John Dewey

espanolEl libro publicado por Stephen Toulmin en 1958, que lleva por titulo Los usos de la argumentacion, es considerado como uno de los pilares del resurgimiento de la Teoria de la argumentacion en el siglo XX. Si bien los estudios sobre dicho libro y, en general, sobre la posicion de su autor son numerosos, hay un aspecto de su obra que permanece aun poco analizado, a saber, su vinculo con las ideas del filosofo pragmatista John Dewey. Este vinculo resulta problematico habida cuenta de que, si bien las referencias a Dewey en el conjunto de la obra de Toulmin son numerosas y a menudo elogiosas, en particular las referencias al filosofo pragmatista en Los usos de la argumentacion son escasas y de tono critico, pese a que, como se mostrara en este trabajo, puede sostenerse que la posicion de Toulmin en dicha obra no solo incorpora, como suele reconocerse, una perspectiva pragmatica sino tambien una pragmatista. EnglishIt is well known that the book published by Stephen Toulmin in 195...

Research on youth civic engagement often sees the everyday lives of young people as barriers to civic engagement.  Recent qualitative approaches have drawn attention to the civic and political dimensions of young people’s everyday lives. This is a crucial insight, but cannot—by itself—answer a key question: Just how is it that everyday experience can be transformed into civic engagement?  I argue that Dewey's theory of experience makes two key contributions towards answering this question. First, Dewey’s situational understanding of experience directs us to the concrete conditions everyday life as the necessary groundwork and starting point for civic engagement.  Second, Dewey’s concept of reflective experience helps us understand how taken for granted assumptions about political and social life can be transformed into more active forms of engagement.  I illustrate this argument by drawing on selected findings from a qualitative study of young people’s experience in Public Achievement, a civic engagement initiative

This introduction contextualizes and evaluates Herbert Marcuse’s the accompanying, previously untranslated review of John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Marcuse’s critique of pragmatism is indebted to Max Horkheimer’s claim that pragmatism is an example of “traditional” theory and reduces thought to mere instrument in service of external ends. Unlike Horkheimer, Marcuse concedes that Dewey, unlike the logical positivists, attempted to develop a material logic of ends. However, he concludes that the attempt was ultimately unsuccessful. I place this conclusion in the context of Marcuse’s critique of technological reason. Lastly, I defend Dewey from the charge of crude instrumentalism and delineate Marcuse’s and Dewey’s critical disagreement on science’s capacity for self-reflection.

After defining hermeneutics as the systematic and justified revelation of a meaning, I will try to demonstrate in my paper that John Dewey's theory of inquiry is a type of hermeneutics. I consider that Dewey's hermeneutics is highly comprehensive, since it also examines the meanings which man creates when interpreting nature. In order to prove it, I will analyse the novel "Baltagul" [The Hatchet] written by a famous Romanian writer, Mihail Sadoveanu, trying to show that both the main character, Vitoria Lipan, in her detective investigations, and the hermeneut, who – at a different level – looks for the hidden meaning of the novel, follow the same Deweyan " pattern of inquiry " .

This paper aims to develop a new understanding of normativity based upon the priority of the ordinary. By relying upon diverse sociological and philosophical traditions, the paper seeks to emphasize the ordinary tacit assumptions which provide the basic structure of our experience of the world and its normative features. The general argument is that, whereas sociological traditions of social interactionism shed new light upon the “empirical fact of normativity”, ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism offer a theoretical account of normativity which is consistent with the picture of normativity which emerges out of these empirical descriptions. The paper synthesizes the main achievements of these traditions into a unified account of normativity.

In this article some key elements of Dewey's philosophy are highlighted in order to figure out a theory of human behavior that shows the deep intertwinement between bio-psychological dimension, social interaction, and theory of signs. After a brief exposure of Dewey's theory of the organic circuit, I analyze his theory of emotion to find out a first draft of the continuity between psychology and evaluation processes. According to Dewey, emotional attitudes underpin the transition from animal instinct to human interest, and from selfish instincts to social impulses. Actually, the organic relationship between stimulus and response, as depicted in Dewey's The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, as well as between 'wishing' and 'desire', as depicted in his Theory of Valuation, is related to his distinction between instinct and interest. In this view, I corroborate my analysis focusing on The Logic of Judgments of Practice (1916) whereby I show how Dewey considers the organic circuit as the logical and semiotic device of judgment.

