The THE PHILOSOPHER AND HIS CRITICS: A DIALOGUE ON RORTY'S REVISIONISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN DEWEY

A DIALOGUE ON RORTY'S REVISIONISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN DEWEY

Abstract

When constructing his interpretative hypothesis about John Dewey (1859-1952), the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007), considered a follower of the pragmatist doctrine, attributed to our author two conflicting personalities: the “good” Dewey and the “bad” Dewey. In his interpretation of the pioneering pragmatist, Rorty does not consider it appropriate for Dewey to reconstruct concepts of traditional philosophy such as science, nature, experience and method. Rorty thinks that if Dewey had abandoned such sterile projects, he could have created more persuasive and adequate arguments against canonical philosophy. Upon realizing that Dewey did not abandon these projects, Rorty classifies him as the “bad Dewey” and disapproves of him. Even so, he never tires of praising a supposed “good Dewey”, who was critical of evidence, foundationalism, and dualisms. In his attempt to “linguisticize” Dewey, Rorty wants to demonstrate that the “young Dewey” was the “bad” Dewey, because, according to Rorty, he tried to follow Locke and Hegel and still remained in Kantianism. Thus, he attributes to the “old Dewey” the quality of “good”, a change of attitude that would be more consistent with his doctrine: the realization of socio-educational and cultural studies on philosophical problems in their specific contexts. Our thesis, summarized in this article, consists of arguing that the hypothesis that there is a “first” and a “second” Dewey does not seem adequate to us. Rorty’s interpretative strategy is not accepted by us because it disfigures the work of the classical pragmatist, considering that only the historicist dimension of his thought should be accepted and not the scientific dimension. In our view, this interpretation seeks to hide the nucleating category of Dewey’s work, which is experience. Rorty wrote that Dewey's contribution to philosophical thought was to be critical of tradition. Thus, Dewey's claim to offer a metaphysics characterized by the description of reality and the discovery of its general features in order to illuminate future research and investigations was rejected by Rorty. Based on this context, we intend to recover a dialogue that Rorty proposes to his critics in the book Rorty and pragmatism. The philosopher responds to his critics (1995), especially with James Guilonck. Regarding the questions raised by Hartmann and Kremer, our criticism against these two authors consists of arguing against Rorty's strategy of splitting Dewey into two and, finally, we support an interpretation that articulates the two dimensions of Dewey's philosophy: the historicist and the scientific.