This is a slightly ordered collection of passages from The Good of Activity, Part Four, Section One, of John Dewey’s book Human Nature and Conduct. It was a revelation for me. I’d never seen such a sustained and evocative description of the kind of non-cumulative, retrospective meliorism that I am…

I'd open up your paperback analogy a bit. Not only paperbacks fell into a standardized format/template during the heyday of the "web of print". So did newspapers, catalogs, magazines, etc. A small percentage of these types of print publications broke the "template" prevailing at the time, but they remained niche…

Though it’s not original with me, I’ve long embraced the melioristic principle of “try to make things suck less” (even before I knew what meliorism was). My more polite label for “suck less” meliorism is “retrospective meliorism”. (If anyone knows a more “official” label for the concept, please let…

[This essay is in response to this blog post by Phil Oliver: A clean well-lighted corridor.] Thanks for a beautiful poem about Hotel Pragmatism. It was incredibly thought provoking for me. It prompted me to reread sections of James’s essays that I haven’t looked at in decades. Such rereading has…

[This essay is a response to this blog post: Our 19th century.] Rorty discusses his claim that “Dewey is the better exponent of a properly pragmatist philosophy of religion”, in more detail in his essay “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance”, in the book “Philosophy and Social Hope”: So far…

Upon further reflection, I now see a way to resolve the tension in a fruitful way. The tension is not between two duties. It is between the concept of moral duty and the concept of moral worth. Given this distinction, one can consistently distinguish between one's "highest moral duty" and…

I’ve got a few reasons for believing in eternity. But the ultimate reason, as with all belief, is primarily an aesthetic one. I feel that describing reality as eternal is more meaningful and fruitful for me. Some people have an aesthetic preference for a description of reality that is finite…

This essay was inspired by the following Twitter exchange: