Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
We pride ourselves upon being realistic, desiring a hardheaded
cognizance of facts, and devoted to mastering the means of life. We
pride ourselves upon a practical idealism, a lively and easily moved
faith in possibilities as yet unrealized, in willingness to make
sacrifice for their realization. Idealism easily becomes a sanction of
waste and carefulness, and realism a sanction of legal formalism in
behalf of things as they are--the rights of the possessor. We thus tend
to combine a loose and ineffective optimism with assent to the doctrine
of take who take can: a deification of power. All peoples at all times
have been narrowly realistic in practice and have then employed
idealization to cover up in sentiment and theory their brutalities. But
never, perhaps, has the tendency been so dangerous and so tempting as
with ourselves. Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future
which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent
the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a
faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently
large task for our philosophy.
REFORMATION OF LOGIC
ADDISON W. MOORE
I
In a general survey of the development of logical theory one is struck
by the similarity, not to say identity, of the indictments which
reformers, since the days of Aristotle, have brought against it. The
most fundamental of these charges are: first, that the theory of logic
has left it formal and with little significance for the advancement of
science and the conduct of society; second, that it has great difficulty
in avoiding the predicament of logical operations that are merely
labored reproductions of non-logical activities and therefore
tautologous and trifling, or of logical operations that are so far
removed from immediate, non-logical experience that they are irrelevant;
third, that logical theory has had trouble in finding room in its own
household for both truth and error; each crowds out the other.
The identity of these indictments regardless of the general
philosophical faith, empiricism, or rationalism, realism, or idealism to
which the reformer or the logic to be reformed has belonged, suggests
that whatever the differences in the doctrines of these various
philosophic traditions, they possess a common ground from which these
common difficulties spring.
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