Episode 127: John Dewey on Experience and the World

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On Experience and Nature (1925), through ch. 4.

What's the relationship between our experience and the world that science investigates? Dewey thinks that these are one and the same, and philosophies that call some part of it (like atoms or Platonic forms) the real part while the experienced world is a distortion are unjustified. We need to remove the unjustified split between perception and reality to give humanistic phenomena (like ethics) their due and to keep our philosophical sentiments fully aware of their origins in human strivings, lest we fall prey to prejudice and wishful thinking, like, say Augustine, who was so afraid of the suffering attendant to impermanence that he denied the true reality of any impermanence or evil.

Mark, Wes, and Dylan talk about whether this sort of Nietzschean examination of philosophical motives holds water, whether an experienced quality like "scariness" can really be "out in the world" (instead of just in our minds), the relationship between the objects of experience and the objects of science, what role "ends" should play in science, where aesthetic feeling comes into the picture (everywhere!), and more. Learn more about the topic and get the book.

End song: "Uncontrollable Fear" by The MayTricks from So Chewy! (1993), written/sung by Steve Petrinko. Get the album free.

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Dewey image by Sterling Bartlett.

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