The Legacy of <i>A Common Faith</i> in the Thought of Philip H. Phenix
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The following article traces the legacy of John Dewey’s A Common Faith (1934) and Dewey’s concept of “the religious” in the thought of Philip H. Phenix, a prominent philosopher of education during the 1950s and 1960s. Phenix frequently cited A Common Faith and echoed Dewey’s commitments to naturalism, creativity, and ethical commitment, all of which he associated with transcendent sources of meaning. In this respect, Phenix’s position was almost identical to Victor Kestenbaum’s subsequent interpretation of Dewey in The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal (2002). Unlike Kestenbaum, however, Phenix found no trace of transcendence in A Common Faith and repeatedly criticized Dewey on the point. This article ascribes Phenix’s attachment to the transcendent and his interpretation of A Common Faith to contemporary changes in science and religion, particularly the intellectual influence of theoretical physics and existentialist theology, with implications for our understanding of religious and educational thought at midcentury.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".