Practicing Freedom and Emancipating Practices:

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to show how Foucault’s critical engagement with the actual circumstances in which he was entangled, in effect,

carries forward Dewey’s own critical project. Dewey and the other pragmatists might have been awaiting (as Richard Rorty suggests) Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and other contemporary thinkers, but the latter can now assist the students of Peirce, James, Dewey, and other pragmatists in the efforts of these students to put pragmatism to work in our world. In particular, what Foucault enables us to do in this context is to read ewey, precisely as a pragmatist, better than we would be able to do without reference to Foucault’s archaeologies, genealogies, and problematizations. This becomes manifest if we focus on experience and thought. Thinking itself is, for Foucault no less than Dewey, experiential, whereas experience is not utterly devoid of thought. Accordingly, the experience of thinking and the thoughtful engagement with historical experience are linked to what Foucault calls "practices of freedom."