Dewey's Ethical Thought / / Jennifer Welchman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Welchman, Jennifer,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.)

In the first book on the development ofJohn Dewey's ethical thought, Jennifer Welchman revises the prevalent interpretation of his ethics. Her clear and engaging account traces the history of Dewey's distinctive moral philosophy from its roots in idealism during the 1890s through the pragmatist approach of his 1922 work, Human Nature and Conduct. Central to the development of Dewey's ethics was his lifelong conviction that the realms of science and morals, facts and values were reconcilable. This conviction, Welchman demonstrates, drove Dewey to reject the orthodox ethics of his day in favor of radical alternatives—first absolute idealism and later pragmatism. She reveals how Dewey came to adopt and subsequently to modify idealist ethics of self-realization. Welchman then explores the transformations in Dewey's conception of science that exploded the fragile truce between fact and value that he had negotiated as an idealist. Finally, she examines how Dewey developed his own instrumentalist accounts of moral value, conduct, and character that culminated in his best-known work of ethics, Human Nature and Conduct.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part I Idealism: 1884-1894 -- Chapter 1 Origins of Dew Idealism -- Chapter 2 Dewey's Early Idealism -- Chapter 3 Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, 1891 -- Chapter 4 Dewey's Reexamination of Self-realization Ethics, 1891-1894 -- Part II Pragmatism: 1894-1908 -- Chapter 5 Years of Transition, 1894-1903 -- Chapter 6 Pragmatic Ethical Science: The 1908 Ethics -- Chapter 7 Toward a Pragmatic Communitarianism -- Bibliography -- Index