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Summary:
The Progressive movement was a turn of the century political movement.
It began with a domestic agenda, with people being interested in establishing more transparent and accountable governments.
Many Progressives, like Roosevelt, saw zero conflict between imperialism and reform and instead saw an opportunity to further the agenda.
After the violence that the Philippine-American War caused, other reformers started vocalizing their opinions and thoughts about the imperialism and continued to increase intervention under Dollar Diplomacy policies.
Progressive movement also spilt over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.
Fortunately in the 1920's, the Progressive movement began to overturn and helped different movements come to light like ending women's suffrage, and pushing for further change for many other things.

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The Progressive Movement and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1890-1920s

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The Progressive Movement and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1890-1920s

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Summary:
In 1937, Dewey published his article "Education and Social Change"
His thoughts and ideas with the role of education had a tremendous influence on work of later educational philosophers. Dewey was convinced that the power of education could change society.
Young children are curious, flexible, and experimenting with their lives as they grow, and school should help them along that journey.
Dewey once used a metaphor of teachers trying to pour knowledge into "empty heads" of children because all we ever have them do is sit and listen to the information given to them.
Dewey also believed that there was a close relationship between experience and education, btu that they are not the same.
According to Deweyan theory, students learn from positive experiences by reflecting on them, and if teachers don't require focus-on-meaning from their students, they won't educate them but only train them.
Dewey pointed us in this direction long ago, and if schools and educational systems are serious about fixing the problems we've had and still have today, then they should move in the direction Dewey theorized and fought to implement all those years ago.

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Dewey's Thought on Education and Social Change on JSTOR

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This is a preview. Log in through your library. Dewey published his article "Education and Social Change" in 1937. His preoccupation with this issue is a constant theme in his works, which are infused with ideas about the role that education and, most specifically, our school system have in the transformation of society.

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Summary:
This is another article about John Dewey and his life as well as background.
John Dewey was one of American pragmatism's early founders, along with others.
His educational theories and experiments had a global outreach.
Dewey grew up in a religious family and he belonged to congregations for about thirty-five years and turned away around 1894 as he left for his job in Chicago and then returned to philosophical issues of religion in the 1930's.
Dewey's naturalism disallows a traditional God. He asks that we think not of a singular object but the qualities to which God is compared to goodness, wisdom, love and that he represents our highest ideals.
All of the beliefs he had about religion, and what he forced on others is why exhortation to trade religious faith for common faith is a piece of his experimental ideal of democracy.

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1. Biographical Sketch

John Dewey lead an active and multifarious life. He is the subject of numerous biographies and an enormous literature interpreting and evaluating his extraordinary body of work: forty books and approximately seven hundred articles in over one hundred and forty journals.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859 to Archibald Dewey, a merchant, and Lucina Rich Dewey. Dewey was the third of four sons; the first, Dewey's namesake, died in infancy. He grew up in Burlington, was raised in the Congregationalist Church, and attended public schools. After studying Latin and Greek in high school, Dewey entered the University of Vermont at fifteen and graduated in 1879 at nineteen. After college, Dewey taught high school for two years in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Subsequent time spent in Vermont studying philosophy with former professor H.A.P. Torrey, along with the encouragement of the editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, W.T. Harris, helped Dewey decide to attend graduate school in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1882. There, his study included logic with Charles S. Peirce (which Dewey found too "mathematical", and did not pursue), the history of philosophy (especially with George Sylvester Morris, and physiological and experimental psychology with Granville Stanley Hall (who trained with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig and William James at Harvard).

Though many years later Dewey attributed important credit to Peirce's pragmatism for his mature views, during graduate school, Peirce had no sizable impact. Dewey's main graduate school influences-Neo-Hegelian idealism, Darwinian biology, and Wundtian experimental psychology-created a tension, which he sought to resolve. Was the world fundamentally biological, functional, and material or was it, rather, inherently creative and spiritual? In no small part, Dewey's career was launched by his attempt to mediate and harmonize these views. While they shared the idea of "organism", Dewey also saw in both -- and rejected-any aspects deemed overly abstract, atomizing, or reductionistic. His earliest attempts to create a "new psychology" (aimed at merging experimental psychology with idealism) sought a method by which experience could be understood as integrated and whole. As a result, Dewey's early approach was a modified, English absolute idealism. Two years after matriculating, Dewey completed graduate school in 1884 with a dissertation criticizing Kant from an Idealist position ("The Psychology of Kant"); it remains lost.

While scholars still debate the degree to which Dewey's mature philosophy retained early Hegelian influences, it is clear that the personal influence on Dewey was profound. New England's religious culture, Dewey recalled, imparted an "isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, [and] of nature from God", and he reacted with "an inward laceration" and "a painful oppression". His study (with George Sylvester Morris) of British Idealist T.H. Green and G.W.F. Hegel afforded Dewey personal and intellectual healing:

Hegel's synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was, however, no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel's treatment of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special attraction for me. ( FAE, LW5: 153)

Philosophically, Dewey's early encounters with Hegelianism informed his career-long quest to integrate, as dynamic wholes, the various dimensions of experience (practical, imaginative, bodily, psychical) that philosophy and psychology had defined as discrete.

Dewey's family and reputation as a philosopher and psychologist grew while at various universities, including the University of Michigan (1886-88, 1889-1894) and the University of Minnesota (1888-89). At Michigan, Dewey developed long-term professional relationships with James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead. In 1886, Dewey married Harriet Alice Chipman; they had six children and adopted one. Two of the boys died tragically young (two and eight). Chipman had a significant influence on Dewey's advocacy for women and his shift away from religious orthodoxy. During this period, Dewey wrote articles critical of British idealists from a Hegelian perspective; he read and taught James' Principles of Psychology (1890), and called his own view "experimental idealism" (1894a, The Study of Ethics, EW4: 264).

In 1894, at Tuft's urging, President William Rainey Harper offered Dewey the position of head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago, which at that time included both Psychology and Pedagogy. Attracted by the prospect of putting these disciplines into active collaboration, Dewey accepted the offer, and began to build the department by hiring G.H. Mead from Michigan and J.R. Angell, a former student at Michigan (who also studied with James at Harvard). Dubbed, by James, the "Chicago School" Dewey along with Tufts, Angell, Mead and several others develop "psychological functionalism". He also published the seminal "Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896, EW5; hereafter RAC), and broke from transcendental idealism and from his church.

At Chicago, Dewey founded The Laboratory School, which provided a site to test his psychological and educational theories. Dewey's wife Alice was the school's principal from 1896-1904. Dewey became active in Chicago's social and political causes, including Jane Addams' Hull House, and Addams became a close personal friend of the Dewey's. Dewey and his daughter and biographer Jane Dewey credited Addams with helping him develop his views on democracy, education, and philosophy; nevertheless, the significance of Dewey's intellectual debt to Addams is still being uncovered ("Biography of John Dewey", Dewey 1939a; see also Seigfried 1999, Fischer 2013).

In 1904, conflicts related to the Laboratory School lead Dewey to resign his Chicago positions and move to the philosophy department at Columbia University in New York City; there, he also established an affiliation with Columbia's Teacher's College. Among Dewey's important influences at Columbia were F.J.E. Woodbridge, Wendell T. Bush, W.P. Montague, Charles A. Beard (political theory) and Franz Boas (anthropology). Dewey remained at Columbia until retirement 1930, going on to produce eleven more books.

