Dewey's Ethics

The ethical ideas of John Dewey, which underlie his approaches to education and other social and political issues. @PhiloofAlexandria

[@methodbanana2676]

These videos are great. Really interesting, really informative, and the perfect length. Thank you!

[@TheAvianoid]

Thank you for these resources! I'm a Norwegian student, and our philosophy cources sadly exclude pragmatism & neo-pragmatism entierly; so most students haven't even heard about Dewey. This sorts of internationally available secondary sources on the web significantly help break down the internal divisions in our field of philosophy, and I thank you for making a small contribution towards that😁

[@donwight233]

Thank you 👍

[@thattimestampguy]

0:15 Learning about John Dewey’s Philosophy • Philosopher • Education Reformer 4:13 Practical Thinking • React & Revise 6:00 Revision 6:45 The World Keeps Changing 7:31 The Unknown and Unencountered Future. 7:54 Ethical Judgements are Context-Dependent, (Situation and Solution have to fit: ex a hammer 🔨 and a nail) 9:00 • (Figuring out what to do in specific problem situations.) 9:32 Ethics is more like engineering, it’s trying to solve practical problems, coming up with Prescriptions for action. • Medicine • Engineering • Architecture It’s Practically Oriented. Context Sensitive • 1 Treatment works for some, Another Treatment works for others • Proceed with Caution ⚠️ when applying 1 solution to multiple different contexts. 11:06 Ethics is developed from/as we deal with experiences. 11:33 We value everything for the sake of solving problems. Nothing is Inherently Good for it’s own sake. 11:57 Vague general goods don’t give any 1 achievement that is inherently valuable itself. 12:35 We are just facing lots of different problems - Food and Drink needs - Educational problems 13:07 What is the Highest Good? “There’s no such thing.” - John Dewey. 13:38 We face lots of different problems, needing different principles, and needing revision. 14:00 Heuristics are ways of going about solving problems. • Refinement • Problem Solved • New Problem • Can the previous solution apply here? Yes, good. Or no, we need a different approach, a different solution. 15:16 John Dewey’s tombstone 🪦

[@azyx4192]

I always walked past his old house in Vermont but never considered him to be of much interest~ guess I was wrong.

[@joseferreirapinto9523]

I think abduction explains part of his approach which somehow connects with Derrida on the need for deconstruction? @Prof Daniel Bonevac thanks again for this inspiring video.

[@joseferreirapinto9523]

I read his lecture notes and together with some of the writings authored by Charles Sanders Pierce while looking at abduction or retroinduction something you mention too on another video?

[@sciencmath]

Does Dewey ever discuss moral disagreement? Based on this lecture (and Arthur Holmes' lectures), Dewey's ethic doesn't seem to provide any help.

[@PhiloofAlexandria]

I think that’s right. Same problem with Gadamer and other pragmatists-all they can say is that we work it out together. Sometimes we do; sometimes we don’t. The real question is, How?

[@mileskeller5244]

I'm not sure how one can refute moral realism and also try to use something akin to the scientific method to test normative statements, and expect the results to be repeatable, and demonstrable.

[@brendangolledge8312]

Logic involves deriving correct conclusions from assumed premises. So if a moral system doesn't have an assumption about something that is innately good, then that moral system is not logical. In the case of solving practical problems, you are taking food and shelter and other such things as innate goods. If you didn't care about being full, then you wouldn't bother trying to figure out how to eat. Generalization is also the same as abstraction, so it is no wonder that something which is very generalized can't be practically applied. But that doesn't mean that there is no true abstraction. You may as well say that F=ma is not meaningful, because it is not able to solve any real problem without more context.

[@Al.Kour.00]

Who will be the next "great philosopher" to admire? Joseph Stalin?

[@PhiloofAlexandria]

I don’t talk about just those people I agree with. I talk about influential people even when they’re deeply destructive.

[@anthonyspencer766]

@@PhiloofAlexandria You the man, D-Bone. Unfortunately, we seem to have stumbled into a milieu culturally in which it is normalized not to seek to understand ideas that one judges to have resulted in undesirable outcomes morally, politically, and/or economically. The tremendous gaff here is that achieving this synthesis requires a philosophy - or simply, some set of ideas - that allows us to connect the Thinker in question with moral outcomes (or otherwise). That synthesis requires philosophical answers because it is not at all clear how thought leaps to the level of global outcome, if you will. Not only that, if we grant that a certain philosophy X did in fact generate some undesirable moral outcome (that is, we believe the *philosophical argument that explains this "story"), this provides an even greater impetus to understand X. Why? Because the denial of this claim is tantamount with saying that we have an objective answer taking the form of some Y philosophy, where Y != X, and Y = Good. Presumably, at some point, in order for an idea had by one individual (which is inevitably a synthesis of many ideas by thinkers who came before him) to have the scaled effects that make it "diabolical" a posteriori means that probably many people thought the ideas were genuinely good to begin with. We should want to know why they did. Again presumably, if there are intelligent people who think X is good at some time T1, yet they turn out to be very wrong, then, in principle, people who think Y is good at T2 could also be wrong for the same or similar reasons, i.e., the reasons why humans today still don't have broad agreement on what's good (what an oblique way of getting to the threat of history repeating itself!).

[@thomaslaubli1886]

I don't understand the connection between John Dewey and Stalin. He talks about solving problems in changing contexts. This is the opposite of Marxism, which claims the final form of society for itself and is not swayed by experience. Dewey anticipates Popper's critical rationalism, which represents a kind of fallibilism, and rejects Platonic forms.