Creative Intelligence Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~140,000 words · 646 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Dewey. (n.d.). Creative Intelligence Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/creative-intelligence-essays-in-the-pragmatic-attitude
- MLAJohn Dewey. "Creative Intelligence Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/creative-intelligence-essays-in-the-pragmatic-attitude.
- ChicagoJohn Dewey. Creative Intelligence Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-dewey/creative-intelligence-essays-in-the-pragmatic-attitude.
What it is about
The collective volume of 1917 in which Dewey and seven colleagues presented pragmatism as a programme for philosophy as a whole, not as a theory of truth.
Context and history
Dewey's opening essay, 'The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy', is among his clearest and harshest. He argues there that philosophy has spent centuries solving problems it made for itself — how to get out of the mind into the world, how to bridge the gulf between subject and object — and that these problems vanish if one stops assuming that knowing is contemplation and admits that it is a way of acting. The proposal is that philosophy should leave the problems of philosophers and take up the problems of men. The book appeared with the war in the background, and that gives it an urgency the 1903 'Studies' did not have.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The Essays which follow represent an attempt at intellectual cooeperation. No effort has been made, however, to attain unanimity of belief nor to proffer a platform of "planks" on which there is agreement. The consensus represented lies primarily in outlook, in conviction of what is most likely to be fruitful in method of approach. As the title page suggests, the volume presents a unity in attitude rather than a uniformity in results. Consequently each writer is definitively responsible only for his own essay. The reader will note that the Essays endeavor to embody the common attitude in application to specific fields of inquiry which have been historically associated with philosophy rather than as a thing by itself. Beginning with philosophy itself, subsequent contributions discuss its application to logic, to mathematics, to physical science, to psychology, to ethics, to economics, and then again to philosophy itself in conjunction with esthetics and religion. The reader will probably find that the significant points of agreement have to do with the ideas of the genuineness of the future, of intelligence as the organ for determining the quality of that future so far as it can come within human control, and of a courageously inventive individual as the bearer of a creatively employed mind. While all the essays are new in the form in which they are now published, various contributors make their acknowledgments to the editors of the _Philosophical Review_, the _Psychological Review_, and the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_ for use of material which first made its appearance in the pages of these journals. CONTENTS PAGE THE NEED FOR A RECOVERY OF PHILOSOPHY 3 John Dewey, Columbia University. REFORMATION OF LOGIC 70 Addison W. Moore, University of