John Dewey

Introduction

John Dewey is the American philosopher whose work across more than seventy years of continuous publication developed pragmatism into a comprehensive philosophy of inquiry, experience, education, art, ethics, and democracy. He is the most institutionally consequential American philosopher of the twentieth century: his work on education founded the progressive education movement and shaped twentieth-century pedagogy across the world; his work on democracy informed twentieth-century political theory and practice; his philosophy departments at Chicago and then Columbia trained generations of American philosophers, educators, and public intellectuals.

Dewey was also the most publicly engaged philosopher of his era. He wrote regularly for The New Republic, the Nation, and other public venues; he was active in labor, civil liberties, women's suffrage, and pacifist causes; he led the investigation into the Trotsky trials in Mexico City in 1937; he wrote on virtually every public issue of the first half of the twentieth century. The integration of academic philosophy with sustained public engagement is one of the things that makes Dewey distinctive in the philosophical tradition.

Life

John Dewey was born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of New England Congregationalist farmers and merchants. He took his BA at the University of Vermont in 1879, taught high school in Pennsylvania for several years, and entered the new graduate program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins in 1882, where he studied with Charles Sanders Peirce (in logic), G. Stanley Hall (in psychology), and George Sylvester Morris (in Hegelian philosophy). The Hopkins years shaped his intellectual development decisively: the contact with Peirce planted the pragmatic seeds that would germinate later; the Hegelian Idealism of Morris organized his early work; the encounter with empirical psychology informed everything he subsequently did.

Dewey took his PhD in 1884 with a dissertation on Kant's psychology and was appointed instructor at the University of Michigan that same year. The Michigan years (1884–94) saw his early work in the Hegelian Idealist framework that George Morris had introduced. The break with Idealism came gradually through the 1890s and was complete by the time Dewey moved to the University of Chicago in 1894.

The Chicago years (1894–1904) were Dewey's most institutionally productive. He chaired the combined department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy; he founded the Laboratory School in 1896 as a working test-bed for his educational theories; he gathered around himself the circle of pragmatist philosophers (George Herbert Mead, James Hayden Tufts, Addison Moore) who would constitute the Chicago School of philosophy. The shift from Hegelian Idealism to pragmatism crystallized in the 1903 collection Studies in Logical Theory, which William James reviewed enthusiastically and announced as the arrival of a Chicago School of pragmatism.

A conflict with the university administration over the Laboratory School led to Dewey's resignation in 1904 and his move to Columbia, where he taught until his nominal retirement in 1930 and remained active until his death in 1952. The Columbia years saw the production of the major systematic works: Democracy and Education (1916), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature (1925), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Art as Experience (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), and Freedom and Culture (1939). The post-retirement decades saw continued work, including the late Knowing and the Known (1949) coauthored with Arthur Bentley.

The public engagement was continuous. Dewey was a co-founder of the American Association of University Professors (1915), the American Civil Liberties Union (1920), and the New School for Social Research (1919). He led the international Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials in 1937, traveling to Mexico City at age 77 to chair the proceedings. He died in New York City in 1952 at age 92.

The problem he worked on

Dewey's intellectual project was the systematic reconstruction of philosophy along pragmatist lines. The traditional philosophical project, on Dewey's diagnosis, had been organized around dualisms — mind and body, fact and value, theory and practice, knower and known, individual and society — that misrepresented experience and produced insoluble pseudo-problems. The reconstruction was supposed to start over from experience as actually had, recognize that the dualisms are products of bad philosophical method rather than features of reality, and produce a philosophy continuous with the actual conduct of inquiry in science, ethics, art, and democratic life.

The organizing concept is experience — not the thin sense-data of empiricist epistemology but the rich, transactional, time-extended engagement between organism and environment that constitutes human living. Inquiry is one mode of experience; aesthetic engagement is another; moral and political life are others; education is the deliberate cultivation of the dispositions that make experience progressively richer. The reconstruction of philosophy on this basis is the project of Dewey's mature work.

Contributions

Inquiry and the theory of warranted assertibility

Dewey's most systematic theoretical work is on the nature of inquiry. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) develops a comprehensive account of inquiry as a structured process by which an organism in an indeterminate situation produces a determinate situation through the formation, testing, and revision of hypotheses. The account integrates the Peircean pragmatic maxim, the Jamesian emphasis on the texture of experience, and Dewey's own engagement with the actual practice of scientific inquiry.

The technical centerpiece is Dewey's replacement of the traditional concept of truth with warranted assertibility — the property of beliefs that have survived disciplined inquiry. Dewey treats the traditional truth-concept as fraught with the dualisms his reconstruction was supposed to dissolve; warranted assertibility provides a workable substitute that locates the property in the dynamic relation between belief, inquiry, and experience.

Education and the Laboratory School

Dewey's work on education is the institutionally most consequential portion of his philosophy. The School and Society (1899), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916), Experience and Education (1938) constitute the systematic statement of the pedagogical program. The central commitments: education is not the transmission of inert content but the cultivation of dispositions for inquiry, problem-solving, and democratic participation; learning happens through doing, through engaging in activities whose problems require the development of relevant skills and understanding; schools should be miniature democratic communities in which the practices of inquiry and shared decision-making are continuously enacted.

The Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (founded 1896) was the working experiment in which Dewey tested these ideas. The school's curriculum was organized around projects (gardening, cooking, weaving, woodworking, and other activities that integrated skills, knowledge, and social cooperation) rather than around separate academic subjects. The Lab School model influenced the progressive education movement across the United States and internationally; Dewey's books on education were translated into many languages and shaped twentieth-century pedagogy in ways the rival traditional approaches did not.

Democracy as a way of life

Dewey's most extensive single work is Democracy and Education (1916), but his thinking about democracy continued through The Public and Its Problems (1927), Individualism, Old and New (1929), Liberalism and Social Action (1935), and Freedom and Culture (1939). The central thesis: democracy is not a form of government but a way of life — the application of inquiry to shared problems, the cultivation of dispositions for cooperation and revision, the integration of individual development with social membership. Voting and elections are essential but not exhaustive; democracy requires a culture of inquiry-based cooperation that schools, workplaces, and other institutions must enact.

The framework has been continuously influential in twentieth-century political theory. Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country (1998) is recognizably Deweyan; Cornel West's work on democratic life is in the Deweyan lineage; the broader deliberative democracy tradition through Habermas and others is partly indebted to Dewey.

Naturalistic metaphysics

Experience and Nature (1925), his major systematic metaphysics, develops a naturalistic metaphysics that takes experience as the starting point and treats nature as the encompassing context within which experience occurs. The framework is anti-dualist (no separation between experience and nature) and anti-reductionist (experience is not reducible to mere physical events). It anticipates later work in process philosophy (Whitehead engaged Dewey extensively) and in contemporary naturalism.

Aesthetics

Art as Experience (1934) is Dewey's major work in aesthetics and one of the most-read works of twentieth-century aesthetics. The central thesis: aesthetic experience is not a special category of experience separate from ordinary life but the consummation of ordinary experience when it achieves its full integrative character. Art is not the privileged objects in museums but the perfecting of the kind of experience that occurs throughout life; the museum culture that separates art from life is a symptom of a damaged culture, not a recovery from it.

Key works

• The School and Society (1899)
• How We Think (1910)
• Democracy and Education (1916). The systematic statement of the educational philosophy.
• Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920)
• Human Nature and Conduct (1922)
• Experience and Nature (1925). The major systematic metaphysics.
• The Public and Its Problems (1927)
• The Quest for Certainty (1929). The Gifford Lectures on the historical and philosophical roots of dualism.
• Art as Experience (1934). The major aesthetics.
• Liberalism and Social Action (1935)
• Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938). The major systematic logic.
• Experience and Education (1938). The compressed restatement of the educational philosophy.
• Freedom and Culture (1939)
• Knowing and the Known (1949, with Arthur Bentley)

