What Dewey Knew. The Public as Problem, Practice, and Art
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6187833 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura Bieger (Social Change and Development, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Issue | 15-1 |
| Publication date | 2020-04-29 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/ejas.15646 |
| OpenAlex | W3014910704 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 14 |
This essay takes the present “post truth” threat to democratic politics as an occasion to revisit John Dewey’s view of the public as a political actor that is both indispensible for the project of modern democracy and vulnerable to self-effacement. Drawing on a recent development in democratic theory—epistemic democracy—that is in part inspired by Dewey, I trace how Dewey’s relativist understanding of truth animates his views of the public as a political actor and of democracy as a “collective exercise in practical intelligence” (Festenstein). But in linking the epistemic thrust of Dewey’s political theory with his view of communication as art, I move beyond established understandings of epistemic democracy to argue that the aesthetic is assigned with a key role in collectively exercising the practical intelligence that both sustains democracy and moves it forward—and that epistemic democrats have overlooked so far
Aesthetics · Democracy · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Relativism · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Rhetoric and Communication Studies
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |