“[The] social significance of academic freedom lies in the fact that without freedom of inquiry and freedom on the part of teachers and students to explore the forces at work in society and the means by which they may... (1/2)

Join us tomorrow for Dr. Ruta's talk, "Experience, Musical Understanding & Aesthetic Value" at 11 am in the Center for Dewey Studies (Morris Library Basement, Room 0044).

“Under a régime of highly centralized finance and industry, the mass of individuals, who are subordinates, tend to become cogs in a vast machine whose workings they do not understand, and in whose management they have no part or lot.... (1/2)

“[The] lesson of history is that the forces which limit and restrict the life of individuals and thereby hinder freedom change with every great change in human relations. Consequently, freedom is... (1/2)

“Society means association; coming together in joint intercourse and action for the better realization of any form of experience which is augmented and confirmed by being shared. Hence there are as many associations as... (1/2)

“Just as ‘individual’ is not one thing, but is a blanket term for the immense variety of specific reactions, habits, dispositions and powers of human nature that are evoked, and confirmed under the influences of associated life, so with the term ‘social.’ Society... (1/3)

“To say that a man seeks health or justice is only to say that he seeks to live healthily or justly. These things, like truth, are adverbial. They are modifiers of action in special cases.... (1/3)

“A moral situation is one in which judgment and choice are required antecedently to overt action. The practical meaning of the situation—that is to say the action needed to satisfy it—is not self-evident.... (1/2)

Join us tomorrow at noon for Dr. Harris's talk!

“To perceive this fact is to abolish rigid dogmas from the world. It is to recognize that conceptions, theories and systems of thought are always open to development through use. It is to enforce the lesson that we must be on the lookout quite as much for indications to... (1/2)

“Each science from mathematics to history exhibits typical fallacious methods and typical efficacious methods in special subject-matters. Logical theory has thus a large, almost inexhaustible field of empirical study.... (1/2)

“[Philosophy] cannot ‘solve’ the problem of the relation of the ideal and the real.... It can make it easier for mankind to take the right steps in action by making it clear that a sympathetic and integral intelligence brought to bear upon... (1/2)

“When the practice of knowledge ceased to be dialectical and became experimental, knowing became preoccupied with changes and the test of knowledge became the ability to bring about certain changes. Knowing, for the experimental sciences, means... (1/2)

“The conceptions that are socially current and important become the child's principles of interpretation and estimation long before he attains to personal and deliberate control of conduct. Things come to him clothed in language, not in physical nakedness, and this garb of... (1/2)

“The organism acts in accordance with its own structure, simple or complex, upon its surroundings. As a consequence the changes produced in the environment react upon the organism and its activities. The living creature... (1/2)

Join us this Friday for Dr. Ruta's talk, "From Opposition to Intertwinement: Rethinking Tradition and Progress Through Dewey" in the Center for Dewey Studies (Morris Library Basement). Light refreshments will be provided, and you are welcome to bring your own lunch. (1/2)

“Until the dogma of fixed unchangeable types and species, of arrangement in classes of higher and lower, of subordination of the transitory individual to the universal or kind had been shaken in its hold upon... (1/2)

“Philosophy starts from some deep and wide way of responding to the difficulties life presents, but it grows only when material is at hand for making this practical response conscious, articulate and communicable.” – John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920, MW 12: 110).

“When William James called Pragmatism a New Name for an Old Way of Thinking, I do not know that he was thinking expressly of Francis Bacon, but so far as concerns the spirit and atmosphere of the pursuit of knowledge, Bacon may be... (1/2)

“The mind of man spontaneously assumes greater simplicity, uniformity and unity among phenomena than actually exists. It follows superficial analogies and jumps to conclusions; it overlooks the variety of details and the existence of exceptions. Thus it weaves... (1/2)

“[Philosophy] did not develop in an unbiased way from an open and unprejudiced origin. It had its task cut out for it from the start. It had a mission to perform, and it was sworn in advance to... (1/2)

“Man differs from the lower animals because he preserves his past experiences... The revivals of memory are, however, rarely literal. We naturally remember what interests us and because it interests us. The past is recalled not because... (1/2)

Happy 166th Birthday to America's Philosopher, John Dewey! 🎉🎂

“Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and Nature and the treatment of specific subject-matters would be correspondingly modified. I would abandon the term ‘experience’ because… the historical obstacles which prevented understanding... (1/3)

Join us tomorrow for Dr. Joseph L. Smith’s talk, “On the Black Hand Side: Cornel West and the Black Prophetic Critique of Pragmatism,” in the Center for Dewey Studies (Morris Library Basement). Light refreshments will be provided, and you are welcome to bring your own lunch as well. (1/2)

“[A] mind that has opened itself to experience and that has ripened through its discipline knows its own littleness and impotencies; it knows that its wishes and acknowledgments are not final measures of the universe whether in knowledge or in conduct, and hence are, in the end, transient.... (1/3)