Questa è la traduzione italiana di un saggio fondamentale di John Dewey, non sufficientemente conosciuto in Italia. È uscito sulla "Società degli individui" nel 2007, senza ottenere l'effetto sperato. La traduzione è preceduta da una breve premessa in cui spiego perché il modo in cui Dewey interpreta l'importanza di Darwin per la riflessione filosofica è ancora molto attuale oggi.

"Michel Weber et Pierfrancesco Basile (sous la direction de), Chromatikon III. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès — Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2007. (300 p. ; ISBN 978-2-8746-3083-5 ; 23 € ; https://www.i6doc.com/fr/livre/?GCOI=28001100028210 ; https://www.i6doc.com/en/livre/?GCOI=28001100028210; https://www.i6doc.com/doc/chromatikon3 & https://www.i6doc.com/doc/chromatikon3-eng)

Table
Michel Weber, Avant-Propos & Foreword
I. Séminaires de recherche — Research Seminars
Pierfrancesco Basile, The Reality of Forms
Jean-Marie Breuvart, Husserl et Whitehead, sur l’Intentionnalité
Didier Debaise, Life and Orders
Ronny Desmet, The Rebirth of the Ether
Guillaume Durand, Les objets perceptuels du Professeur Whitehead
Franck Robert, Penser la couleur avec Process and Reality
Xavier Verley, Sentir : Whitehead et Merleau-Ponty
II. Etudes critiques — Critical Studies
Jean-Pascal Alcantara, Le rôle des mathématiques dans la genèse whiteheadienne
Une Sœur de Saint-Jean, Un Principe que les religions appellent « Dieu »
Laura Ilinescu, Vérité et pouvoir dans le Léviathan de Thomas Hobbes
Marc Maesschalck, Raison et événement chez Jean Ladrière
Pierre Montebello, Nietzsche, une philosophie de la nature
Michel Weber, Contact Made Vision: The Apocryphal Whitehead
III. Comptes rendus — Critical Reviews
Stéphan Galetic : James, Essais d’empirisme radical
Ronny Desmet : Lacoste Lareymondie, Une philosophie pour la physique quantique
IV. Informations réticulaires — Reticular News
Discussion: David Ray Griffin, A Reply to Alexander Cockburn
Notes : Peter H. Hare, On Gertrude Stein and Mathematical Logic
Interview : Carlo Sini, Luca Gaeta and Luca Vanzago, The Milano School
Tribute: Leemon McHenry, T.L.S. Sprigge, the Last Idealist
Séminaires — Seminars
Publications
Table des matières — Table of Contents
"

This thesis is an investigation into the legitimacy and limits of the term “body art” in its vernacular sense, wherein it refers to methods of decorating or ornamenting the body, such as tattooing or piercing. Though the term is widely used and widely understood, it has rarely appeared in any writing which takes an explicitly arthistorical or art‐critical approach, and has never been subjected to any sustained analysis which uses the methodologies deployed by specialists when engaging with other forms of art. If tattooing and its coincident technologies are “body art”, they have not as yet been understood as such by art historians.

The arguments made over the course of this work thus amount to a case for the applicability of art‐historical and art‐theoretical methodologies to body modification practice. The thesis first establishes the existence of a rhetorical yet broadly undefended case for the artistic status of practices which alter the form of the body. This claim is to be found amongst both the contemporary subcultural body modification community and amongst plastic surgeons. With particular reference to theories of art and aesthetics by John Dewey, Richard Shusterman, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the work investigates whether such claims are tenable. In light of these investigations, the thesis then presents a number of problems which immediately arise from such a claim – problems of authorship, ownership, objectivity and value – and attempts to resolve them through detailed analysis of a number of case‐studies.

(The full thesis can be downloaded from the British Library's EThos Service at https://ethos.bl.uk by searching "Lodder" or the thesis' persistent ID, 525734 - registration required)

This book uses sports as a metaphor for research methods. It focuses on how to use and build frameworks for empirical research. The frameworks are analogous to a "play", which is connected to a unique purpose and directs the movement of players during the game. Examples from award winning student research support the chapters that introduce 4 different conceptual frameworks. Before a player can enter the game, he or she should be in shape and understand the rules. Effective teams have systems in place that help their players achieve top physical abilities. Likewise, student scholars need systems in place to ensure they have the necessary skills and preparation to conceptualize and write a strong paper. To do this, it is helpful to bring project management skills to the task of writing a paper. A project management system organizing a scholar's time, materials and Ideas is presented. The book is written using John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce's philosophy of science and theory of inquiry.

