Abstract
The essay investigates the role attributed by John Dewey to science and democratic public education in the work Sozialphilosophie. Vorlesungen in China 1919/20 [Social Philosophy, Lectures in China 2019/2020]. It focuses on the interpretation of the fifteenth lecture, aiming to understand the way in which the author associates science and education, attributing to them a transforming critical force in favor of associated democratic styles of life and, consequently, contrasting them with the authoritarian conservatism legitimized by the traditional belief system. The essay is structured in three parts. In the first part, it deals with the inherent limit of tradition; in the second, it reconstructs the tripartite nucleus of the authority of science; finally, in the third part, it indicates some limits of Dewey’s thought and, simultaneously, its possible contemporaneity.
SCIENCE; BELIEF; PUBLIC EDUCATION; DEMOCRACY