In 1946, almost two decades after Alice Chipman Dewey died (1927), Dewey married Roberta Lowitz Grant. John Dewey died of pneumonia in his home in New York City on June 1, 1952.

Short Chronology of the Life and Work of John Dewey

Source: H&A 1998, xiv

1859 Oct. 20. Born in Burlington, Vermont

1879 Receives A.B. from the University of Vermont

1879-81 Teaches at high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania

1881-82 Teaches at Lake View Seminary, Charlotte, Vermont

1882-84 Attends graduate school at Johns Hopkins University

1884 Receives Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University

1884 Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan

1886 Married to Alice Chipman

1888-89 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota

1889 Chair of Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan

1894 Professor and Chair of Department of Philosophy (including psychology and pedagogy) at the University of Chicago

1897 Elected to Board of Trustees, Hull-House Association

1904 Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University

1905-06 President of the American Philosophical Society

1919-21 Lectures in China

1924 Visits schools in Turkey

1926 Visits schools in Mexico

1927 Death of Alice Chipman Dewey

1928 Visits schools in Soviet Russia

1930 Retires from position at Columbia University, appointed Professor Emeritus

1937 Chair of the Trotsky Commission, Mexico City

1952 June 1. Dies in New York City

2. Psychology

Soon, Dewey began developing his own psychological theories; extant accounts of behavior, he argued, were flawed because they were premised upon outdated and false philosophical assumptions. (He eventually judged that larger questions about the meaning of human existence reached deep into cultural practices and exceeded the resources of psychology; such questions required philosophical investigations of experience in the fields of art, politics, ethics, and religion, etc.) Dewey's psychological work reconstructed the components of human conduct (instincts, perceptions, habits, acts, emotions, and conscious thought) and these proved integral to later, mature statements about experience. They also informed his lifelong contention that mind, contrary to long tradition, is not fundamentally subjective and isolated, but social and interactive, made through natural and cultural environments.

2.1 Associationism, Introspectionism, and Physiological Psychology

Dewey entered the field of psychology while it was dominated by introspectionism (arising from associationism, a.k.a., "mentalism") and the newer physiological psychology (imported from Germany). Earlier British empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, accounted for intelligent behavior with (1) internally inspected ("introspected") entities, including perceptual experiences (e.g., "impressions"), and (2) thoughts or ideas (e.g., "images"). These accrue toward intelligence by way of an elaborate process of associative learning. Discovery-by-introspection was indispensable for many empiricists, and for many physiological and experimental psychologists (e.g., Wundt) as well.

Dewey was deeply influenced by his graduate school study of physiological psychology with G. Stanley Hall; classes included theoretical, physiological, and experimental psychology; he conducted laboratory experiments on attention. Unlike introspectionism, Hall's methods incorporated strict experimental controls, and this biology-based approach promised Dewey an organic and holistic model of experience capable of overcoming the subjectivist dualisms plaguing the older, associationist models. However, Dewey still found physiological psychology retaining an atomized and mechanistic view of experience based on "sense data". From his Hegelian perspective, this psychology could never account for the wider world of lived meanings, the socio-cultural environment. In other words, "organism" entailed "environment", and "environment" entailed "culture". A rigorously empirical psychology could not merely study "the" mind, but had to forge connections with other sciences.

2.2 The "Reflex Arc" and Dewey's Reconstruction of Psychology

One expression of Dewey's early psychology (and Jamesean turn) was his seminal critique of the reflex arc concept (1896), written at Chicago. The "reflex arc" model of behavior was an increasingly influential way to explain human behavior empirically and experimentally using stimulus-response (cause-effect) pairings; it sought to displace other, less observable and testable approaches that relied upon "psychic entities" or "mental substance". In the reflex arc model, a passive organism encounters an external stimulus causing a sensory and motor response; for example, a child sees a candle (stimulus), grasps it (response), burns her hand (stimulus), and pulls her hand back (response). This, it argued, makes explicit the event's basic stimuli and responses, replete with connections satisfactorily describable in mechanistic and physiological terms-and all without recourse to mysterious and unobservable entities.

Dewey criticized the reflex arc framework on several grounds. First, events (sensory stimulus, central response, and act) are artificially separated for the purpose of analysis. "The reflex arc", Dewey wrote, "is not a comprehensive, or organic unity, but a patchwork of disjointed parts, a mechanical conjunction of unallied processes" ( RAC, EW5: 97). Second, the model falsifies the nature of genuine interaction; organisms do not passively receive stimuli and then actively respond; rather, organisms continuously interact with environments in cumulative and modifying ways. The child who encounters a candle is already actively exploring, anticipating a room, for example; noticing the flame modifies already ongoing actions. "The real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light" ( RAC, EW5: 97). Third, and relatedly, the model is too rigid in designating certain events as the stimulus or the response-in a word, it "reifies" them. Because events studied are enmeshed in a wider, ongoing activity matrix, other designations (of "cause" or "event") could be plausible, contingent on the aims of some other experimental inquiry. Effectively, Dewey pointed out how the reflex arc model, intending to shed metaphysical assumptions, had inadvertently imported new and different ones. We are seeking to discover, Dewey wrote, "what stimulus or sensation, what movement and response mean" and we are finding that "they mean distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence" ( RAC, EW5: 102; emphasis mine). This suggestion is pragmatic; it says, rather than seeking an underlying reality ( pure stimulus, pure response), look to meanings. In doing so, it is evident that terms such as stimulus, response, sensation, and movement "mean distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence" ( RAC, EW5: 102). The meaning of terms is grasped by recognizing their functions as acts in a wider, dynamic context which includes aims and interests.

Dewey's critique and reconstruction of the reflex arc presaged other important developments in his pragmatism. His argument that psychology needed to pay greater attention to context and function was applied, in time, to all the sciences, as well as to logic and mathematics. The methodological lesson was, in effect, a warning not to mistake eventual outcomes of analysis for existents already there. Theoretical distinctions which are meaningful in specific situations depend upon a wider context that is both retrospective and prospective.

While there is not space to present Dewey's extensive reconstruction of the phenomena psychology considered permanent parts of human beings, a cursory review can show his philosophical method at work. Let us consider instincts/impulses, perceptions, sensations, habits, emotions, sentiency, consciousness, and mind.

2.3 Instincts/Impulses

Attempts to explain complex, developed behavior by reference to preexisting impulses and instincts had already been attacked by James (e.g., in "Habit", James 1890: chapter 4) and Dewey continued the assault. Such explanations fail to consider instinct's plastic and pliable character. Across a variety of individuals, instincts considered simple or basic are anything but-they blossom into many different habits and customs. They also fail to see that instincts are not pushing an essentially passive creature, but are actively taken up in diverse circumstances, for diverse purposes. As with "stimulus", the meaning of any "instinct" depends on contextual factors, which can include both biological and socio-linguistic responses. But, in a phrase, there is no psychology without social psychology, no possible inquiry into pure, biological instincts (or any other "natural" powers) which does not also consider both the social and environmental context of the phenomena studied and the inquiry's own context. Instincts/impulses are interactive phenomena-in-environment, and must be appreciated as transactions ( HNC, MW14: 66).

