ABSTRACT
Sidney Hook was a leading American social philosopher. He taught philosophy at New York University from 1927 to 1972. Hook has variously described his Weltanschauung as experimentalism, or experimental naturalism, or pragmatic naturalism. More recently, however, he called it simply pragmatism, or as "the philosophy of pragmatism in the tradition of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey". Hook consistently and insistently teaches the moral necessity to think for oneself, to act knowingly, to give to challenges that people face a total intellectual, moral, and spiritual response. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Hook believes that man's freedom is an absolute one. Man's relative freedom does not move in a vacuum. Hook regretted that he had a poor Jewish education in a traditional heder, and he regretted, too, that he did not provide a proper Jewish education for his children, and that his grandchildren lack a Jewish consciousness.