This article discusses the role of practices and people's participation in practices in conceptual accounts of organizing, learning, and organizational learning. Specifically, the discussion takes its point of departure in Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's account of learning as legitimate peripheral participation in practices, and Theodore Schatzki's practice theory account of organizing and organizations. Both accounts center on the role of practices as people come to know, and as changes occur in social activity and organizational settings. However, the two accounts are based on different ontologies. Borrowing the terminology of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, Lave and Wenger instantiate a substantivist, and ultimately individualist, ontology, whereas Schatzki's event ontology is relational. It is argued that both ontologies have merits of their own, but the article seeks to integrate the two approaches by utilizing Ole Dreier's notion of the life trajectories of persons across social practices. In this perspective, organizational learning shows when people's life trajectories are affected by the bundles of social practices they engage with, and when the bundles of social practices are transformed by the way people enact the practices.

The limited aim here is to explain what John Dewey might say about the formulation of the grue example. Nelson Goodman’s problem of distinguishing good and bad inductive inferences is an important one, but the grue example misconstrues this complex problem for certain technical reasons, due to ambiguities that contemporary logical theory has not yet come to terms with. Goodman’s problem is a problem for the theory of induction and thus for logical theory in general. Behind the whole discussion of these issues over the last several decades is a certain view of logic hammered out by Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and many others. Goodman’s nominalism hinges in essential ways on a certain view of formal logic with an extensional quantification theory at its core. This raises many issues, but the one issue most germane here is the conception of predicates ensconced in this view of logic. The problem here is the implicit assumption that there is just one type of first-order predicate. P...

The task of schools, universities and educational institutions should be to support people in their growth by helping them to develop their potential and providing them with a wide range of skills for a successful integration in the society. This objective must be constantly adapted to the new challenges created by the ever-changing social and cultural scenario. Today, more than ever, we live in a complex society where everything evolves promptly, making previously indispensable knowledge and skills rapidly obsolete. The system of education must be transformed profoundly in order to pursue a vision of education that goes beyond the predominant utilitarian and economic one, to integrate the multiple dimensions of human existence and to promote the harmonious development of the person in relationship to the world. The Recommendations of the Council of the European Union of May 22, 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning make it clear that, in order to ensure resilience and the ability to adjust to change, the skills that are now required are entrepreneurial, social and civic skills. It should be noted that the competences mentioned by the Council of the European Union are meta-competences and personal skills. How can the educational system create the conditions for the development of the human being, his resilience and skills? Are there already educational approaches that can foster an integral growth? A pedagogical approach that places the development of the human being in all his dimensions at the center of its structure, valuing the empowerment of the subject who actively contributes to the construction of himself and the community in which he lives, can be identified in Service-Learning. In practical terms, it is a learning/teaching approach that combines Service (solidarity service to the community, citizenship) with Learning (the acquisition of professional, methodological, social and didactic skills) in order to help students develop knowledge and skills through a solidarity service offered to the community. Service-Learning, which has been developing around the world since the end of the 1960s, has its roots in the civic concern of the North American pedagogist John Dewey and in the South American educator and philosopher Paulo Freire's concept of transforming the world through reflection and action. Both are today the two main points of reference for the most pragmatic and critical currents of this pedagogical proposal, although they have never explicitly theorized it. The two scholars understood the "educational process as a bearer of action and reflection", insisting on the fact that theory and practice must complement each other as they both "build their philosophies around concepts related to experience, growth, communication, mediation and problem solving. Today, the Service-Learning approach has become a worldwide pedagogical movement, taking on its own characteristics in different cultural contexts.

Il ripensamento della società contemporanea passa attraverso un nuovo umanesimo in cui “facendo arte” insieme gli individui si riconoscono come comunità sulla base di principi e valori condivisi. Mettendo a fuoco un concetto di arte inteso come esperienza (J. Dewey) e come cura, in linea con le teorie dell’Everyday Aesthetics e con la teoria dell’“artification” dell’etologa Ellen Dissanayake, il lavoro si propone di tracciare alcune linee interpretative che, a partire dalle criticità emerse con l’emergenza sanitaria del coronavirus, valorizzino l’arte come strategia per fare comunità.