2.4 Perception/Sensation

Dewey's methodological lesson regarding instincts was twofold; first, one cannot premise an empirical science on unquestioned, metaphysical posits; even basic terms must be open to revision or deletion; second, strictly analytical methods using simple elements to build up complex behavior are often inadequate to explain the meaning of psychological phenomena. This lesson also applies to perception and sensation. Dewey attacked the view, common in his day, that a perception (1) was simply and externally caused, (2) completely occupied a mental state, and (3) was passively received into an empty mental space.

The qualities never were 'in' the organism; they always were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake. ( EN, LW1: 198-199)

Thus, perceptions and qualities are discriminations made in inquiry and language; they are not reports of ontological entities which are simple, ultimate, or discrete. Always, pragmatic factors are decisive. (Dewey makes the same point about nouns and concepts; cf. W.V.O. Quine's example of "gavagai".) "Perception", then, is shorthand for the more complicated processes of interacting events. "Red" is an abstraction from more complex experiences (such as red-car-merging-into-my-lane), and the pragmatic question becomes, What is the function of this abstraction? How does it mediate thought or action for future experiences? ("A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception", LW2: 51; EN, LW1: 198-199)

Regarding (2), perceptions pervading mental states, Dewey echoes an important point made by James in "The Stream of Thought" (James 1890: chapter 9). Namely, while a perception may occupy the focus of awareness, each has an attendant "fringe" which contributes a contrast and, to the wider situation, an "underlying qualitative character" ("Qualitative Thought", LW5: 238 fn. 1). In the lemon case, above, the "tartness" has its character amidst a slew of "fringe" conditions such as immediate past flavors, anticipations, etc.

Finally, regarding (3), as mentioned, perception is an activity of "taking up" by organisms already functioning in situations, not an instant, passive apprehension of stimulus. As such, there are always selective adjustments; quick or slow, they always take some time. Perception is never naïve, never a confrontation with some "given" content already imbued with inherent meaning. Long before Wilfred Sellars (see entry on Sellars) dismissed the passive-perception-encounter as modern empiricism's "Myth of the Given", Dewey rebuked such claims. All seeing is seeing as-adjustments within larger acts. Over time, these habits of adjustment change and, as a result, what is perceived can also shift; subsequent selections and interpretations are modified ( DE, MW9: 346).

2.5 Acts and Habits

Later writings develop the argument of "Reflex Arc", namely that complex behavior cannot be explained by building up simpler constituents. "Acts" provide a better starting point, of organisms in environments ( HNC, MW14: 105). Acts are transactional: we act with and on things, in contexts, amidst conditions. Acts are fundamental to understanding behavior because they are selective. By directing movement and organizing situations, they manifest interest. This combination-of selectivity and interest-make activities meaningful. For example, our ancestors acted selectively regarding how to satisfy instinctive hunger; such selectivity created the conditions for a more elaborate interest in the taste of food, and, much later, in dining customs and cuisine.

Drawing upon James' and Peirce's uses of "habit", Dewey integrates habit deeply into his philosophy. Habit helps explain various dimensions of human experience (biological, ethical, political, and aesthetic) as manifested in complex and social behaviors-walking, talking, cooking, conversing. Habits are not simple; they are composed of acts. Acts unfold in time, beginning with instinct borne of need and muddling toward reintegration and satisfaction. To become a habit, an act-series must possess gradual and cumulative change; such change concresces as one act leads to the next. When there is a cumulative linking of acts which structure experience, there is "habit". Habit, Dewey wrote, "is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts" ( HNC, MW14: 32). These ways are typically shaped by both past experience as an individual and especially through social and linguistic interactions; we call habits shared by groups "customs".

While habits may become routines, Dewey argued against the assumption that they were therefore automatic or insulated from conscious intervention. They cannot be automatic, because new situations vary, and the same exact acts never repeat. Thus, unlike machine routines, organic habits remain plastic, changeable. My habitual eating of sweets is subject to contingency (a sharp toothache) and modification (restraint, substitution); frequently, conscious reflection on an existing habit is the first stage of habit revision.

Habits were also envisioned as dormant powers, waiting to be invoked. Dewey argued that habits are, instead, "energetic and dominating ways of acting" determining what we do and are: "All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self" ( HNC, MW14: 22, 21). Dewey inveighed against the notion that habits are like individual possessions. Rather, habits exist as transactions between organisms and environments; they are not "inner forces" but functions which make adaptation or reconstruction possible.

Habits enter into the constitution of the situation; they are in and of it, not, so far as it is concerned, something outside of it. ("Brief Studies in Realism", MW6: 120)

Because the situation is cultural as well as bio-physical, habits are ineliminably social. So-called "individual" habits emerge within the social world of friends, family, home, work, media, etc. This means that effecting a change of habits does not require a magical act of sheer willpower, but rather intelligent inquiry into relevant conditions (psychological, sociological, economic, etc.).

2.6 Emotion

Like "habit", Dewey redescribed "emotion" as a basic form of involvement present in "coordinated circuits" of activity. Where habits are controlled responses to problematic situations, emotion, by contrast, is not predominantly controlled or organized; rather, it is an organism's resonance with a situation, a "perturbation from clash or failure of habit" ( HNC, MW14: 54). As with the other aspects of psychological life, Dewey's account reconstructed emotion as fundamentally transactional with other experiences typically analyzed as discrete (the "rational" or "physical" dimensions, e.g.).

Dewey's account connected those of Charles Darwin and William James. Darwin argued that internal emotional states cause organic expressions which, depending on their survival value, may be subject to natural selection; for example, my feeling and expression of emotion may earn sympathy that aids survival of like-feeling offspring. James, in contrast, sought to decrease the distance between emotion and accompanying bodily expression. In actual cases of emotion, a perception excites a pre-organized physiological mechanism; our recognition of such changes just is the emotional experience: "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike" (James 1890 [1981: 450]). Dewey's "The Theory of Emotion" (1894b & 1895, EW4) pressed James further, toward the integrated whole of feeling-and-expression. Being sad is not merely feeling sad or acting sad but is the purposive organism's overall experience. This is Dewey's attempt to gently correct James' unfortunate reiteration of mind-body dualism. To understand emotion, Dewey argued, we must see that "the mode of behavior is the primary thing" ("The Theory of Emotion", EW4: 174). As with habit, emotion is not the private possession of the subject, but rather emerges from the fluid boundary connecting event and organism; emotion is "called out by objects, physical and personal", an intentional "response to an objective situation" ( EN, LW1: 292). If I encounter a strange dog and I am perplexed as to how to react, there is an inhibition of habit, and this excites emotion. As I entertain a range of incompatible responses (Run? Call out? Slink away?), a tension is created which further interrupts and inhibits habits, and is experienced as emotion ("The Theory of Emotion", EW4: 182) Thus, emotions are intentional insofar as they are " to or from or about something objective, whether in fact or in idea" and not merely reactions "in the head" ( AE, LW10: 72).

Philosophically, emotion is a central feature of Dewey's critique of traditional epistemology and metaphysics. He decried traditional systems which, in their pursuit of rational access to truth and reality, create an invidious distinction by casting emotion as confused thought, distraction, or bodily interference which needs to be suppressed, controlled, or bracketed. Emotion is intertwined, psychologically, both in the individual (in reasoning and acting), and in the wider culture (with social forms of meaning creation). Attempts to balkanize emotion are motivated in part, he argued, by the desire to segregate leisure from labor, men from women; on this reading, the traditional rationalistic bent is, in effect, a power-play that deserves intellectual and moral critique.

2.7 Sentiency, Mind, and Consciousness

Dewey's accounts of sentiency, mind, and consciousness build upon those of impulse, perception, act, habit, and emotion. These are complex topics, but a cursory view can complete this sketch of Dewey's psychology.

Sentiency

As with other psychic phenomena, sentience emerges through the transactions of organisms in natural environments. In general, creatures seek to satisfy needs and escape peril; when stability yields to precariousness, a struggle to reestablish balance begins; there is adjustment to self, to one's environment, or both. Methods successful in the past, pre-organized responses, sometimes fail. In such cases, we become ambivalent-divided against ourselves about what to do next. It proves advantageous to inhibit practiced responses (to look before leaping); this pause or inhibition of the action flow creates a space which, Dewey wrote, "introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation" ( EN, LW1: 237). In other words, inhibition creates ambivalence, and ambivalence makes possible new ways of considering alternatives; crude, physical situations take on qualitatively new complexities of meaning. Thus, Dewey wrote, sentiency or feeling

is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction. ( EN, LW1: 204)

At this stage, the new relationships are not yet known; they do, however, provide the conditions for knowing. Symbolization, language, is the next step in liberating these noticed relationships using intellectual tools including abstraction, memory, and imagination ( EN, LW1: 199).

Mind

Dewey rejected both traditional accounts of mind-as-substance (or container) and more contemporary schemes reducing mind to brain states ( EN, LW1: 224-225). Rather, mind is activity, a range of dynamic processes of interaction between organism and world. Consider the range connoted by mind: as memory (I am re minded of X); attention (I keep her in mind, I mind my manners); purpose (I have an aim in mind); care or solicitude (I mind the child); paying heed (I mind the traffic stop). "Mind", then, ranges over many activities: intellectual, affectional, volitional, or purposeful. It is

primarily a verb...[that] denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional. It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups. ( AE, LW10: 267-68)

As Wittgenstein ( entry on Wittgenstein, section on rule-following and private language) pointed out 30 years later, no private language (see entry on private language) is possible given this account of meaning. While meanings might be privately entertained, they are not privately invented; meanings are social and emerge from symbol systems arising through collective communication and action ( EN, LW1: 147).

Active, complex animals are sentient due to the variety of distinctive connections they have with their environment. But "mentality" (mindfulness) arises due to the eventual ability to recognize and use meaningful signs. With language, creatures can identify and differentiate feelings as feelings, objects as objects, etc.

Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially and proleptically. With language they are discriminated and identified. They are then "objectified"; they are immediate traits of things. ( EN, LW1: 198)

The bull's charge is stimulated by the red flag, but unlike the driver ignoring a broken red stoplight, the bull cannot detach "red" as a sign; it remains a crude stimulus.

Dewey thus demoted and promoted the mind's significance. No longer our spark of divinity, as some ancients held, it is also rescued from merely being a ghost in a machine. Mind becomes vital, investigating and addressing problems, and inventing new tools, aims, and ideals. Mind bridges past and future, an "agency of novel reconstruction of a pre-existing order" ( EN, LW1: 168).

Consciousness

A whole system of meanings as embodied in organic life

Awareness or perception of meanings (of actual events in their meaning)

Contextual and persistent: a constant background

Focal and transitive

Structural and substantial: a constant foreground

A punctuated series of heres and nows

Enduring luminosity

Intermittent flashes of varying intensities

A continuous transmission of messages

The occasional interception and singling out of a message that makes it audible

Dewey also tried to get at consciousness performatively, so to speak; he provoked the reader to consider the nature of consciousness while reading. Here, again, he utilized notions of "focus" and "fringe", emphasizing how the latter is indispensable for mental orientation ( EN, LW1: 231). As physical balance controls walking, mind's meanings constantly adjust and direct present, focal interpretation. The progressive advance of vivid consciousness is enabled by mind's pervasive and persistent system of meanings.

Having concluded this review of Dewey's psychology, we turn now to his account of experience.

3.1 The Development of "Experience"

Dewey's notion of "experience" evolved over the course of his career. Initially, it contributed to his idealism and psychology. After he developed instrumentalism in Chicago during the 1890's, Dewey moved to Columbia, revising and expanding the concept in 1905 with a historically significant essay, "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" ( PIE, MW3). Further developments show up in "The Subject-matter of Metaphysical Inquiry" (1915, MW8) and the "Introduction" to Essays in Experimental Logic (1916, MW10) which consolidated and advanced his view that "experience" was more than just way to rebut subjectivism in psychology, but was also factored into metaphysical accounts of existence and nature (Dykhuizen 1973: 175-76). Dewey advanced this in the1923 Carus Lectures, revised and expanded in his metaphysical magnum opus, Experience and Nature (1925, revised edition, 1929; EN, LW1). Many other significant elaborations on experience follow, notably in Art as Experience (1934b, AE, LW10). Because experience is pivotal across his philosophical oeuvre, interested readers should track its functions in other sections of this entry; here, experience is treated concisely, with a focus upon Dewey's philosophical method and metaphysics.

To begin, why was experience such an important concept that it penetrated Dewey's very approach to philosophy? Keep three influences in mind. First, recall that Dewey inherited from Darwin the idea of nature as a complex congeries of changing, transactional processes without fixed ends; in this context, experience means the undergoing and doing of organisms-in-environments, "a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and readjustments, of coordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness" ("A Short Catechism Concerning Truth", MW6: 5). Second, recall that Dewey took from James a radically empirical approach to philosophy-the insistence that perspectival experience, including that called personal, emotional, or temperamental, was philosophically relevant and worth factoring into abstract and logical theories. Finally, recall that Dewey accepted from Hegel experience as manifested in particular social, historical, and cultural modes. Not only is the self constituted through experiential transactions with the community, but this recognition vitiates the Cartesian model of the simple, atomic self and methods based upon that presumption. Philosophy may start where we start, personally - with complex, symbolic, and cultural forms-and then articulate further emergences from them.

It should be noted that "experience", both as sheer terminology and as Dewey deployed the concept, generated much confusion and debate. Dewey recognized this and commented about it toward the end of his life. Decades later, one of the Dewey's foremost philosophical celebrants, Richard Rorty, lambasted Dewey for both the term and (what Rorty perceived as) Dewey's intentions. (Rorty 1977, 1995, 2006) Nevertheless, since the term lives on, both in Dewey's work and in everyday discourse, it deserves continued analysis.

