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The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy

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This is rigorous, tightly argued book that explores pragmatism (especially Dewey and the relation of his thought to that of C.S. Peirce), the relation between a pragmatic theory of experience and a pragmatic theory or logic of inquiry, and the meaning of intelligence. An earlier reviewer is right to point out that this is a book that assumes substantial knowledge of pragmatism. If you have not read big chunks of Peirce, James, and Dewey, and if you do not know your way around philosophy a bit, this book will be too advanced. It is not, for all that, barren or irrelevant. Indeed, the practical implications of this book--at least for persons with sufficient background to grasp them--are large and important. Sleeper's account of pragmatism and its conception of philosophy is challenging and effectively argued. Persons who have been getting their pragmatism through the works of thinkers like Rorty or Putnam or Cavell or McDowell would do well to redirect themselves to, and through this book. After reading this book, it is not hard to see why experts in the field--for instance scholars associated with the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy--consider it a classic. This re-issue will insure that new readers have access to it. An absolutely key book in the contemporary study and forward direction of pragmatism

This book can be read only by academic philosophers. Unfortunately it is not an exposition for the general public of the important and relevant ideas of Dewey. It is a book filled by "isms"; it assumes that the reader already knows not only Dewey's philosophy but also that he is an expert on most other philosophers also. Really quite unreadable. Here are a few typical sentences from the book: "Dewey is challenging both Venn's account of experience as divisible into perception and conception and the analytic-synthetic distinction presupposed in both empirical logic after Hume and the transcendental logic of neo-Kantians and objective idealists." Or: "For, once it is accepted that the true subject-matter of Dewey's metaphysics is experience itself, which allows Dewey's project to be assimilated to Kant's in the Critique of Pure Reason, it becomes almost impossible not to agree with Santayana's accusation that Dewey is half-hearted in his naturalism". Or: "Generic traits are expressed as the terms of the conclusions drawn, in propositions that have projectibility, but in practice they have both extensional and intentional meaning: the are the temporal and existential evidence of valid inference." I think that philosophical books written in a language that only other philosophers understand are meaningless. Philosophy has meaning only as far as it is relevant to peoples' lives. This book only demonstrates how barren philosophy can become when it creates its own artificial code of communication, in a way that is completely detached from the need for understanding of people in general. I am sure that Dewey's ideas can be discussed quite clearly in a more accessible language, focusing more on the ideas themselves and less on the discord between philosophers.