Even though he only attended the first semester of Dewey's Psychological Ethics series (Philosophy 231), Ambedkar heard enough to see the con- tours of Dewey's later, and more naturalistic, psychology. We shall explore in future chapters how Dewey's earlier, and more Hegelian, psychology still exerted force on Ambedkar's arguments and positions, but here I provide the contours of what Ambedkar heard about psychology at Columbia in the classroom. How can we reconstruct or access what was possibly ut- tered in that classroom over a century ago? For Philosophy 231, the fall or winter semester of Dewey's Psychological Ethics course, I have identified a range of archival documents that give us a better idea of what Ambedkar heard from Dewey. Some of these documents come from years adjacent to the period when Ambedkar was enrolled in Philosophy 231; for instance, an incomplete typed page from 1912 (References) seems to list the read- ings that Dewey assigned to his students in the Psychological Ethics course (then listed under the course numbers 121-122).20 One sees Dewey as- signing works by William James on psychology, George Elliot Howard on social psychology, and Gabriel Tarde on imitation; Dewey's own students from his Michigan days are also present, with books from Charles Horton Cooley and Charles A. Ellwood showcasing the range of possible Hege- lian rereadings of sociology. Dewey even recommends his own work with James H. Tufts, the 1908 Ethics, which we shall see Ambedkar leaning heav- ily on in future chapters. It is safe to infer that many, if not all, of these same books were recommended to Ambedkar's class with Dewey in 1914. As is obvious from his respect for work from directly before and after the Ambedkar and Dewey at Columbia University.
turn of the century evident in his later syllabi, Dewey did not abandon older works that he saw as possessing reconstructive value.
Beyond the 1912 References document, other archival resources became apparent as ways to get more insight into Ambedkar's semester with Dewey. Some give us a likely idea of what Ambedkar was taught by Dewey. For in- stance, a forty-three-page syllabus bearing the titles "Columbia University" and "Psychological Ethics" appears to be the sort of précis of a course that Dewey was said to distribute to his students in advance of the semester's specific sessions as early as his teaching days in Michigan. It does not list a date, but it has typed references to Dewey's 1916 book, Democracy and Edu- cation, and a handwritten note about Bertrand Russell's January 1917 book, Why Men Fight, the American edition of Russell's 1916 book (discussed in the next chapter), the focus of one of Ambedkar's early experiments in publication. Using the Columbia course bulletins and what we know of Dewey's travels, we can infer that this amended document, perhaps best called the 1917 Syllabus, was most likely from the 1917-18 iteration of Philosophy 231-232.22 Aligned with this useful document is an undated, but likely constantly reused, document that Dewey handed out to his stu- dents, titled "Notes on Psychological Ethics: Historical. "23 This seventeen- page Background Handout provides the context for Dewey's exploration of psychology and ethics in his course, surveying a range of important philo- sophical figures from the ancient world that lay behind Dewey's modern problematics: Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics. Such a condensed and generic background handout was surely used in multiple versions of Philosophy 231-232, and it would have been particularly valuable to a young Ambedkar wanting and needing to know more about the tradition of philosophy in the West.
More direct access to Ambedkar's specific semester can be gained from lecture notes from Dewey and his students that I have located. Dewey's own lecture notes, prepared in advance of his classroom ruminations, clearly hail from Ambedkar's course. They are labeled, both in his own hand- writing and then later with his typewriter, as "Fall 1914" and "1914-1915 Psy of Ethics (231-232). "24 Individual lectures bear the dates on which Dewey gave them, allowing us to determine which fell after Ambedkar's 231 fall session concluded and what lectures (and topics) he missed when he replaced Dewey's Philosophy 232 course in the spring with Vladimir Simkhovitch's Economics 242 course on radicalism and social reform.25 Complementing the instructor's notes (what we can label Lecture Notes) are notes taken by students or stenographers during the 1914-15 academic year.