The standard collected edition is The Collected Works of John Dewey edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Southern Illinois, 37 volumes, 1969–1991), one of the most complete scholarly editions of any American philosopher.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Charles Sanders Peirce (his Johns Hopkins teacher, whose pragmatic maxim Dewey eventually appropriated); George Sylvester Morris (the Hegelian Idealist who shaped his early work and whose framework Dewey eventually moved beyond); William James (whose Principles of Psychology shaped Dewey's account of habit and experience); Hegel (whose dialectical analysis of experience and history shaped Dewey's early work and remained substrate of his mature thinking); Charles Darwin (the evolutionary framework that informs Dewey's naturalism); the experimental tradition in psychology (Wundt, Hall, Stanley Hall).

Influenced: the entire progressive education movement (William Heard Kilpatrick, the Lab School movement, the international diffusion of Dewey's ideas through translations and adaptations); George Herbert Mead (the social psychology of the self); the Chicago School of philosophy and sociology; Alfred North Whitehead (who engaged Dewey explicitly in process philosophy); Sidney Hook (Dewey's most prominent student and the major American Deweyan of the twentieth century); the broader American liberal tradition through Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann (though Lippmann disagreed), and others; the neo-pragmatist tradition through Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979; Achieving Our Country, 1998) and the contemporary engagement by Hilary Putnam, Cornel West, Cheryl Misak, and others; the broader contemporary literature on democratic theory, education, and the philosophy of art that engages Dewey continuously.

Reception

Dewey's reception during his lifetime was uniquely substantial. He was widely recognized as the leading American philosopher of his era from at least the 1910s onward; his books on education were international bestsellers; he was awarded honorary degrees from universities across the world and was the subject of the Schilpp volume in the Library of Living Philosophers (1939) while still active.

The mid-twentieth-century reception was complicated by the rise of analytic philosophy in American university departments. Dewey's prose, his integrative ambitions, and his sometimes-imprecise terminology were poorly fitted to the standards the analytic tradition was establishing; by the 1950s and 1960s, Dewey was often dismissed as a vague public moralist rather than engaged as a systematic philosopher. The Deweyan presence in education departments continued throughout this period, but academic philosophy turned away.

The recovery began in the 1970s and 1980s with the publication of the Collected Works and the work of Richard Bernstein, John Smith, and Sidney Hook. The neo-pragmatist movement of the 1980s and 1990s (Rorty, Putnam, Robert Brandom) brought Dewey back into mainstream philosophical conversation; the contemporary engagement is across philosophy, political theory, educational theory, and the philosophy of art.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Robert Westbrook's John Dewey and American Democracy (1991), Jay Martin's The Education of John Dewey (2002), Larry Hickman's John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (1990), Steven Fesmire's John Dewey and Moral Imagination (2003), and the recent monographs by Vincent Colapietro, Gregory Pappas, John Capps, and Steven Fesmire. The journal Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society covers Dewey alongside the other pragmatists; Education and Culture (the journal of the John Dewey Society) is dedicated to the educational work. Active scholarly debates concern the relationship between Dewey's metaphysics and contemporary naturalism, the contemporary applicability of his democratic theory in conditions of polarization and digital media, the pedagogical relevance of his educational framework in contemporary educational politics, and the relationship between Dewey and the contemporary neo-pragmatist developments.

Further reading

• Pragmatism — the tradition Dewey systematized
• Peirce — his Johns Hopkins teacher and the founding pragmatist
• William James — the pragmatist contemporary whose work Dewey extended
• Hegel — the philosophical predecessor whose dialectical framework remained substrate of Dewey's mature thinking
• Belief Systems — the broader concept Dewey's account of habit and inquiry helps articulate
• Coherence Without Certainty — the epistemic posture Dewey's warranted assertibility most closely articulates

The American philosopher who systematized pragmatism into a comprehensive philosophy of inquiry, experience, education, and democracy. The most institutionally consequential American philosopher of the twentieth century.