3.2 Traditional Views of Experience and Dewey's Critique

Dewey disputed the shared empiricist conviction that sensations are categorically separable contents of consciousness. This belief, he argued, produced a "whole epistemological industry" devoted to solving the general problem of "correspondence" and a host of specific puzzles (about the existence of an external world, other minds, free will, etc.) ("Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth", LW14: 179). This "industry" isolates philosophy from empirically informed accounts of experience and from pressing, practical problems. Regarding the phenomenon of mental privacy, Dewey argued that while we have episodes of what might be called mental interiority, it is a later human development. "Personality, selfhood, subjectivity, are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social" ( EN, LW1: 162; see also 178-79). Regarding sensorial atomicity, discussed previously in the section on psychology, Dewey explained sensation as embedded in a larger sensori-motor circuit, a transaction which should not be quarantined to any single phase-nor to consciousness. Sensation emerges dynamically from the engagements of minds, bodies, and their environments, where "environments" includes human language and culture. (Consider, as evidence of how blurry the boundaries between "sensation" and "culture" can be, how differently food tastes in varying circumstances and cultures.)

Dewey levied similar criticisms against traditional accounts of reflective thought. Mind is neither static nor a substance which stands, somehow, apart from the body-or from history, from culture. Reasoning is one function of mind, not the product of a separate "faculty", and not "purified" of feeling. Rather, reasoning is always permeated with both feelings and practical exigencies. While it can help to "bracket out" a feeling or exigency scrambling a present calculation, it is nevertheless true that reasoning subsists in a wider "qualitative world", one that "forms the field of characteristic modes of thinking, characteristic in that thought is definitely regulated by qualitative considerations" ("Psychology and Work", LW5: 243).

3.3 Dewey's Positive Account of Experience

So far, these details, and the section on psychology, limn an outline of Dewey's view: experience is processual, transactional, socially mediated, and not categorically prefigured as "rational" or "emotional". Here are three additional, positive characterizations: first, experience as experimental; second, experience as primary ("had") vs. secondary ("known"); and third, experience as methodological for philosophy.

First, experience exhibits a fundamentally experimental character. This was impressed upon Dewey in a variety of his educational roles. Children's experiences involve alternating phases: acting and being acted upon. Such phases become "experimental" when agents consciously relate what is tried with what eventuates and eventually understand which actions are significant for controlling future events. "Learning" is the name for the outcome of experience as experimental.

[E]xperienced situations come about in two ways and are of two distinct types. Some take place with only a minimum of regulation, with little foresight, preparation and intent. Others occur because, in part, of the prior occurrence of intelligent action. Both kinds are had; they are undergone, enjoyed or suffered. The first are not known; they are not understood; they are dispensations of fortune or providence. The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that present the funded outcome of operations that substitute definite continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the fragmentary quality due to isolation. ( QC, LW4: 194)

Dewey's had/known distinction is a way of describing existence without presupposing a dualism between appearance/reality. Much in experience is unknown to us without being illusory or merely apparent; we are not trapped in a cave full of illusions with only rational dialectic to yank us upwards. Rather, we engage and cope with a world which is not completely meaningful. We strive to make the world more meaningful, but while some of the meanings devised assist in prediction and control of circumstances, others are simply enjoyed-but that does not make them less real.

Third, experience was also considered a "method". This requires some unpacking.

Dewey's distinction between experience "had" and "known" was more than just a phenomenological observation; it was a metaphilosophical directive regarding how philosophy, itself, should be done. For experience is not just "stuff" presented to or witnessed by consciousness; rather, experience is activity, engagement with life. Philosophy, too, is a form of activity-which means that we need to do philosophy differently; we need pay attention to where and how we start; in this sense, experience is a method.

One might sensibly ask,

If Dewey says that experience happens in both primary (felt, had) and secondary (reflective, known) ways, why not start with theory? Is that not experience, too?

Dewey's reply would be that while theory is one kind of experiencing, it is not where we start; theory is an intermediate phase of inquiry. As we live our lives, we confront problems which invoke the need for inquiry and, often, there is a need to devise a tool of explanation and amelioration. Theory is that tool, generated by these encounters; it does not come first. "The vine of pendant theory", Dewey wrote, "is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter" ( EN, LW1: 11; see also 386).

As did James and Peirce before him, Dewey challenged not only the theories of previous philosophers, but the assumptions informing their methods. For generations, philosophers started their philosophical examinations with various theoretical conceptions-"substances", "mind vs. body", "pleasure as natural aim", and so on. In his philosophical work, Dewey criticized any number of these presuppositions, but here his point is metaphilosophical-how these conceptions enter into the practice of philosophy as presuppositions. Too often philosophy puts the (theoretical) cart before the (practical) horse. We simply cannot know-and should not assume-which terms and theories are necessary for an analysis of a novel situation. Nevertheless, much philosophy has assumed such necessities. We may call this the assumption of a "theoretical starting point". It has produced endless dialectical exchanges; it has caricatured and hollowed out many complex and changeable subject matters. Overall, it has isolated philosophy from a more thoroughgoing empiricism which could engage with humanity's most important problems.

Dewey's proposed method-the experiential starting point-is not just another philosophical "move", but a radical attempt to philosophize from what Ortega y Gasset calls "the shaken confines of our own life" and what Douglas Browning calls "bedrock" (Ortega y Gasset 1957: 40; Browning 1998: 74). Dewey wrote,

The experiential or denotative method tells us that we must go behind the refinements and elaborations of reflective experience to the gross and compulsory things of our doings, enjoyments and sufferings-to the things that force us to labor, that satisfy needs, that surprise us with beauty, that compel obedience under penalty. ( EN, LW1: 375-76)

Such a method is truly critical, because it forces inquirers to check previous interpretations and judgments against their live encounters in a new situation ( EN, LW1: 364). This entails that philosophy as a practice impose upon itself a much more radical and dynamic model of theorizing, one pressed into much closer transactions with existing practices and problems. This imposition, in turn, forces philosophy to engage with new subject matters (and theories), beyond the traditional "problems of philosophy", and to embrace the idea that "the starting point is the actually problematic" ( EN, LW1: 61).

Much which is central to Dewey's metaphysics has been discussed-the transactional organism-environment setting, mind, consciousness, and experience. Accordingly, this section will focus on the development of Dewey's conception of "metaphysics", the main project in Experience and Nature, how a so-called empirical metaphysics intended to reconnect with the ancient idea of philosophy as wisdom, and finally it will sketch some of the criticisms Dewey's metaphysics received.

Debate over a definite meaning for the term "metaphysics", was just as alive in Dewey's day as in ours. From the beginning, Dewey sought to critique and reconstruct metaphysical concepts (e.g., reality, self, consciousness, time, necessity, and individuality) and systems (e.g., Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel). Like his fellow pragmatists Peirce, James, and Mead, Dewey sought to transform not eradicate metaphysics. As described earlier, Dewey's early metaphysical views were closest to idealism, but engagements with experimental science and instrumentalism convinced him to abandon traditional metaphysics' project of giving an ultimate and complete account of reality überhaupt.

His dormant interest in metaphysics was revivified at Columbia by his colleague F. J. E. Woodbridge, who illustrated how metaphysics might be done in a "descriptive" rather than an extra-physical way ("Biography of John Dewey", in Schilpp 1939: 36). While many of Dewey's most important writings on metaphysics were also about experience (discussed above), special attention should be paid to "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (1905, PIE, MW3), "The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry" (1915, MW8), and his "Introduction" to Essays in Experimental Logic (1916c, MW10)-all vital steps toward his magnum opus, Experience and Nature. EN's final chapters, dealing with art and consummatory experience, are developed in Art as Experience (1934b, LW10), another source of significant metaphysical discussions.

