobs and the possibility of economic stability, more people are starting or returning ...

Uncategorized

Populism Through Uprooted Truths

The resiliency of Erdogan and the AKP

March 27, 2018 • by Can Mert Kökerer

This is an attempt to tell and explain the “success” story of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its founder Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current President of the Republic of Turkey. They came to power in 2002, following economic and political crises in the previous decade. The party and ...

Feature

White Supremacy, Fear and the Crises of Legitimation

Reflections on the mistrial in the murder case of Walter Scott and the election of Donald Trump

January 1, 2017 • by Melvin L. Rogers

We are, however, likely to miss the importance of this decision if we do not connect it to another jarring day: November 9th. Many of us woke up (some of us never slept) to the announcement that Donald J. Trump would be the 45th president of the United States. Given ...

Power and Crisis

Against “Charm”

The Uses of Autobiography for Philosophy

December 20, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

Moreover, how other philosophers lived and died is not the most important thing about them either: while life and work are inseparable, the latter takes pride of place. Heidegger went too far in saying that all one needs to know about Aristotle, for philosophical purposes, was that he lived, then ...