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The Person Vanishes argues that despite John Dewey's failure to
articulate "an adequate theory of personality", his writings
provide at least a theory-sketch of human personality consistent
with the assumptions that framed his philosophical outlook.
Recognizing the new developments in society, science, and the arts,
Dewey argues for the necessity of a Copernican revolution in our
understanding of the human self; from the monadic and minimalist
self of the Cartesian-Newtonian modernist tradition to a relational
and processual model of selfhood consonant with the press of
post-modernist historical experience. As a field and activity
conception, Dewey's self emerges as a nexus of relational
energizing, genuinely moored in a cultural surrounding in which
ongoing creative reconstruction becomes the mark and criterion of
the self's health and growth. What vanishes in Dewey's
reconstruction is not the self as such, but only the entitative,
substantive self of early modernism. Dewey's understanding of the
self is grounded in the conviction that philosophy must begin its
inquiry from the ordinary experience of plain men and women. The
Person Vanishes examines Dewey's participatory notion of
deliberation, what he calls "dramatic rehearsal", by using the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a case study. The analysis attempts
to cash out the personal and collective habits, as well as the
different modalities of ends, facts, and values that diagram the
existential dimensions of this problematic situation. Contrary to
traditional dualistic and spectatorial accounts of deliberation,
Dewey's "dramatic rehearsal" shows the complexity of
decision-making when the genuine limitations of daily life are
taken seriously. The attempt to march to Dewey's participatory
philosophy reveals the escapist nature of all dualistic
philosophical traditions and the reason for their continuous
failure to resolve concrete social and personal conflicts.
In this book Yoram Lubling and Eric Evans offer a Deweyan
reconstruction of our philosophical understanding of well-being.
They begin with Dewey's critique of the "philosophical fallacy" to
examine the legitimacy and value of theories of well-being offered
by traditional philosophy. However, such theories fail to provide
an authentic account of well-being due to a false understanding of
experience as either epistemic or cognitive. Next, using Dewey's
theory of experience, they reconstruct "happiness" as the target
for evaluation of well-being. This leads them to reject the
traditional view of a private encapsulated self, and to offer in
its place a transactionally situated self which is an embodied,
enculturated agent. Through their emphasis on the importance of the
qualitative aspects of Dewey's understanding of a situation, the
pervasive quality of the situation emerges as the most plausible
criterion for the evaluation of well-being. The authors use Dewey's
theories of inquiry, ethics, value and art to establish the
naturalistic conditions under which such pervasive quality enters
into a situation as either settled or unsettled, in other words, as
peace in motion. Consequently, a problematic situation becomes the
primary condition under which all inquiry initiates whether it is
in the context of science, ethics, values, art or ordinary living.
Lubling and Evans conclude that a Deweyan account of well-being
involves embodied knowing instead of the traditional view of
cognitive knowledge. By using such an account, it is possible to
explain the conditions and mechanisms under which well-being
contributes to the enlargement and enrichment of individual and
collective human experience.
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