While labels tend to obscure Dewey's innovations, it is safe say that Dewey had a realist, naturalistic, non-reductive, emergentist, process metaphysics. He sought to describe the most general features ("generic traits") of nature in a way which did empirical justice to the world as encountered, and which could be useful toward future attempts to describe and change the world for the better. Unlike other metaphysics, Dewey explicitly said that metaphysics served something further -criticism. In the end, Dewey wound up describing his efforts both as a "metaphysics" and as a "system", that is, "the hanging together of various problems and various hypotheses in a perspective" ("Nature in Experience", LW14: 141-142). He described his enterprise as both informed by "a definite point of view" and by the contemporary, human world ("Half-hearted Naturalism", LW3: 75-76 ).

3.6 The Project of Experience and Nature

While this entry lacks space for even a bare summary, it is worth noting that EN begins with an extensive discussion of method and experience as a new starting point for philosophy. An extensive presentation of the generic traits follows, which, in due course, evokes and informs discussions regarding science, technology, body, mind, language, art, and value. While the traits are not presented systematically (à la other metaphysicians such as Spinoza or Whitehead) there is a progression moving from the more basic to the more complex.

Since Dewey is a pragmatist and meliorist, it is worth asking: How can metaphysics contribute to the world beyond academic philosophy? Dewey's larger ambition was to return philosophy to an older, ancient mission-the pursuit of wisdom. And while Dewey describes philosophy as inherently critical, a "criticism of criticisms", where does that leave even an empirical, hypothetical, naturalistic metaphysics? ( EN, LW1: 298) Dewey raises the issue, prophylactically:

As a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differentiation into physical and mental, [metaphysics] seems to have nothing to do with criticism and choice, with an effective love of wisdom. ( EN, LW1: 308)

Dewey answers his own question with his account of the generic traits, one which purportedly provides "a ground-map of the province of criticism, establishing base lines to be employed in more intricate triangulations" ( EN, LW1: 308). New maps, new ways of looking at existence can defang old truisms-e.g., men are rational, women are emotional, humans are intelligent, animals are dumb, etc.-and facilitate the creation of new meanings. Many of philosophy's conceptual tools (kinds, categories, dualisms, aims, and values) were entrenched; a reconsideration of the "what" and "how" of existents promised a basis for a new start.

The activity of metaphysical map-making fits in with the more engaged role Dewey envisioned for philosophers. The philosopher would serve as what Dewey called a "liaison officer", a kind of semantic intermediator able to help those speaking at cross purposes (or in different jargons) to communicate more effectively ( EN, LW1: 306). Metaphysical maps draw from contemporary circumstances and purposes, so they would not promise certainty or permanency. Indeed, the general traits "are actually so intimately intermixed that all important issues are concerned with their degrees and the ratios they sustain to one another" ( EN, LW1: 309). Just as physical maps must be redrawn based on changing needs and purposes, so would metaphysical maps; in the meantime, hopefully, criticism is sharpened and value is more effectively secured.

Dewey received and responded to many criticisms of his metaphysical views, from 1905's "Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" and on. Critics often overlooked that his position was aiming to undercut prevailing metaphysical genres; often, his view was just aligned with one or another existing position. (He was taken, variously, as in league with realism, idealism, relativism, subjectivism, etc. See Hildebrand 2003.) One recurrent criticism was that the view advanced in PIE (that "things are what they are experienced as") could not possibly yield a metaphysics because it merely bespoke the kind of subjective, immediate experience inimical to a more mediated and objective account. Similar reactions arrived twenty years late to EN from critics attacking the contrast there between "experience" and "nature".

Subsequent criticisms honed in on a supposed tension between two foci of Dewey's: "qualities" vs. "relations". Qualities are immediate, while relations are mediate; how could both coexist in the same item of experience? There seemed to be a contradiction within Dewey's view. Richard Bernstein (1961) seized on this issue, and claimed that Dewey harbored two irreconcilable strains, a "metaphysical strain" and a "phenomenological strain", but failed to sufficiently account for them with his "principle of continuity". One response to this argued that such critiques are vitiated by their unwitting reproduction of the very spectatorial standpoint Dewey's experiential starting point was designed to prevent.

In recent years, some specialists in pragmatism and American philosophy have debated whether Dewey should have engaged in metaphysics at all. Some, such as Richard Rorty and Charlene Haddock Seigfried, have argued that Dewey's critique of traditional metaphysics was the most he should have done; going further diverted him from more important ethical work (Seigfried 2001a, 2004) or plunged him into foundationalist projects he had previously disavowed ("Dewey's Metaphysics" in Rorty 1977). Others have argued that Dewey invented a genuinely new approach to metaphysics which avoided old problems while contributing something salutary to culture at large (Myers forthcoming, Garrison 2005, Boisvert 1998a, Alexander forthcoming).

4. Inquiry and Knowledge

4.1 The Organic Roots of Instrumentalism

The interactional, organic model Dewey developed in his psychology informed his theories of learning and knowledge. Given this new ecological framework, a range of traditional epistemological proposals and puzzles (premised on metaphysical divisions such as appearance/reality, mind/world) lost credibility. "So far as the question of the relation of the self to known objects is concerned", Dewey wrote, "knowing is but one special case of the agent-patient, of the behaver-enjoyer-sufferer situation" ("Brief Studies in Realism", MW6: 120). As we have already seen in psychology, Dewey's wholesale repudiation of the tradition's basic metaphysical framework required extensive reconstructions in every other area; one popular name for Dewey's reconstruction of epistemology (or "theory of inquiry", as Dewey preferred to call it) was "instrumentalism".

As did his earlier psychological functionalism, instrumentalism utilized a Darwinian starting point to criticize and dissolve entrenched divisions between, for example, realism/idealism, science/religion, and empiricism/rationalism. Seen from this standpoint, change and transformation are natural features of the actual world, and knowledge and logic are ways to adapt, survive, and thrive. The vitality of the world in which we reason, its dynamic and biological basis, is more informative about knowledge and truth than the paradigms of physics or mathematics, historically celebrated by philosophy. While instrumentalism acknowledges sensation's contributions, it also insists upon the constructive power of reasoning.

Early statements of instrumentalism (and definitive breaks by Dewey with Hegelian logic) may be seen in "Some Stages of Logical Thought" (Dewey 1900 [1916], MW1); that essay follows Peirce ( entry on Peirce section on pragmatism, pragmaticism, and the scientific method], especially the well known 1877-78 articles championing the larger framework of scientific thinking, namely the "doubt-inquiry process" (MW1: 173; see also Peirce 1877, 1878). This account is developed in Studies in Logical Theory (Dewey 1903b, MW2), by Dewey and his collaborators at Chicago. In the work, Dewey acknowledges a "preeminent obligation" to James (Perry 1935: 308-309).

