Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
John Dewey thought philosophy had become too fond of puzzles no one could solve. In these eight talks, first given in Tokyo, he asks philosophers to learn from science and from daily life: try an idea, watch what it does, and keep what helps people live better. He talks about thinking, right and wrong, and how towns and schools might grow kinder and wiser. His voice is calm, plain and quietly hopeful throughout.
Dewey gave these talks in Tokyo in 1919, to students living through a world war's aftermath, and he told them philosophy itself had to be rebuilt. For centuries, he says, thinkers chased eternal truths far above daily life. Meanwhile science had shown a better way: form an idea, act on it, watch the result, and let experience correct you.
Lecture by lecture, he applies that way of thinking everywhere. Experience is not a veil between us and the world, it is our living contact with it. Reason is not a separate throne, it is intelligence at work in problems. Even ideals matter only as they guide real choices in schools, workshops, families and governments, here and now.
The last lectures turn to morals and society, and the tone warms. A good community, for Dewey, is one where people keep learning together and share the fruits of growth. He ends, surprisingly, with poetry and religious feeling, calling them the unforced flowers of life. It is philosophy meant to be used, and it reads like a kind friend.
John Dewey delivered these eight lectures in Tokyo in 1919 and published them in 1920 as a call to rebuild philosophy. Instead of timeless puzzles, he argues, philosophy should learn from science, face social problems, and test its ideas by their fruits in ordinary life. The lectures move from the history of thought to logic, morals and society. Clear, hopeful and practical, the book is a friendly doorway into Dewey's pragmatism.
Dewey opens with a prefatory note dated September 1919, explaining that these eight lectures were given at the Imperial University in Tokyo and that his aim is not to plead for one party in philosophy but to show why reconstruction has become unavoidable. The reader then walks into a history of an idea changing its job. The first lectures trace how philosophy grew from Greek wonder and medieval faith into modern systems, and how science, industry and democracy have quietly altered what its questions can mean. Middle lectures take up experience and reason, the ideal and the real, and argue that intelligence is not a spectator of the world but a tool for remaking it. The final lectures turn practical: the significance of logical reconstruction, reconstruction in moral conceptions, and at last social philosophy, closing with poetry and religious feeling as the unforced flowers of life. The shape is compact, eight chapters of some six thousand words each, complete as delivered, and the tone throughout is that of a teacher thinking aloud with his audience rather than a prophet laying down a system.
Edition: Edition of 1920. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 40089.
The first chapter
Being invited to lecture at the Imperial University of Japan in Tokyo during February and March of the present year, I attempted an interpretation of the reconstruction of ideas and ways of thought now going on in philosophy. While the lectures cannot avoid revealing the marks of the particular standpoint of their author, the aim is to exhibit the general contrasts between older and newer types of philosophic problems rather than to make a partisan plea in behalf of any one specific solution of these problems. I have tried for the most part to set forth the forces which make intellectual reconstruction inevitable and to prefigure some of the lines upon which it must proceed.
Any one who has enjoyed the unique hospitality of Japan will be overwhelmed with confusion if he endeavors to make an acknowledgment in any way commensurate to the kindnesses he received. Yet I must set down in the barest of black and white my grateful appreciation of them, and in particular record my ineffaceable impressions of the courtesy and help of the members of the department of philosophy of Tokyo University, and of my dear friends Dr. Ono and Dr. Nitobe.
J. D.
September, 1919.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1920. Author died 1952. Public domain in the United States. Share this book: WhatsApp
Starvard