The Essential John Dewey: 20+ Books in One Edition. Джон Дьюи
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without dealing profoundly with any special problem, familiarized themselves with the generalizations of workers in special fields and combined these ideas for the entertainment of the public. They were neither philosophers nor physicists, but, like some men whom we might cite from our own times, endeavored to popularize the teachings of both. Naturally they seized upon the most sweeping generalizations and the preconceptions which disclosed themselves in manifold forms. Just as naturally they had no eyes with which to detect the significance of the besetting problems at which, in matters more concrete, the masters were toiling. Hence the contradictions, revealed in the analysis we have just given of the philosophy of the age, stood out in utter nakedness.
The result was inevitable. The inability to discover a unitary predicate, more still, the failure to attain a working copula, led directly to the denial of the possibility of predication. There was no truth. Granted that it existed, it could not be known. Even if known, it could not be communicated. In these incisive words of Gorgias the conclusion of the ineffectual effort to establish a logic of science is clearly stated. But the statement is happily only the half-truth, which is almost a complete falsehood. It takes no account of the indications, everywhere present, of a needed reconstruction. Least of all does it catch the meaning of such a demand.
The Sophists did not, however, merely repeat in abstract from the teachings of the philosophers. It matters not whether they originated the movement or not; at all events they were pioneers in the field of moral philosophy. Here it was that they chiefly drew the inferences from the distinction between φύσει and νόμῳ. Nothing could have been more effective in disengaging the firmly rooted moral pre-possessions and rendering them amenable to philosophy. Just here, at last, we catch a hint of the significance of the logical process. In a striking passage in Plato's Protagoras,106 which one is fain to regard as an essentially true reproduction of a discourse by that great man, Justice and Reverence are accorded true validity. On inquiring to what characteristic this honorable distinction is due, we find that it does not reside in themselves; it is due to the assumption that a state must exist.
Here, then, in a word, is the upshot of the logical movement. Logical predicates are essentially hypothetical, deriving their validity from the interest that moves men to affirm them. When they lose this hypothetical character, as terms within a volitional system, and set up as entities at large, they cease to function and forfeit their right to exist.
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