Essays in Experimental Logic: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Essays in Experimental Logic, credited to John Dewey, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Essays in Experimental Logic by John Dewey. Read in English by LibriVox Volunteers. In this early collection of formative essays, acclaimed American philosopher John Dewey argues that the idealistic, realistic, and analytic schools of philosophy fail to take into account the pragmatic and experimental nature of experience - common to science and practical experience, but alien to the abstract theorizing of coherentist and correspondence theories of logic. Here we find the essential groundwork for the mature naturalistic and process-oriented metaphysics that Dewey would elaborate in his later mature works such as Experience and Nature and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. In his long introduction, Dewey provides a summary and precis of his experimental logic, taking specifically pains to contrast his approach with the emerging analytic logic of Russell and Frege. Chapters 3-6 take aim at the idealistic logic dominant in his time by providing a close reading and critique of the German logician Hermann Lotze. Chapters 7-8 argue for the distinction between acquaintance with an external reality and knowledge of that reality. Rather than disembodied and abstract, Dewey describes a logic arising out of the concrete interactions of organisms embedded within a natural environment. Dewey's logic of experience is essential to an understanding of his various projects, from education, to art, politics, pragmatism, and science. (Summary by P. J. Taylor)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Essays in Experimental Logic
• Author credits: John Dewey
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 21
• Listed recording duration: 11:26:29

Catalogue topics

• logic
• empiricism
• John Dewey
• pragmatism
• american philosophy

Track guide

1. 00 - Prefatory Note — 1:49
2. 01 - I. Introduction (§ I - IV) — 50:18
3. 02 - I. Introduction (§ V-VII) — 58:50
4. 03 - II. The Relationship of Thought and Its Subject Matter — 36:39
5. 04 - III. The Antecedents and Stimuli of Thinking — 47:26
6. 05 - IV. Data and Meaning — 26:17
7. 06 - V. The Objects of Thought — 35:05
8. 07 - VI. Some Stages of Logical Thought — 54:10
9. 08 - VII. The Logical Character of Ideas — 12:04
10. 09 - VIII. The Control of Ideas by Facts — 33:44
11. 10 - IX. Naive Realism Vs. Presentative Realism — 22:35
12. 11 - X. Epistemological Realism: The Alleged Ubiquity of the Knowledge Relation — 29:20
13. 12 - XI. The Existence of the World as a Logical Problem — 30:10
14. 13 - XII. What Pragmatism Means by Practical — 43:34
15. 14 - XIII. An Added Note as to the 'Practical' — 9:04
16. 15 - XIV. The Logic of Judgements of Practice - Their Nature — 27:20
17. 16 - XIV. The Logic of Judgements of Practice - Judgments of Value I and II — 43:22
18. 17 - XIV. The Logic of Judgements of Practice - Judgments of Value III, IV, V — 36:45
19. 18 - XIV. The Logic of Judgements of Practice - Sense Perception as Knowledge — 35:23
20. 19 - XIV. The Logic of Judgements of Practice - Science as a Practical Art — 41:09
21. 20 - XIV. The Logic of Judgements of Practice - Theory and Practice — 11:25

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