Historicism and naturalism in Dewey: the reconstruction of philosophy

• Autor(a) principal: Do Nascimento, Edna Magalhães
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Cognitio (São Paulo. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitiofilosofia/article/view/61844

This article analyzes John Dewey’s (1859-1952) philosophical project, which consists of a radical critique of traditional epistemology based on the pragmatistconception of experience. The scientific status of philosophy, according to Dewey, will not require a scientific theory that can be tested, but a metaphysical program built from situational logics. The present article presents the historical and scientific dimensions of Dewey’s empirical metaphysics, arguing in favor of the articulation between the two approaches that configure the project of reconstruction of philosophy. Dewey understands that the search for ultimate foundations has made philosophy prisoner of an image of the mind as a builder of representations - some exact, others not, but all with the intention of being studied through pure, non-empirical methods. Unlike this tradition that assumes an idea of the intellectual superiority of knowledge, revealed through non-empirical methods, Dewey argues in favor of the empirical in philosophy and stands against a common conception of reality as safe, regular, and finished. Keywords: Experience. Nature. Empirical metaphysics. Philosophical Reconstruction. Keywords: Experience. Nature. Empirical metaphysics. Philosophical reconstruction.