John Dewey's “Turkish Tragedy”

摘要

In the summer of 1924, American philosopher and education theorist John Dewey travelled to Turkey to advise the Turkish government on the development of a new, secular education system. Dewey later wrote five articles for the New Republic on political and educational affairs in Turkey; one of them, “The Turkish Tragedy,” alluded to the deportations and massacres of the Armenians in 1915–1916 and insinuated that alleged Armenian treachery and atrocities had provoked them. This article explains how and why this influential intellectual compromised his own high epistemic standards and morally mitigated Turkish responsibility for the Armenian Genocide.