Volume 4, Number 6 · April 22, 1965
Revaluations: John Dewey's Darwinism
By Henry David Aiken
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought
by John Dewey
Indiana, 304 pp., $2.45 (paper)
A large part of the enormous corpus of John Dewey's writings is now to be found only in our great research libraries. We must therefore be grateful to the Indiana University Press for making available again these still attractive essays, first gathered and published in 1910; they provide an excellent sampling of the work of Dewey's middle period, after he had broken with the transcendentalism and Hegelianism of his early years and had joined forces with the pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Some, like the title essay, are better written, in a rather old-fashioned way, than readers of Dewey's later works have come to expect; others afford early examples of that curious opaqueness which afflicts so much of Dewey's later technical writing on questions of logic and epistemology. Two of the pieces, surprisingly, are philosophical dialogues. Dewey, it must be confessed, is no Hume or Berkeley, still less a Plato, and the second of the dialogues, 'A Short Catechism Concerning Truth,' employs its form in a wholly external and perfunctory way in order to answer various standard 'objections' to the pragmatic theory of truth. The other dialogue, entitled 'Nature's Good: A Conversation' is better, and I found in it an excellent, almost Santayanean statement of the philosophical naturalist's effort to distinguish nature as a source and context of values from nature conceived as a purpose, as an end, or as a good. It also contains a characteristically pragmatic insistence upon the practical role of philosophical inquiry and upon the centrality of method, which for Dewey is the same thing as intelligence, to the solution of all problems of practice. In fact the following concluding statement in 'Nature's Good' could hardly be improved upon as a general formulation of the point of view of classical pragmatism:
Review, 2296 words
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