Camden Philosophical Society: “The Relationship Between Language & the World

The June 16th session will, as usual, be a hybrid gathering from 3:30-5:30 pm eastern on the third Tuesday of the month. All are welcome to participate, in-person at the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library or by Zoom. That goes for visitors, as well as year-rounders in Maine, and friends of the society wherever you may be.

If you wish to join via Zoom, please email sewright772@gmail.com. You will receive a Zoom invitation on the day of the meeting. Click on the “Join Zoom Meeting” link in that invitation at the time of the event.

On June 16th Greg Fahy will present John Dewey’s views about experience and how our human ability for language impacts our relation to the world. Greg provides this overview:

“I will give some background on Dewey’s life.  Suffice it to say here that Dewey was arguably the most influential American philosopher in the first half of the 20th century and had influence on the discipline of education as well as social and political philosophy.  In the past, the Camden Philosophical Society has read sections of his work The Public and its Problems addressing the challenges of forming democratic social institutions.  Dewey is in the pragmatist school of American philosophy and aligns well with philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.  

In this reading, we look at Dewey’s account of experience, which is resolutely anti-dualist, and distinguishable clearly from the British Empiricist account of experience. And if we are going to begin philosophy in experience, Dewey thinks it is important to have an account of experience that does not separate us from nature.  He thinks that our everyday language tends to presume separation, which results in all sorts of philosophical conundrums that can be avoided if we only began with a more accurate and non-dualist account of experience.  In particular, I think Dewey’s account of experience can respond in meaningful ways to the discussions of alienation and absurdism that we have had recently. ” 

This month’s reading will be the revised chapter on p. 31-73 from the second edition of John Dewey’s Experience And Nature, which can be found here: