• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.217-247
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• 2012

This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.107-130
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• 2005

The aims of this study are to identify Dewey's theory on mathematics education and to clarify its influence on the modern theories of mathematics education. For this purpose, we have examined Dewey's theory of knowledge named as pragmatism or instrumentalism, and studied the Dewey's theory of education in which he maintained education is the reconstruction of experiences. And then, we have examined Dewey's theory on mathematics education, such as theory of mathematics, purpose of mathematics education, contents of mathematics education, and methods of mathematics education respectively. After that, we have analyzed how his theory on mathematics education is connected with the diverse theories of modern mathematics education, such as Piaget's operational constructivism, Freudenthal's theory of realistic mathematics education, Polya's theory on mathematical problem-solving, and social constructivism. Through this study, we might say that Dewey's theory on mathematics education is a prototype of modern theories of mathematics education and a comprehensive paradigm which is very suggestive to the phenomena of mathematics education.