“[S]ince reflection is the instrumentality of securing freer and more enduring goods, reflection is a unique intrinsic good. Its instrumental efficacy determines it to be a candidate for... (1/3)

“Any activity that is productive of objects whose perception is an immediate good, and whose operation is a continual source of enjoyable perception of other events exhibits fineness of art. There are acts of all kinds that directly refresh and enlarge the spirit and that are instrumental... (1/3)

“It is hardly worth while to oppose science and art sharply to one another, when the deficiencies and troubles of life are so evidently due to separation between art and blind routine and blind impulse. Routine exemplifies the uniformities and recurrences of... (1/3)

“[E]mpirical facts indicate that not error but truth is the exception, the thing to be accounted for, and that the attainment of truth is the outcome of the development of complex and elaborate methods of... (1/3)

“Meanings do not come into being without language, and language implies two selves involved in a conjoint or shared undertaking.... Otherwise it becomes a mechanical routine not differing... (1/3)

“The distinction between physical, psycho-physical, and mental is thus one of levels of increasing complexity and intimacy of interaction among natural events. The idea that matter, life and mind represent separate kinds of Being... (1/3)

“[Mind] is an added property assumed by a feeling creature, when it reaches that organized interaction with other living creatures which is language, communication. Then the qualities of feeling become significant of objective differences in... (1/3)

Join us tomorrow at 12pm Noon for Dr. Joseph Urbas’s talk, "An Emersonian 'Deposit' in Dewey's Philosophy?  The Case of the Ethical Writings" in the Center for Dewey Studies (Morris Library Basement). We will have snacks and beverages available, and you are also welcome to bring your lunch. (1/2)

“Experience, a serial course of affairs with their own characteristic properties and relationships, occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events... (1/3)

“Freedom of thought denotes freedom of thinking; specific doubting, inquiring, suspense, creating and cultivating of tentative hypotheses, trials or experimentings that are unguaranteed and that involve risks of waste, loss, and error.”

This Friday, the Center for Dewey Studies will host a special Lunchtime Talk and Alwin Carus Lecture by Joseph Urbas on Emerson’s influence on John Dewey. Find out more at deweycenter.siu.edu/center-events/

“The heart of language... is communication; the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership. To fail to understand is... (1/2)

“Language, signs and significance, come into existence not by intent and mind but by over-flow, by-products, in gestures and sound. The story of language is the story of the use made of these occurrences; a use that is eventual, as well as eventful.”

Join us tomorrow at 1 pm for Dr. Nicholas Guardiano’s talk, "Emerson's Aesthetic Transcendentalist Legacy: The Idea of Beauty in American Art," in the Center for Dewey Studies (Morris Library Basement). We will have snacks and beverages available, and you are also welcome to bring your lunch.

“While leisure is the mother of drama, sport and literary spell-binding, necessity is the mother of invention, discovery and consecutive reflection. While at happy junctures the course of extraordinary events may be bound or wheedled by enjoyed rite and... (1/2)

“Aside from mathematics, all knowledge is historic; chemistry, geology, physiology, as well as anthropology and those human events to which, arrogantly, we usually restrict the title of history. Only as science is seen to be fulfilled and brought to itself in intelligent management... (1/2)

“[Something] unpredictable, spontaneous, unformulable and ineffable is found in any terminal object. Standardizations, formulae, generalizations, principles, universals, have their place, but the place is that of being instrumental to better approximation to what is unique and unrepeatable.” (1/2)

“Modern psychiatry as well as anthropology have demonstrated the enormous role of symbolism in human experience. The word symbolism, however, is a product of reflection upon direct phenomena, not a description of what happens when so-called symbols are potent. For the feature... (1/3)

“Structure and process, substance and accident, matter and energy, permanence and flux, one and many, continuity and discreteness, order and progress, law and liberty, uniformity and growth, tradition and innovation, rational will and impelling desires, proof and... (1/3)

“Empirically, all reflection sets out from the problematic and confused. Its aim is to clarify and ascertain. When thinking is successful, its career closes in transforming the disordered into the orderly, the mixed-up into the distinguished or placed, the... (1/2)

“Philosophical simplifications are due to choice, and choice marks an interest moral in the broad sense of concern for what is good. Our constant and unescapable concern is with... (1/2)

“[Experience] is of as well as in nature. It is not experience which is experienced, but nature– stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity, and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced.... (1/3)

“All philosophies employ empirical subject-matter, even the most transcendental; there is nothing else for them to go by. But in ignoring the kind of empirical situation to which... (1/2)

“For democracy means not only the ends which even dictatorships now assert are their ends, security for individuals and opportunity for their development as personalities. It signifies also primary emphasis upon the means by which these ends are to be fulfilled.... (1/3)