Presenting on Dewey at Public Philosophy 2015

My paper, “First and Second-Order Public Problems In the Philosophy of John Dewey,” has been accepted to the Advancing Public Philosophy Conference, to be held June 11-13, 2015 at the University of San Francisco.  I attended the conference for the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (PACT) at USF in 2013 and had a great time; I’m looking forward to returning.

The abstract of the paper is below the fold:

When we reflect on the practice of public philosophy, talk about publically engaged philosophy, or evaluate the success of such engagement, what is our reference point? In other words, when the “public” is the subject of investigation or the location of an intervention, how does it get defined and delineated? American Pragmatism in general, and John Dewey in particular, are paradigmatic examples of public philosophy. From Dewey’s engagement with various social issues to his theorization of public democratic spaces themselves, he illustrated how rich publically engaged philosophical practice could be. In this paper I take up Dewey’s conception of publics in The Public and Its Problems, offering a critical re-articulation of the term that is able to address issues at the heart of contemporary social and political philosophy: domination and oppression, the fact of pluralism, and the importance of difference.

I argue that we should draw a distinction between second-order public problems and the more fundamental first-order public problem (singular) of the public: the very constitution of the public is itself a public problem. That is, the construction of the public from within is itself the underlying condition for the possibility for all other problems to be articulated and then solved by that public, and so when second-order public problems are discussed and subsequently solved, they carry implicitly within their articulation an answer to the question, “who constitutes the public who is able to participate in public problem solving?”

The ability to participate in the construction of public problems is the gateway to a publicly shared life that is the bedrock of equal standing within democratic communities, and individuals exist equally within democratic community by participating in the construction and reconstruction of the meaning and identity of that community. In other words, the boundaries of the community—who belongs and can therefore meaningfully participate, who does not, and how this line is drawn—are what is at stake within democratic community. Furthermore, they must always be at least potentially at stake for the community to remain democratic and leave open the possibility of participation to all: “full” participation is always out of reach, because the boundaries of a community and its participants are in principle never fixed beyond redefinition.

I argue that popular resistance on the part of an oppressed population affects a re-definition of the meaning of the entire community through the enactment of its claims of belonging. Acts of resistance offer a new way of conceiving of the makeup of the public, offering an answer to the question of who gets to participate in solving public problems on the Deweyan model. This is an important point to emphasize because when we ask pointed and concrete questions about such significant public concerns as climate change, healthcare, and welfare, among myriad others, we must be sure to do so as democratically as we can. One way to do that is to be aware of who and what exactly we pick out when we refer to the “public.”