Something out of the Ordinary

It happens that I lived for the first seven years of my life in a house placed three or four miles from the site of this hotel, in a neighborhood intermittently still recognizable from my childhood images of Atlanta. I realized, in choosing the material to present in response to the honor of delivering this year's presidential address to our division of the American Philosophical Association, that I was fantasizing it as representing some fragment of a map by which to figure how that distance and direction into the city and to this room can have been traveled. I want such a map, since I keep discovering that I have to go back to collect belongings that others may not have come to care for as I have. A conjunction of quotations, from texts that were I think among the earliest I recognized as belonging to some body of work called philosophy, may give an idea of what it is I want to talk about today, in important part to reminisce about. The first is from John Dewey's Construction and Criticism, dating from 1929: