[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 4/26/2025]
Thanksgiving morning moves along: a breakfast of too much oatmeal, me scribbling away in our unit's 2d floor quiet room, morning/holiday count in the near future, tried reaching Ryan on the phone only to get voicemail. I think this is my penultimate Thanksgiving here, and hoping for it being my last. WXPN plays Joan Armatrading right now, making it a very good morning.
...It is of assistance to connect philosophy with thinking in its distinction from knowledge. Knowledge, grounded knowledge, is science; it represents objects which have been settled, ordered, disposed of rationally. Thinking, on the other hand, is prospective in reference. It is occasioned by an unsettlement and it aims at overcoming a disturbance. Philosophy is thinking what the known demands of us—what responsive attitude it exacts. It is an idea of what is possible, not a record of accomplished fact. Hence it is hypothetical, like all thinking. It presents an assignment of something to be done—something to be tried. Its value lies not in furnishing solutions (which can be achieved only in action) but in defining difficulties and suggesting methods for dealing with them. Philosophy might almost be described as thinking which has become conscious of itself—which has generalized its place, function, and value in experience.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916; The Free Press/MacMillan Company, 1966); Chapter Twenty-four: Philosophy of Education, p. 326
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...The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature is to maintain the continuity of knowing with an activity which purposely modifies the environment. It holds that knowledge in its strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellectual resources—of all the habits that render our action intelligent. Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and to adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge. Knowledge is not just something which we are now conscious of, but consists of the dispositions we consciously use in understanding what now happens. Knowledge as an act is bringing some of our dispositions to consciousness with a view to straightening out a perplexity, by conceiving the connection between ourselves and the world in which we live.
Chapter Twenty-five: Theories of Knowledge, p. 344
sch
[4/26/2025: I have no way of remembering the Armatrading song that played, but I will leave you with my favorite song of hers; heard first on WXRT back in the mid-Eighties.
sch]
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