The test of validity of [an] idea is its functional or instrumental use in effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a relatively integrated one. ( Studies, MW2: 359)

Thus, instrumentalism abandons all psycho-physical dualisms and all correspondentist theories of knowing. Dewey wrote,

In the logical process the datum is not just external existence, and the idea mere psychical existence. Both are modes of existence-one of given existence, the other of possible, of inferred existence....In other words, datum and ideatum are divisions of labor, cooperative instrumentalities, for economical dealing with the problem of the maintenance of the integrity of experience. ( Studies, MW2: 339-340)

4.2 Beyond Empiricism, Rationalism, and Kant

So far, we have seen that Dewey's instrumentalism is of a piece with his system's other components. But it was also responding to dialectic within philosophy's epistemological positions, particularly the tension between British empiricism, rationalism (see entry on rationalism vs. empiricism), and the Kantian synthesis. A brief account will suffice to introduce Dewey's response.

Classical empiricists insisted that the origins of knowledge lay in sensory experience. They were motivated, in part, by the concern that rationalistic accounts, seeking to trace knowledge to thought alone (rather than particular, independent sense stimuli), were too unchecked. Without the limits imposed by sense experience, philosophy would continue to produce wild and divergent dogmatisms. There was in classical empiricism, as in Dewey, a genuine interest in scientific progress; for science to advance, it needed to escape unfettered speculation. The account developed, then, by figures such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume claimed that (in Locke's version) the world writes on a receptive blank slate, the mind, in the language of ideas. By the faculties of memory, association, and imagination, knowledge is generated; further elaborations of what is known must, on the empiricists' account, be checkable against its origins in sense experience.

Rationalists, in contrast, argued that knowledge was by nature both abstract and deductively certain. Consider, for a moment, your sensory experiences: they are fluid, individualized, and permeated by the relativity borne of innumerable external conditions. How could a philosophical account of genuine knowledge-necessarily certain, self-evident, and unchanging-be derived using a method so besotted with sensorial flux? Knowledge must derive, rather, from inner concepts, which could be certain. Knowledge, then, is produced by an immaterial entity, mind, with a power to reason which is innate, and which stands logically independent of practical ends and the contingencies of one's physical body.

Kant responded to the empiricist-rationalist tension by reigning in their overweening ambitions; he argued that philosophy must stop attempting to transcend the limits of thought and experience. Philosophy's proper aspiration is more modest-to discover what is possible to know in the phenomenal world. Kant, then, refused an originary role to either percepts or concepts, arguing instead that sense and reason are co-constitutive of knowledge. More important, Kant argued that what epistemology requires is an account of the mind as a systematic and constructive force.

Dewey's response to this three-way epistemological conflict was foreshadowed in the earlier discussion of the "Reflex Arc" paper, with its account of natural constituent of the sensori-motor circuit. Any proposal premised on a disconnected mind and body-or upon one assuming that stimuli (be they causes or impressions or whatever) were atomic and in need of synthesis-was a non-starter for Dewey.

While he accepted some of Kant's criticisms of rationalism and empiricism, he rejected Kant's propagation of several significant but unjustified assumptions. Chief among these assumptions was the idea that knowledge must be certain; that nature and intellect were categorically distinct; and that a noumenal realm (things-in-themselves) was a justified posit. In addition, Dewey questioned Kant's claim that the sensations which supply knowledge are inchoate, initially-this claim being merely another posit driven by Kant's architectonic. Methodologically, and perhaps more significantly, Dewey followed James in criticizing Kant's overall standpoint as, still, too spectatorial. From the pragmatic, Jamesean, "radical empiricist" standpoint, one may accept as real (though not necessarily as known) a variety of phenomenon, whether such are clear, vague, felt, remembered, anticipated, etc.

Thus, for Dewey, Kant cannot achieve the philosophical perspective necessary for a dynamic synthesis of perception and conception, nature and reason, practice and theory. While Kant's model of an active and structuring mind was a clear advance over more passive systems, it maintained the retrograde depiction of knowledge as faithful mirror of reality. The missing insight was knowledge as dynamic instrument, consisting in managing (predicting, controlling, guiding) future experience. Within this framework, determining "knowledge" is akin to judging the value of an eye or hand; one asks how they affect the organism's ability to cope:

What measures [knowledge's] value, its correctness and truth, is the degree of its availability for conducting to a successful issue the activities of living beings. ("The Bearings of Pragmatism Upon Education", in MW4: 180)

Thus, Dewey replaced Kant's mind-centered system with one centered upon experience-nature transactions-"a reversal", Dewey wrote, "comparable to a Copernican revolution" ( QC, LW4: 232).

4.3 Inquiry, Knowledge, and Truth

In the context of instrumentalism, what do "logic" and "epistemology" amount to? Dewey remains focused on these subject matters but insisted on a more empirical approach. How, he asked, does reasoning and learning actually happen? Dewey addresses the nature of logic in his major 1938 study, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry ( LTI, LW12); his term for logic is the "inquiry into inquiry". LTI undertakes the systematic process of collecting, organizing, and explicating the actual conditions of different kinds of inquiry; the aim of this reconstructed logic, as outlined in the 1917 "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy", is pragmatic and ameliorative: to provide an "important aid in proper guidance of further attempts at knowing" (MW10: 23).

Throughout his career, Dewey described processes and patterns evident in active problem solving. Here, we consider three: inquiry, knowledge, and truth. There is, Dewey argued, a "pattern of inquiry" which prevails in problem solving. In "Analysis of Reflective Thinking" (1933, LW8) and LTI (LW12) it has five phases. Explicitly disavowing categorical divisions between emotion and reason, the initial phase of inquiry begins (1) with a feeling of something amiss, a unique and particular doubtfulness; this feeling endures as a pervasive quality imbued in inquiry and serves as a kind of "guide" to subsequent phases. Next, because what is initially present is indeterminate, (2) a problem must be specifically formulated; problems do not preexist inquiry, as typically assumed. Next, (3) a hypothesis is constructed, one which imaginatively utilizes both theoretical ideas and perceptual facts to forecast the possible consequences of various operations. Next, in phase (4), one reasons through the meanings involved in the hypothesis, sizing up the implications or possible contradictions involved; frequently, what is discovered here requires a return to an earlier phase (to reformulate the hypothesis or even the problem). Finally, inquiry comes to a close with phase (5), acting to evaluate and test the hypothesis; here, it is revealed whether a proposed solution solves the problem, or to put it LTI 's terminology, whether inquiry has converted an "indeterminate situation" into a "determinate one".

The inquiry pattern Dewey sketched is schematic; he noted that actual cases of reasoning often do not show such discreteness or linearity. Thus, the pattern is not a summary of how people always think but rather how exemplary cases of inquirential thinking unfold (e.g., in the empirical sciences).

Knowledge, as viewed by Dewey's transactional model of inquiry, departs from tradition; in effect, it is brought to earth. "Knowledge, as an abstract term", Dewey wrote,

is a name for the product of competent inquiries. Apart from this relation, its meaning is so empty that any content or filling may be arbitrarily poured in. ( LTI, LW12: 16)

To understand a product, one must understand the process; this is what Dewey does. Denying the importance of knowledge, qua isolable product, is effectively denying a metaphysical account of reality that makes mind-the-substance separate from everything else. It does not depreciate knowing as an activity, and Dewey strongly maintained that "intelligence" is a crucial mediator of individual and societal conflict.

