This is an introduction to the philosophy of John Dewey, one of America’s leading philosophers of the 20th century. Dewey was one of the founders of the philosophical movement called “pragmatism”. He also did important work on the theory of education and was a strong voice for progressive political causes.
Category Archives: Non-Fiction
Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism by Philip Kitcher
It’s mostly a comparison of secular humanism with what he calls “refined religion” — religion that takes ethics more seriously than stories about God. Kitcher argues that humanism can do the job of refined religion. I favor humanism but the book didn’t impress me.
Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman by Robert L. O’Connell
Sherman was interesting but O’Connell isn’t much of a writer.
American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph J. Ellis
American Creation is an excellent summary of what Ellis calls “the Founding Era”, defined as the 28 years between the start of the War for Independence in 1775 and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
The author’s method is to focus on six key periods or events: the 15 months between the violence at Lexington and Concord and the signing of the Declaration of Independence; the Continental Army’s winter at Valley Forge, “a pivotal moment” when George Washington realized he could not win the war by winning full-scale battles with the British; the political battle between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists to ratify the Constitution; the approval of the Treaty of New York in 1791 between the United States and the Creek Nation; the beginning of party politics with the creation of the original Republican Party by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, mainly in response to Alexander Hamilton’s proposed Bank of the United States; and finally the Louisiana Purchase, when President Jefferson doubled the size of the United States but set the stage for the Civil War by ignoring the issue of slavery’s expansion to the new territory.
Being relatively ignorant about the history of this period, it was especially surprising to read about Thomas Jefferson’s checkered career and the creation of the first Republican Party, which later became the Democratic-Republican Party and eventually split into two parties, the Democrats and the Whigs (it’s ironic that the current Republican Party is known as the Grand Old Party, even though the Democratic Party is 30 years older). Jefferson and his follower Madison engaged in all kinds of bad behavior premised on the bizarre idea that people like Washington and John Adams wanted to restore monarchy to America.
The other especially surprising story is the attempt by members of Washington’s administration to create a policy that would protect the interests of the Indians east of the Mississippi. The Creek Nation occupied much of the American South and was lead by Alexander McGillivray, an expert negotiator who was only one-quarter Indian. McGillivray eventually agreed to the Treaty of New York, which reserved a large part of the South for the Indians and included the promise that Federal troops would stop any further settlement in the area by American colonists. As with most treaties between the United States and the Indians, the agreement was immediately broken by the Federal government, mostly because there weren’t enough Federal troops to enforce it.
One of Ellis’s principal conclusions is that the struggle over the balance of power between the central government and the states was built into the Constitution from the beginning and has defined much of American history, even to the present day. My conclusion is that we’ve been lucky to do as well as we have, given the political and economic conflicts that have existed since the Founding Era and will apparently never be resolved.
Perception: A Representative Theory by Frank Jackson
Frank Jackson is a well-known philosopher from Australia. Perception, first published in 1977, is an argument for a Representative theory of visual perception similar to John Locke’s. Jackson sums up the book in the last paragraph:
The first four chapters present my case for a Sense-datum theory of perception. Chapter 5 gives the reason for holding that all sense-data are mental. This forces a choice between Idealism and Representationalism. In chapter 6, I argue that there is no good reason for not choosing Representationalism. And, finally, in [the last] chapter, I have, first, attempted to justify my taking the perception of things as basic throughout; and, secondly, I have tried to make more precise … the particular kind of Representationalism that should be chosen.
The Sense-Data theory of perception has had a long history in philosophy. Its principal tenet is that we never perceive physical objects directly. Instead, what we immediately perceive are mental objects called “sense-data”. Thus, when I see the wall in front of me, I immediately perceive a mind-dependent blue expanse, a sense-datum (or set of sense-data), not the wall itself. In Jackson’s words, a visual sense-datum is “something seen, but not in virtue of [seeing] anything else”. Physical objects, on the other hand, are seen, but always by virtue of seeing something else, namely, sense-data. Furthermore, there is a kind of causal relationship between physical objects and the sense-data that “belong to” those objects. That’s why sense-data are said to “represent” the external world.
I’ve read that Jackson no longer endorses the theory he presents here, but Perception still provides a good account of one version of the Sense-Data theory. Professor Jackson makes many interesting distinctions and responds to a number of criticisms. One criticism he anticipates is that he is spending too much time analyzing the language of perception (Chapter 2, for example, is called “Three Uses of ‘Looks'”). He responds that his analysis of language isn’t meant to show whether sense-data actually exist. Instead, it’s meant to help us decide whether believing in the existence of sense-data (accepting the theory) is a reasonable thing to do and how the theory should be stated.
I read Perception because I’ve been thinking about the topic a lot lately and think the Sense-Data theory is probably the best one (even though it’s probably considered a bit old-fashioned now; for one thing, philosophers talk about “qualia” these days instead of sense-data). It’s common for philosophers to think of the mind as software running on the hardware of the brain. But if we’re going to think of our minds/brains as computers running programs, it makes sense to think of the input to these computers as data. Just as a computer program processes data and not the real stuff in the world, we process data as well. In our case, colors, sounds, smells, and so on, are different kinds of data. It just so happens that the data we process isn’t made up of numbers or ASCII characters (or electronic on/off settings); our perceptual data is made up of red or blue expanses, soft or loud noises and pleasant or unpleasant aromas. We don’t perceive the world “directly”, because that can’t be done. We perceive sense-data that represent the world; in similar fashion, computers process electronic values that represent the world too.
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
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