John Dewey, Alain Locke, and the social sciences, 1885–1935

Le récent ouvrage de Trevor Pearce, Pragmatism's Evolution : Organism and Environment in American Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2020) soutient que la dichotomie organisme-environnement, popularisée par Herbert Spencer et centrale pour la biologie et les sciences sociales à la fin du XIXe siècle, était également fondamentale pour les philosophes pragmatistes tels que William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams et W. E. B. Du Bois. Les théories pragmatistes sur la science, la morale et la réforme sociale étaient fondées sur une analyse spécifique de l'interaction organisme-environnement et leur approche est un héritage important pour ceux qui travaillent actuellement en philosophie et en sciences sociales.

Cet ouvrage publié en 2020 a reçu un excellent accueil international, notamment dans les revues Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, le European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, le Quarterly Review of Biology et de nombreux autres journaux. Les articles de T. Pearce sur la relation entre la philosophie américaine et les sciences ont été publiés dans le Journal of the History of Philosophy, le Journal of the History of Ideas et HOPOS, ainsi que dans des collections éditées par Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press et Vrin.

Les recherches actuelles du Dr. Pearce continuent à se concentrer sur le dialogue entre la philosophie américaine, la biologie et les sciences sociales, en mettant l'accent sur des philosophes longtemps négligés, comme Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Grace de Laguna, W. E. B. Du Bois et Alain Locke.

Conférences de Trevor Pearce (UNC Charlotte)

JOHN DEWEY, ALAIN LOCKE, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1885–1935

16 mai 2024, 16h-18h, Salle de séminaire du DEC, 29, rue d’ULM 75005 Paris
John Dewey, Evolutionary Anthropology, and Comparative Jurisprudence
It is by now well known that John Dewey's mature philosophy was in dialogue with the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas, his colleague at Columbia University. Thomas Fallace has shown that Dewey's work on education at the University of Chicago was indebted to the popular "culture-epoch theory," itself also inspired by early anthropology. In this paper I will go back even further, to Dewey's time at the University of Michigan, demonstrating that his early 1890s courses in political philosophy allowed him to develop the social-historical functionalism that provided the framework for his evolutionary account of ethics in the early 1900s. This functionalism was clearly inspired by the comparative jurisprudence of Henry Maine and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as well as by the evolutionary anthropology of Edward Burnett Tylor and Herbert Spencer.

23 mai 2024, 16h-18h, Salle de séminaire du DEC, 29, rue d’ULM 75005 Paris
What Was Social Heredity? W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and the Factors of Evolution
In this paper I will examine how W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke deployed the new concept of social heredity in their early-1900s discussions of the African American experience. First, I will discuss the origins of this concept, which was introduced in the 1890s by psychologist James Mark Baldwin in the context of debates over biological development and the causes of evolution. Next, I will discuss Du Bois’s pamphlet “Heredity and the Public Schools” (1904), a Washington D.C. lecture to teachers and principals in which he argued that the “scientific formulation” of life experience as social heredity “is going to revolutionize modern thought and modern conceptions of education.” Third, I will examine Locke’s use of this formulation in his work on “the theory and practice of race” at Howard University, where Locke’s colleague Kelly Miller had recently made social heredity part of the official sociology curriculum. I will conclude by arguing that the concept of social heredity allowed both Du Bois and Locke to frame their respective discussions of race progress in evolutionary terms, while at the same time downgrading the importance of strictly biological inheritance.

30 mai 2024, 16h-18h, Salle de séminaire du DEC, 29, rue d’ULM 75005 Paris
What Was Culture? Alain Locke, Georg Simmel, and Anthropology
Georg Simmel is usually remembered as a sociologist. But as Michelle Smith has shown, for Alain Locke, who took several classes with him at the University of Berlin in 1910–11, Simmel was first and foremost a philosopher of culture. I will argue in this paper that Locke was probably influenced by Simmel's essay "Female Culture," one of several collected in Philosophical Culture (1911). Simmel argued, combining idealist philosophy with gender stereotypes, that a properly female culture was impossible. But Locke, under the influence of first generation Boasian anthropologists such as Edward Sapir, ultimately inverted Simmel's arguments, making space for his own account of Afro-American culture as famously presented in The New Negro (1925).

6 juin 2024, 16h-18h, Salle de séminaire du DEC, 29, rue d’ULM 75005 Paris
Alain Locke's Critique of John Dewey's Pragmatist Value Theory
Alain Locke is often described today as a "critical pragmatist." But his only foray into professional philosophy, the 1935 essay "Values and Imperatives," was not only a development of his Harvard dissertation on general value theory; it was also a systematic critique of John Dewey's philosophy of value as presented in The Quest for Certainty (1929). In this paper, I begin by reviewing how Locke's teacher Ralph Barton Perry framed pragmatism as a philosophical approach. Next, I present Dewey's experimental-empiricist approach to the problem of value. Finally, I demonstrate that Locke's own approach in "Values and Imperatives" was directly opposed to Dewey's, which he linked to "positivism"—a fair connection given Dewey's recent embrace of operationalism and the myriad connections between pragmatism and logical empiricism in the 1930s. My analysis suggests that we take Locke at his word: he was "more of a humanist than a pragmatist."