Books: Philosopher’s Philosopher

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY—John Dewey—Minton, Balch ($4.00). John Dewey, philosopher’s philosopher, educator’s educator, has played a role in U. S. life not small but not popular.* In his latest book Dr. Dewey returns to one of his favorite attacks on a stubborn position: the problem of getting philosophical knowledge into action. Academic as Dr. Dewey may appear to the layman, he has ever had little use for a fugitive and cloistered learning that never sallies out and seeks its adversary: Life. Experimental knowledge, says he, is the most authentic, the only kind actually worth much. “Knowledge which is merely a reduplication in ideas of what exists already in the world may afford us the satisfaction of a photograph, but that is all.” The vital office of philosophy today, says philosopher-educating Dewey, is “to search out . . . the obstructions” in life; to focus reflection upon needs congruous to present life; to interpret the conclusions of science with respect to their consequences for our beliefs about purposes and values in all phases of life.”

Dr. Dewey is a bridgebuilder. Seeing the gulf between savant and citizen, he works to span it, building out on one side by educating the plain man, on the other by rousing the pedant to action.

*The New Yorker, Manhattan smartchart, hazarded on the occasion of his 70th birthday last month, that “he might not have been discovered if he hadn’t looked like Groucho Marx.”