ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by framing many of the past and current issues within and among cities – problems like poverty and homelessness, gentrification and access to safe housing, water rights, and food pathways – as wicked (high stakes, interconnected, systemic, and intractable issues that resist ideal resolution). It next documents how pragmatists John Dewey (1859–1952) and Jane Addams (1860–1935) engaged wicked dimensions of the city in their time and place, harnessing from their own philosophic engagement a series of lessons, strategies, and tools likely to be of value to philosophers interested in engaging issues within the city today. The chapter concludes by briefly highlighting modern-day examples of pragmatic public engagement and a number of lingering questions in need of further consideration. The intent, then, is to provide a vision around which philosophic engagement on wicked urban challenges can be built. Explicating Dewey’s and Addams’s philosophic engagement with issues of city life – and linking it to modern-day public philosophers – demonstrates the need for such an approach while also yielding a number of strategies and tools for philosophers otherwise often either unaware or unprepared for such work.
For instance, Addams – as a public philosopher, social activist, and deliberative facilitator – deeply understood the interconnectedness of urban challenges, collaborating across differences in order to address the high stakes, public problems facing Chicago, the nation, and the world. Her life’s work embodied boundary-spanning engagement that was both markedly local and yet profoundly global in its perspective and its reach. According to some historians, she did more in her time to reform unjust and ineffective policies than almost any other. In addition, her narratives about her work at Hull House provide a plethora of nuanced examples and illustrations useful for engaging struggles from within and among our cities today. Dewey leveraged lessons learned from Addams’s public work, explicating the merits of philosophic engagement on shared problems. He highlighted the need for context-dependent experimentalism (a willingness to learn by doing), pluralism (a call to value and seek out diverse perspectives), fallibilism (a recognition that we are at best at least partially wrong), and meliorism (a commitment to iterative progress and acknowledgement of the constant possibility of regress). He ultimately called on philosophers to see their critical and creative capacity as liaisons. By carefully explicating why many institutions fail to adapt to the city’s needs, cope with change, and collaborate with the public, he also offered a vision for how philosophers should use their expertise to address these challenges.
Their pragmatist approach – a philosophic method focused on addressing real problems through experimental, iterative, and public engagement – has served and can serve as a catalyst for philosophic action that emerges from and responds to the needs of one’s time and place. A number of current philosophers have taken similar approaches to engaging urban issues (often working outside of higher education in order to leverage philosophy’s creative capacity toward addressing the city’s collective challenges). Briefly outlining the work of such field philosophers uncovers a number of potential avenues for philosophic engagement on the intractable challenges of the city today.
In the end, this analysis aspires to provide an initial frame for the what, why, when, where, and how of pragmatic philosophic engagement on issues of city life upon which the reader can build. By defining many of the city’s collective problems through a wicked problems framework, the chapter sketches out the “what,” “why,” and “when” of public philosophic engagement; by explicating philosophical responses to these challenges, it uncovers a critical public space – the “where” – and a range of philosophical work – the “how” – desperately needed for crossing the divides that separate us. It also demonstrates the possibilities inherent in such an approach, possibilities for generating the capacity, and the care needed to more justly address our shared wicked problems.