Resumo: Este artigo é uma breve apresentação de "O desenvolvimento do pragmatismo americano", de John Dewey, cuja tradução é publicada neste presente número de COGNITIO-ESTUDOS. Trata-se de mostrar como Dewey interpreta a história do pragmatismo como corrente filosófica nascida nos EUA, com as idéias de Peirce sobre o método científico e a significação conceitual, passando pela reinterpretação das idéias de Peirce feita por James, que transformou o pragmatismo numa teoria da ação e da verdade. Dewey afirma se filiar a essa corrente numa linha de continuidade, embora não sem algumas diferenças, ao defender que seu instrumentalismo é uma conseqüência da ampliação do pragmatismo operada por James. Palavras-chave: John Dewey. Charles S. Peirce. William James. Pragmatismo. Crença. Instrumentalismo.

Dewey's conception of scienti c explanation, which has been neglected by both philosophers of science and philosophers of education, facilitates overcoming the seeming divide between teaching a highly technical and specialized subject matter and encouraging students to successfully engage in the experience of being philosopher-scientists.

Bertrand Russell was one of the great public intellectuals of the 20th century.  During WWI he turned from logic and analysis to working for peace and a better future for all humanity.  His humanism and public writings deserve serious study.  (The peace symbol comes from the anti-nuclear-war group he led later.)  Here I contrast him with other intellectuals of the period such as Dewey and Santayana, and relate him to Julien Benda and Romain Rolland.

Who has the authority to assign responsibility for international crimes? There is a simple answer: international tribunals, in particular the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet this obvious response obscures further questions regarding where the political authority to create international tribunals comes from, as well as the vital moral question regarding how courts are constituted as actors with the capacity to assign blame. In modern international politics authority has traditionally rested with states, meaning that rightful legal institutions were created and justified by the consent of states. The ICC is granted authority in this way, as it was created through a treaty negotiated and signed by states. Such a procedural response, however, obscures as much as it reveals about the politics and morality of assigning responsibility for international crimes. Asking how a new international authority is constituted and justified as an actor with the political power to try state officials and other international criminals, and to embody and defend supposedly emergent norms of global justice, is a more contentious and difficult question that takes us beyond questions of positive law.

Is it possible to take the domain of the political too seriously? I claim that there are two ways in which it is: (i) To overestimate the relationship between humanity's purpose or end and the concept of the political, and (ii) to ignore those feasibility constraints on methods and institutions and place too much confidence in democratic means for resolving problems in the domain of the political. The first I call the ends objection and the second the means objection. Although this framework might appear oversimplified, it maps well on to the ideas of two thinkers who, it can be argued, also take the domain of the political too seriously: (i) Carl Schmitt, who in The Concept of the Political argued that awareness of a relationship between friends and enemies provides insight into the contestational nature of politics and (ii) John Dewey, who in " The Future of Liberalism " claimed that being a genuine liberal means eschewing the absolutism of John Locke and the laissez-faire attitude of libertarians, embarking instead on a process of collective experimentation he terms "thoroughgoing liberalism." An antidote to Schmitt and Dewey's all too serious treatments of the political, I suggest, is to explore the comedic side of Benjamin Franklin's political writings. While some of his letters, essays and fictitious newspaper articles indicate something akin to Schmitt's friends-enemies distinction and Dewey's experimentalist attitude, one in particular, " An Edict to the King of Prussia, " reveals how satire can invoke a less serious sense of the political. Whether the political is conceived as essentially contestational or experimental, Franklin's satirical approach proves more effective than Schmitt or Dewey's more serious approach to the political—or so I argue.

Los Angeles super-teacher Rafe Esquith has been held up as a model for excellent teaching, winning Disney's National Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award and Parents Magazine's As You Grow Award. Not content with the progress of his inner-city students, and working on the premise that "there are no shortcuts" (the title of the book he wrote about his teaching), he asked them to be at school at 6:30 rather than the regular 8:00 am, and not leave before 6:00 pm, rather the regular 3:00 o'clock. In addition, he organized and supervised students coming in on Saturdays during the school year and also in the summers, when he taught them enrichment and remedial classes. He also took them on camping trips, tours of the mid-west, and trips to Washington DC-raising his own money for the required airfare, textbooks, and musical instruments. Often he worked extra jobs on weekends and nights to raise the cash himself. In short, he is held up as an exemplary teacher precisely because teaching totally engulfed his entire life, including his time for sleeping. Extreme self-sacrifice, it would appear, is what constitutes exemplary teaching in the social imaginary-forfeiting oneself for one's student's success (Rothstein, 2004, p. 81).

