“the Quest For Certainty” And Its Meaning Of Pedagogy

John Dewey critisized the antique philosophy by the theme of ‘the quest for certainty’ and he constructed his own philosophy advocates. He thought that knowledge and action(theory and practice) were binary-oppositioned under the antique metaphisics. People’s quest for certainty is an escape to the quest for abstract, absolute and fixed reality while people ignore the safety in real life which is really important. Dewey’s reconstructing philosophy aimed at digesting this abstract, absolute, fixed certainty and digesting philosophy of dualism and making philosophy to serve the specific problem’s solving and achieving one kind of security rather than certainty. This important purport is reflected in the new concept of experience.In the book of ‘The Quest for Certainty’, Dewey specially described the meaning of one kind of experience as experimental exploration. It seems in Dewey, the significance of exploring experience is that it reveals the interaction between experience and nature, it reveals the different nature between the two kinds of experience and it also reveals the selectivity emphasize principles of experience.However, Dewey’s critique of the antique philosophy and his experience philosophy are biased.Through the reading of Pierre Hadot’s deep study on the antique philosophy,we find that the essence of the antique philosophy is that it is one lifestyle and it aims at training people to the existence of transcendence. This transcendence has been confirmed by today’s scientific experiments. So, merging Dewey’s philosophy and the antique philosophy, for the purposes of today’s education, has main implications as that education is directed to making a thorough inquiry and education is directed to one lifestyle. In the former case, the implication mainly means that educational practice itself is a typical practice of inquiry and it should educate students to be inquisitive and to get exploring ability. In the latter case, it mainly means that education itself should be a model of lifestyle :it pursuits the authentic value; the relationship of it pratices this authentic value; it also directs stuednts to make choices of lifestyle.