John Dewey and the 'sceptical and revolutionary' Humean tradition.

John Dewey's philosophy, as Richard Rorty observed, is historicist to the core. From the 1910s onwards, Dewey emphasised the need for a 'reconstruction' in philosophy, which could extract what was most valuable from the Western philosophical tradition and employ it in the attempt to grapple with the most pressing contemporary problems. In his autobiographical reflections, Dewey acknowledged that his early enthusiasm for Hegel's philosophy had left a 'permanent deposit in his thinking', a claim that has recently received considerable scholarly attention. Yet Dewey's intellectual development is marked by an increasing disenchantment with fundamental aspects of Hegelian philosophy, which he considered to be infected with a 'reactionary spirit'. In his mature writings, this essay argues, Dewey turned to a pre-Hegelian (and pre-Kantian) philosopher, David Hume, in order to establish the most important philosophical principles that he initially associated with Hegel on non-metaphysical, non-theological foundations. Hume, on Dewey's reading, was both sceptical and revolutionary; but his call for the transfer of the experimental method to moral subjects had not been heeded. Dewey's philosophical project both explained why, historically, a 'reactionary spirit' had returned to infect post-Humean philosophy, and why the revolution in philosophy for which Hume called was now more urgent than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]