Abstract

At the heart of John Dewey's philosophy lays a romantic impulse—a vision in which the moral imagination plays a crucial role in our efforts to become who we hope to be as we engage a perilous world. 1 My view of romanticism is much like that of Richard Rorty's: that romanticism itself is "the thesis of the priority of imagination over reason—the claim that reason can only follow paths that the imagination has broken." 2 Of course, Dewey acknowledged the importance of the imagination. In Democracy and Education, for example, he wrote that "imagination is as much a normal and integral part of human activity as is muscular movement." 3 We see its role in his 1932 Ethics as the ..