Paul Kurtz is founder and chair emeritus of the Center for Inquiry and founder of a number of other organizations. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, chairman of the Committee for the Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and Prometheus Books. He is the author or editor of almost fifty books, including his new title Exuberant Skepticism. Throughout the last four decades, Kurtz has been a leading defender of science and reason against the prevailing cults of irrationality in our society, and has been interviewed widely in the media on a wide range of subjects, including alternative medicine and communication with the dead, to the historicity of Jesus and parapsychology.
In this, the third of three special-edition epsiodes featuring D.J. Grothe, Paul Kurtz discusses American philosopher John Dewey, and explains how his views undergird much of what the Center for Inquiry stands for. He talks about the American school of philosophy called pragmatism, and its central value of testing ideas by their consequences. He explains how active inquiry, even into controversial claims, is key for the educated mind, and why learning how to think is more important than being instructed what to think. He explores Dewey's humanism, and how nature and science should be servants of the human good. He talks about Dewey's optimism and his faith in democracy, in the common person, and in social progress. He explores how for Dewey moral values are objective, but are not absolute, static and unchanging, but that they should be modified in the light of new evidence and situations. And he explains the real value of inquiry and how it may enrich people's lives.