ABSTRACT
As indicated, Dewey's reconstructions are philosophical undertakings, in important respects analogues to a more general experimentalist method. Often he begins with detailed statements of intellectual background out of which are drawn ideas and principles to be applied to new problems. These principles, it is important to emphasize, are themselves always in process. Dewey writes, "No span of connection in space-time is too wide or too long provided ... [generalizations] are relevant to judgments of issues that are urgently here-and-now" (Dewey 1946, 1989, 163). Indeed, what distinguishes philosophy, it seems, is the scope of ideas from the past for the present that portend the future. This method is one form of what are many possible ways to do Dewey's philosophy today. One other, from the Tradition in philosophy, is a straightforward explication in which time nor problem appears to matter and Dewey's own meaning is taken as interpreted. While standard, one has to be careful with this approach, given that even the most common terms change meaning over time and given, moreover, that Dewey often used words in unique ways. At the least, care comes in placing his ideas within their own semantic context and from detailed substantiation. In addition, one more method takes its lead from critic Harold Bloom's idea of misreading (see Bloom 1975). Here a writer purposely "reads" a predecessor in a non-standard way that contributes to a new stance. Both are employed subsequently.