The catalyst for much of classical pragmatist political thought was the great waves of migration to the United States in the early twentieth century. José-Antonio Orosco examines the work of several pragmatist social thinkers, including John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams, regarding the challenges large-scale immigration brings to American democracy. Orosco argues that the ideas of the classical pragmatists can help us understand the ways in which immigrants might strengthen the cultural foundations of the United States in order to achieve a more deliberative and participatory democracy. Like earlier pragmatists, Orosco begins with a critique of the melting pot in favor of finding new ways to imagine the civic role of our immigrant population. He concludes that by applying the insights of American pragmatism, we can find guidance through controversial contemporary issues such as undocumented immigration, multicultural education, and racialized conceptions of citizenship.

The article proposes a diachronic reconstruction and philological analysis of Gramsci’s reflections on logic and methodology, with particular attention to section IV of Notebook 11. The Author maintains that the same answer found by Gramsci to the question of the logical instruments of thought – a solution based on the idea of “instrumental value” – enables him to “translate” in historicist terms the features of individual philosophy (systematicity, continuity of development, universality) and to clarify the tasks of the individual philosopher considered as a “specialized intellectual”. It is also argued that this historicist “translation” of individual philosophy (or “philosophers’ philosophy”) does not entail its simple and direct reduction to politics but, rather, the explanation of its peculiar “politicalness” and the redefinition of its “relative autonomy”. The Author concludes with some comments on the theoretical and material links between Notebooks 10 and 11.

What are the hopes and ideals for democracy in a time of division and partisanship? This article explores John Dewey's famous address, "Creative Democracy--The Task Before Us" as a repository of materials for theorizing a new approach to democracy in a polarized state. Focusing on the quality and variety of connections--actual, mediated, or possible--connective democracy denotes a new approach to thinking about what we want out of democracy, and what has gone wrong in many of today's fractured states.


<https://mediaethicsmagazine.com/index.php/browse-back-issues/216-spring-2021-vol-32-no-2/3999348-connective-democracy-the-task-before-us>

Der Pragmatismus zählt als eines der bedeutsamsten Theorieparadigmen der Philosophie des einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts sowie als eine der wirkkräftigsten Perspektiven der gegenwärtigen philosophischen Forschung. Das Proseminar bietet eine Einführung in den Begriff des Pragmatismus an mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Rolle in der Werkentwicklung John Deweys. Das Werk Deweys spannt nicht weniger als sieben Jahrzehnte um und befasst sich mit allen klassischen Teildisziplinen des Philosophierens sowie mit der Pädagogik und der Psychologie; eher als durch eigenständigen Systembau entwickelt es sich durch eine stetige kritische Auseinandersetzung mit vergangenen und zeitgenössischen Denkweisen. Daher darf es auch nicht überraschend sein, dass die Haltung Deweys selbst zum Pragmatismus im stetigen Wandel begriffen war und vielleicht auch unentschieden blieb. Im Seminar wird der Versuch unternommen, die pragmatistische „Mentalität“ (James) als Reaktion auf bestimmte philosophische, wissenschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Probleme zu begreifen.

In this paper I intend to examine the theoretical contribution of James’s and Dewey’s pragmatist instances to the problem of emotion. I suppose that with their starting point of holistic base and the consequent attempt to transcend the classical dichotomies of body and mind, fact and value of both authors manage to understand the intrinsically aesthetic and anthropological bond of emotion as a distinctive qualitative constitution of experience – even though they explore it through different angles. They view it as a horizon of sense, full of emotional moods. From this standpoint, emotion is not investigated on intrapsychic and intraphysic level, but starting from the sensory media - in with which, and with which, it comes into being and takes shape, in an attempt to determinate not the meaning of emotion as such, but rather the significance of emotion.

This article attempts to present the unity as well as the difference between Hegel's and Dewey's social philosophical approaches to struggles for recognition. It argues that interpreting Dewey's Lectures in China as a commentary on Hegel sheds new light on Dewey's social philosophy as a recognition theoretical whole. Furthermore, the resulting "experimentalist" account of recognitive relations, norms and values might turn out to present a fruitful perspective in contemporary discussions on recognition.

