ABSTRACT
At this point, it should be clear that Dewey sees philosophy as intelligence put to the service of the needs and hopes of ordinary people. Yet, to avoid stumbling at the first hurdle, this chapter confronts head-on a key related worry, namely, the depth of Dewey’s commitment to addressing problems from his own context risks rendering what he said contextually parochial and thus useless for our present purposes. Why should we take account of what he said when his purported aim was to address his contemporaries and their problems, not us and ours? Why should we think that what he had to say about his time is relevant to ours at all? This chapter thus draws parallels between his time and ours to show that his and our existential ground share common problems. In other words, this chapter justifies heeding Dewey’s conception of democracy as a potentially rich and relevant approach to thinking about politics in the early 21st century.
