The Center for Dewey Studies was temporarily closed from 2017-2022. At the time of its closing in 2017, former Co-Director Thomas Alexander wrote a retrospective of the Center that described more of the history, including a description of the work of the Center that took place after Boydston's account. Work on Dewey continued at SIU during this period, and many researchers (visiting and virtually) made use of SIU's resources through the Special Collections Research Center.
2022 brought the hiring of Matthew J. Brown as Director of the Center for Dewey Studies and Jo Ann and Donald N. Boydston Chair of American Philosophy, and the gradual reopening of the Center…
The official and full reopening, a christening if you will, happens with a conference in Carbondale October 12-14: “John Dewey and his legacy for education.”
I’m on the program, scheduled to lead off something called a Flash Talk. I don’t know if I’ll make it though, five minutes is barely time to clear your throat and hardly seems worth three nights at the school locals call “Southern”… enticing though it is to consider the cheap housing alternative of a campus dormitory. I’m familiar with SIU’s dorms, Older Daughter was a Resident Advisor in one a few years ago. There’s a nice lake path just out the back door. I kinda miss visiting there.
I was initially motivated to submit a proposal because this time of peril for American democracy desperately needs the reaffirmation of Deweyan democratic commitment, and because I wanted to be sure at least one participant would bring William James into the conversation. We academics tend to gravitate inertially to our respective bubbles. If we expect philosophy to speak to our cultural moment and its circumstances we must burst those bubbles and together speak to what Dewey called not the problems of philosophers but those of humans. (Yes, he said “the problems of men” but we know what he meant.)
Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be the device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes the method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.
So, should I stay or should I go? If I go, I’ll just have time to say something like this:
A Real Education
ABSTRACT. A real education is what Henry Adams should have got, if he was paying attention, from William James’s late-life “magnificent outburst” on behalf of the human spirit and against reductively, fashionably unwise popular science pessimism… truly a reflection of WJ’s own “incandescent spirit,” as his biographer Robert Richardson has written.
Richardson was referencing WJ’s “magnificent outburst” in response to Henry Adams’s depressed and superficial reflections on the significance for history of the 2d law of thermodynamics. Irrelevant, said WJ. Then, Richardson applauds,
“What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!” –William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson
It really was one of WJ’s finer, nobler moments.
My current projects, this one included, revolve around questions about the real meaning of education, and what sort of knowledge matters most. WJ remains one of the most reliable guides I've found, in exploring such questions.
And John Dewey is right there with him, nobly extolling true democracy’s commitment to universal education as reflected in what “the best and wisest parent” should wish for all children, insisting that education is no mere preliminary but is “life itself,” affirming the humane and sympathetic ends of real education, inviting us to understand and honor our place in the grand evolutionary epic of “the continuous human community,” imploring us to focus less on arcane scholarship and more on the actual problems of everyday people, and in so many other ways.
For my part in celebrating the Dewey Center's re-opening, I propose to explore JD's own distinctive "incandescence" and to suggest that, stylistic and other differences notwithstanding, he also shines a brilliant melioristic light repudiating the Henry Adams sort of bleak cosmic pessimism that, in different garb now – climate change, Artificial Intelligence, rampant dishonesty in public life – hangs so heavily over our historical moment.
Whether I make it up I-24 in October or not, I applaud the light John Dewey and his Center in southern Illinois continue to cast. Shine on, Deweyans. Carry on, continuous human community.