Depuis plusieurs années, les sciences sociales dressent le portrait de victimes engagées, dans les arènes de la médecine, des sciences ou de la justice. La littérature nous conte des histoires de victimes qui réclament des comptes. Instruites par une « expérience de l'injustice » (Renault, 2004), elles auraient ainsi le pouvoir de se mobiliser. On va ici nuancer ce tableau, en nous souciant de la façon dont les épreuves de l'accident ou de la maladie du travail peuvent porter atteinte à la capacité des personnes à en avoir une « expérience », instructive et mobilisatrice. Ces épreuves ne conduisent pas toujours à remettre en cause des conditions de travail ou à demander la réparation de torts. L'attention à de telles dynamiques relativise l'embrayage sur une économie juridique de la réparation, qui mobiliserait une indignation trouvant dans le droit les moyens de se transformer en action publique.

2017
This essay extends an open philosophy with a philosophy of music education on soil. An open philosophy emerges from analysis of Kafka's parable " Before the Law. " I explore what " the law " might be, what it could mean for how people relate to " the law, " and how critiquing " the law " allows music teachers and learners to challenge the institutionalization of musical values. Extended with a metaphor of soil, music educators recognize " the law " is unsustainable and deserving skepticism. Institutions require continual skepticism. Through skepticism, ways of being and musicking together emerge.

"Instrumentality of Moods: Pragmatism and Useful Uselessness of Art." – In this essay the author deals with the problem of “useful uselessness” of art as the background for identifying the nature of pragmatist philosophy of art. First, he introduces an isolationist approach according to which art is distinct or even separate from the rest of life. In the second part he turns to contextualist theories which maintain the integrality of art and life. Although pragmatist aesthetics seems to be thoroughly contextualist from the point of view of this distinction, the author argues that it should be conceived as mediating between the two. Finally, in the third part, he draws on John Dewey’s understanding of “qualitative” nature of thought to localize on this ground the proper pragmatist conception of purpose of art consisting in “creating moods”.

Workshop notes for the workshop, "Re-reading J. Dewey and J. Tufts’s Ethics," Umass Boston,
October 20-21, 2016; Organizers: Roberto Frega (IMM-CNRS) & Steven Levine (Boston UMB)

Outline:
• Aims. General remarks about Chapter aims
• Contents. Brief review of Chapter contents, questions interspersed
• Review and Questions. Brief review of chapter point and my questions
Aims. General remarks about Chapter aims

In the previous Chapter 13 (Approbation, the Standard, and Virtue), Dewey sought to show how seemingly “basic” moral notions were not singular or univocal guides but complex, relative to all the various dimensions influencing lived situations (cultural, historical, and personal, e.g.). In Chapter 14, we see Dewey investigating “reflective morality” in order to (a) dispel the idea that moral reflection (or inquiry) is categorically different from other kinds of reflection, and (b) to offer some details about it, especially focusing on ways in which moral reflection can be emotional and cognitive, and immediate (intuitive) and mediate (developed). He discusses the process of “dramatic rehearsal” as a way of combining various aspects of moral reflection into a technique indispensable for moral problem-solving.  The chapter’s larger point is that moral knowledge is not a content but a kind of attitude which seeks meaning. While many contingencies can affect us, possibility of alert seeking of meaning exists in everyone. There is no gap between supposedly “moral” and “non-moral” content. “Moral knowledge" cannot be restricted to a special realm because changing circumstances constantly bear on the common and individual good in novel ways.

The following work is focused on a discussion about the contributions of John Dewey to mathematics education. It is based on the articulation of Dewey’s ideas in different mathematics books/textbooks, between the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century. The purpose is to characterize the referred books and the differences among them, and to identify how Dewey’s ideas – in special the notion of experience – are mobilized. More specifically, the present study is part of a doctoral research project that investigates the appropriations of John Dewey’s and Edward Thorndike’s ideas in the mathematics education field in Brazil between the 1930s and the 1960s. The discussion held in the present paper is based on the work of such authors as Roger Chartier and Michel de Certeau, regarding the social places of texts production, and concepts as appropriation and strategy. Some of the sources adopted were Dewey’s books, such as The Psychology of Number (McLellan & Dewey, 1895); the series of arithmetic books written by James A. McLellan and Albert F. Ames, published between the 1890s and the 1900s; and the series of Georgia Alexander, published in the 1920s (both series had the involvement of Dewey). Based on this study it is possible to highlight the changes in mathematics teaching approaches in the analysed books as it relates to the changes in Dewey’s own ideas. It is also possible to chart the evolution of Dewey’s thinking from the general concepts conveyed in The Psychology of Number to a more focused attention on examples of daily life and references to cultural aspects regarding American context or other countries in Georgia Alexander’s series.