Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

Truth and method

In Art as Experience, Dewey brings together the deep and enduring connection between art and human experience. Art is understood not as a commodity or solitary object but as an intensely meaningful...

Art as experience

The Metaphysical Club

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is one of the most influential works of legal and political theory published since the Second World War. It provides a memorably well-constructed and sustained argument in favour of a new (social contract) version of the meaning of social justice. In setting out this argument, Rawls aims to construct a viable, systematic doctrine designed to ensure that the process of maximizing good is both conscious and coherent – and the result is a work that foregrounds the critical thinking skill of reasoning. Rawls's focus falls equally on discussions of the failings of existing systems – not least among them Marxism and Utilitarianism – and on explanation of his own new theory of justice. By illustrating how he arrived at his conclusions, and by clearly explaining and justifying his own liberal, pluralist values, Rawls is able to produce a well structured argument that is fully focused on the need to persuade. 
Rawls explicitly explains his goals. He discusses other ways of conceptualizing a just society and deals with counter-arguments by explaining his objections to them. Then, carefully and methodically, he defines a number of concepts and tools—“thought experiments”—that help the reader to follow his reasoning and test his ideas. Rawls’s hypothesis is that his ideas about justice can be universally applied: they can be accepted as rational in any society at any time.

An Analysis of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice

Though the idea of “social pathologies” or “diseases” of a whole society has been quite common since Rousseau`s Second Discourse and especially prominent within the tradition of critical theory, it is not really clear who precisely is proposed to have fallen ill here in the first place. Is it only some sufficient number of individual persons, is it the collective understood as a macro-subject, or is it the “society” itself as having been encroached upon by a particular disorganization of its social institutions in their functional efficiency to such an extent that one can confidently speak of a distinctively social “disease”? For all three alternative attributions—i.e., the sporadic individuals with the total amount of their illnesses, the collective with its own particular clinical syndrome, and the society itself as fallen ill—sufficient instances can be found in the corresponding literature. In order to find a way out of these conceptual perplexities lying at the very heart of this way of talking, I deal with the theoretical proposals by Alexander Mitscherlich and Sigmund Freud, who both defend a specific concept of “social pathologies” or “diseases” based on psychoanalytical insights. The result of my critical reconstruction will be that only an understanding of the society as an organic entity allows a nonreductive use of the idea of “social pathologies”.

The Diseases of Society: Approaching a Nearly Impossible Concept

This article starts with the idea that the task of social philosophy can be defined as the diagnosis and therapy of social pathologies. It discusses four conceptions of social pathology. The first ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1368431018769593

Four conceptions of social pathology

Abstract 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.

Ein Drama in drei Akten: Der Kampf um öffentliche Anerkennung nach Dewey und Hegel

In this article, I inquire into the “naturalistic” aspect of John Dewey’s China lectures on social philosophy and ask what his naturalism about social philosophy is In the lectures and the notes, Dewey describes the subject-matter and the method of social philosophy in naturalistic terms: the object of social philosophy is conceived as “associated life” and its method is likened to the “art of medicine,” as the social philosopher is understood to be advancing “diagnoses” and “cures” for “social pathologies” I next revisit Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics in the hope of finding a clue for how to conceive of Dewey’s naturalistic conception of the social Finally, I indicate how Dewey’s naturalism informs the very significance of the critical social philosophy advocated in the Lectures  His naturalistic social philosophy establishes an evaluative approach to social reality, which is not reducible to the normativity of moral or political justification, but is based immanently on the authority of “associated life” itself

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.53.1.07

Degeneration of Associated Life: Dewey's Naturalism about Social Criticism

There are two traditions of immanent social critique. One of them, prominent in contemporary Frankfurt school critical theory, regards the immanence of critique as a quality of the standard employed. Such a conception of immanent critique needs to show, prior to the concrete practice of critique, how the standard is immanent in the object of critique. Showing this is the task of a “model of immanent critique.” The other tradition, going back to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and practiced in particular by Dewey in his later works, regards the immanence of critique as the form of critical practice itself. Because such a conception of immanent critique does not, at the outset, ask how the standard is immanent to its object, it also does not need a model licensing critical practice. Indeed, it must be inherently hostile to any attempt at modeling immanent critique because the immanence lies in the power of critical practice to transform any models it applies.

Arvi Särkelä

Papers

The Diseases of Society: Approaching a Nearly Impossible Concept

Four conceptions of social pathology

Ein Drama in drei Akten: Der Kampf um öffentliche Anerkennung nach Dewey und Hegel

Degeneration of Associated Life: Dewey's Naturalism about Social Criticism

Immanent Critique as Self-Transformative Practice: Hegel, Dewey, and Contemporary Critical Theory