Title:
“The Greatest (Philosophical) Story Ever Told”
Abstract:
John Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925) is one of the greatest and most profound philosophical manifestos of all time. Why? Because he provides the most exemplary model of how philosophy and the sciences can work together collaboratively to provide an empirically responsible conception of nature and our human place within it. The result is a naturalistic, non-reductive, and pluralistic view of mind, meaning, thought, knowledge, and values that are compatible with our present state of evolutionary development as well as with our individual development over the course of our lives. Dewey gives us a this-worldly account of how fallible, finite human creatures experience meaning, inquire intelligently into our problematic lives, remake our experience for the better, and find realistic values for the conduct of our lives.
Bio:
Mark Johnson is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Emeritus, in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research has focused on the philosophical implications of the role of human embodiment in meaning, conceptualization, reasoning, values, and knowing, especially from the perspective of embodied cognition theory and pragmatist philosophy. His recent work develops a naturalistic account of mind and knowing. He is best known as co-author, with George Lakoff, of Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), plus nine other books exploring the bodily depths of meaning and imagination.
