Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy, and Freedom

Description

"Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy, and Freedom collects twenty-five of Hook's most incisive essays in political philosophy, written throughout his lengthy career. Clustered into five main sections, the essays discuss pragmatism and naturalism, Marx and Marxism, democratic theory, democratic practice, and the defense of a free society."--BOOK JACKET.

First Sentence

Were the phrase not so encrusted with misleading associations, I should call my philosophy "dialectical materialism"; materialism, because its explanations make no appeal to entities or processes which are not empirically verifiable by scientific method or logically inferrible from experienced data; dialectical, because it holds (a) that there is an implied temporal reference in every description or generalization, (b) that the processes of discovery and interpretation-as distinct from the validity of their results-cannot be completely dissociated from the socio-historical culture of the age, and (c) that under certain conditions, human thinking, construed as meaningful selective behavior and not as a passive reflection or image of the external scene, plays a creative role in the world.

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