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A familiar way of thinking about ‘methodologies’ that we associate with rational, systematic philosophies are the formal principles or theoretical procedures of inquiry employed in a particular field or discipline. For example, in philosophy, we might speak of Socratic dialectics or Cartesian rational skepticism as methodologies, and of analytic, logical, and phenomenological methodologies among many others. The term ‘methodology’ itself suggests the familiar theory and practice dichotomy by formalizing the method and making the principles of explanation prior to their application.
In looking for a starting point in formulating my own method (rather than methodology) for doing comparative philosophy, I appeal to John Dewey’s postulate of ‘immediate empiricism’ (the notion that our immediate experience is our reality) and the primacy he gives to practice. As a philosophical method, Dewey’s radical empiricism requires that since all human problems arise within the ‘hadness’ of immediate experience as it is had by specific persons in the world, the resolution to these problems must be sought through theorizing this same experience in our best efforts to make its outcomes more productive and intelligent. ‘Hadness’ for Dewey is not some claim to ‘pure’ or ‘primordial’ experience, but simply what experience is as it is had by those persons experiencing it. In formulating this method, Dewey begins by asserting that
Immediate empiricism postulates that things – anything, everything, in the ordinary or non-technical use of the term ‘thing’ – are what they are experienced as. […] If you wish to find out what subjective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic, psychic, cause, substance, purpose, activity, evil, being, quality – any philosophic term, in short – means, go to experience and see what the thing is experienced as. (Dewey, 1977, Vol. 3, pp. 158, 165)
As Dewey's alternative to starting from abstract philosophical concepts and theories, he is arguing that all such terms of art must be understood as the ‘thats’ of specifically experienced meanings. Dewey's method provides us with a way of ascertaining what the language we use actually means, and precludes the dualisms that usually follow in the wake of deploying abstract and thus decontextualizing terms such as reality, rationality, objectivity, justice, and indeed, methodology itself.
Corollary to Dewey’s immediate empiricism is recognition of...