Dewey’s Empirical Naturalism, An Over Reaction to Perennial Philosophical Truths - by Stephen Beach

Dewey’s Empirical Naturalism, An Over Reaction to Perennial Philosophical Truths

"As one of the founders of Pragmatism, John Dewey held that truth is something that must take into account the changing times and circumstances of humans in order to improve human life here and now. It should never fall back into static and outmoded philosophical attempts to construe reality as something “beyond” and for its own sake, but must be ordered to human beings. This, of course, is quite a novel and radical notion to claim that truth is not something eternal, unified, metaphysical, and unchanging. The goal of this paper is to lay out some of Dewey’s key ideas underpinning his redefinition of truth: (1) being based on Darwinian theory and the overturning of the traditional idea of “species,” (2) as understanding religion and philosophy as poor attempts to unify man’s experience and of which science has replaced, and (3) as providing a new foundation for ethics; as well as then offering a short critique as to why his positions fail, not because they do not offer any true innovations in understanding, but because they prematurely leave out certain key phenomena of the human experiences like transcendental realities."