Tag: Scott Pratt

A Deweyan Approach to Virtual Education

Presenter: Bennett Brown − Philosophy; Planning, Public Policy and Management; Political Science

Faculty Mentor(s): Scott Pratt

(In-Person) Poster Presentation

20th-century American philosopher John Dewey contributed extensively to the fields of political theory and education, advocating for a ‘Great Community’ of individuals to grow from the Great Society of institutional power. My study into Dewey’s thought seeks to explain the possibility of his envisioned Great Community in our age of virtual communication; a possibility that doesn’t conflict with his experiential learn-by-doing philosophy of education. The study is informed by critical analysis of Dewey’s published works alongside responses to secondary literature on the topic of his philosophy of education in virtual environments. Arguments in support of this thesis will include a foundational analysis of Dewey’s philosophy of mind and the presentation of a virtual scholastic framework that aligns with his organic educational aims. The study seeks to follow a potential thread of interaction and continuity from Dewey’s 20th century ideas to today, shedding light on different ways of thinking and opportunities within remote learning that don’t conform to the traditional institutional models of education. In other words, to show the virtues of virtual education.

Peirce’s phenomenological grounding of Science and Matters therein

Presenter(s): Timothy Schatz—Philosophy, Math

Faculty Mentor(s): Scott Pratt, Erin McKenna

Session 1: It’s a Science Thing

Any survey of C .S . Peirce’s philosophy will reveal a vast but shattered continent . Hence, any reader who ventures beyond a single text will have to ask themselves how they are to regard the relation of these texts . I am aligned with the unitary interpretation, espoused by the late Dr . Joseph M . Ransdell, and so affirm the Peircean system as essentially phenomenological . The divisions of science, or systems of science, maintains three divisions: mathematics, philosophy, and special science . Phenomenology finds its home in philosophy, and it is here where knowing first encounters being . As such, following Peirce’s underlying gestures towards positive philosophy, post-Kantian empiricism, realism, and christen mysticism, phenomenology naturally arises as ground and loci of his philosophy, insofar as it places the subject in a living world . In the first division of this work, the general system of phenomenological reflection reveals a form of knowing which is inherently human in which beings are known as a world and not disparate things . This reflection is threefold in which reflection folds back onto itself to reveal the triadic structure of Being . Thus the second division shall take up the triadic structure, the categories, in phenomenological detail qua their expression in being . Lastly, this paper culminates in the general architecture of phenomenology, which serves as the ground for Peirce’s Weltanschauung, that is, his conception of the cosmos .