Truth, too, is radically reevaluated. For too long, truth connoted an ideal-an epistemic fixity (a correspondence, a coherence) which could terminate all further inquiry. As this is not the actual situation human beings (or philosophy) inhabits, the ideal should be set aside. Still, Dewey was ever the (re)constructivist; in "Experience, Knowledge, and Value" (1939c) he provided an account of truth; it no longer pointed toward some transcendental thing, but toward the process of inquiry ("Experience, Knowledge, and Value", LW14: 56-57). To label a proposition "true" is to say it offers some reliability as a resource in further inquiry:

In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry. ( LTI, LW12: 16)

Truth does not stand outside of experience, but is an experienced relation, particularly one which is socially shared. In How We Think, Dewey wrote,

Truth, in final analysis, is the statement of things "as they are," not as they are in the inane and desolate void of isolation from human concern, but as they are in a shared and progressive experience....Truth, truthfulness, transparent and brave publicity of intercourse, are the source and the reward of friendship. Truth is having things in common. ( HWT, MW6: 67; see also "The Experimental Theory of Knowledge", 1910b, MW3: 118)

In Dewey's instrumentalism, then, knowledge and truth are adjectival not nominative, they describe a process which, as Peirce tells us, can go on as long as we do. "There is no belief so settled as not to be exposed to further inquiry" (LTI, LW12: 16). To understand why words like "knowledge" and "truth" deserve to be honorifics, one must understand their historic value as tools that have aided past inquiries and helped secure experiences of value.

5. Philosophy of Education

It is probably fair to say that, around the world, Dewey remains as well know for his educational theories (see entry on philosophy of education, section Rousseau, Dewey, and the progressive movement) as for his philosophical ones. However, a closer look at Dewey's body of work shows how often these theories align. Dewey recognized this, reflecting that his 1916 magnum opus in education, Democracy and Education ( DE, MW9) "was for many years that [work] in which my philosophy, such as it is, was most fully expounded" ( FAE, LW5: 156). DE argued that philosophy itself could be understood as "the general theory of education". In lieu of philosophy's increasing tendencies to become hyper-specialized and technical, he urged a greater investment in the problems affecting everyday life. In effect this was a call to see philosophy from the standpoint of education. Dewey wrote,

Education offers a vantage ground from which to penetrate to the human, as distinct from the technical, significance of philosophic discussions....The educational point of view enables one to envisage the philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice. If we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education. ( DE, MW9: 338)

Dewey was active in education his entire life. Besides high school and college teaching, he devised curricula, established, reviewed and administered schools and departments of education, participated in collective organizing, consulted and lectured internationally, and wrote extensively on many facets of education. He established the University of Chicago's Laboratory School as an experimental site for theories in instrumental logic and psychological functionalism. This school also became a site for democratic expression by the local community.

5.1 Experiential Learning and Teaching

Dewey's "Reflex Arc" paper applied functionalism to education. "Reflex" argued that human experience is not a disjointed sequence of fits and starts, but a developing circuit of activities. Learning deserves to be framed in this way: as a cumulative, progressive process where inquirers move from the dissatisfying phase of doubt toward another marked by the satisfying resolution of a problem. "Reflex" also shows that the subject of a stimulus (e.g., the pupil) is not a passive recipient of, say, a sensation but an agent who takes it amidst other ongoing activities in a larger environmental field.

Cognizance of such fundamental facts entailed, Dewey argued, that educators discard pedagogies based on the "blank slate" model of curriculum. Rather, in The School and Society, Dewey wrote, "the question of education is the question of taking hold of [children's] activities, of giving them direction" (MW1: 25). Dewey's How We Think (1910c, MW6) was intended, primarily, to instruct teachers how to apply instrumentalism; education's intellectual goals could be advanced by acquainting children with the general intellectual habits of scientific inquiry.

The native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. ( HWT, MW6: 179)

Given Dewey's different approach to psychology, teaching roles would need revision. While teachers still had to know their subject matter, they also needed to understand the student's cultural and personal backgrounds. Learning as an activity which incorporated actual problems necessitated a careful integration of lessons with specific learners. Traditional motivational strategies, too, had to change; rather than relying on rewards or punishments, Deweyan teachers were called to reimagine the whole learning environment; they must merge the school's preexisting curricular goals with their pupils' present interests. One way to do this was by identifying specific problems able to bridge curriculum and student and then create situations in which students have to work them out. The problem-centered approach demanded a lot from teachers, as it required training in subject matters, child psychology, and various pedagogies capable of interweaving these together.

5.2 Traditionalists, Romantics, and Dewey

Dewey's educational philosophy emerged amidst a fierce 1890's debate between educational "romantics" and "traditionalists". Romantics (also called "New" or "Progressive" education by Dewey), urged a "child-centered" approach; they claimed that the child's natural impulses provided education's proper starting point. As active and creative beings, education should not fetter growth-even instruction should be subordinated to content if necessary. Traditionalists (called "Old" education by Dewey) pressed for a "curriculum-centered" approach. Children were empty cabinets which curriculum fills with civilization's lessons. Content was supreme, and instruction should discipline children to ensure they are receptive.

Still, of these two approaches, Dewey tilted more strongly against the high value placed by traditionalists on discipline and memorization. While recognizing the legitimacy of conveying content (facts, values), Dewey thought it paramount for schools to eschew indoctrination. Educating meant incorporating, with a wide berth for personal freedom, unique individuals into a changing society which-this had to remain clear-would soon be under their dominion. This is why who the child was mattered so very much. Following colleague and lifelong friend G.H. Mead, Dewey argued that any child's "self" was an emerging construct of social and personal experiences, so no child's deeds, words, or interests could be isolated from their social context. Insofar as these were facts of social psychology, schools had to become micro-communities to best reflect children's growing interests and needs. "The school cannot be a preparation for social life excepting as it reproduces, within itself, the typical conditions of social life" ("Ethical Principles Underlying Education", 1897a, EW5: 61-62).

5.3 Democracy Through Education

Dewey's efforts to connect child, school, and society were motivated by more than just a desire for better pedagogical methods. Because character, rights, and duties are informed by and contribute to the social realm, schools were critical sites to learn and experiment with democracy. Democratic life consists not only in civic and economic conduct, but more crucially in habits of problem solving, compassionate imagination, creative expression, and civic self-governance. The full range of roles a child might assume in life is vast; once this is appreciated, it is incumbent upon society to make education its highest political and economic priority. During WWII, Dewey wrote,

There will be almost a revolution in school education when study and learning are treated not as acquisition of what others know but as development of capital to be invested in eager alertness in observing and judging the conditions under which one lives. Yet until this happens, we shall be ill-prepared to deal with a world whose outstanding trait is change. ("Between Two Worlds", 1944, LW17: 463)

Democracy, on Dewey's view, was much more comprehensive than a form of government. "Democracy", Dewey wrote, "is not an alternative to other principles of associated life [but] the idea of community life itself" ( PP, LW2: 328). Individuals exist in communities; as their lives change, needs and conflicts emerge that require intelligent management; we must make sense out of new experiences. Education

is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience. ( DE, MW9: 82)

In other words, the engine of America's political identity was creative experimentation; in order to fulfill their eventual roles as fully participating citizens, students needed education in the habits (imaginative, empirical) which made the experimental sciences so successful. Dewey called such attitudes and habits "intelligence".

Informing all the spheres just discussed-science, education, and democratic life-is Dewey's naturalism which places hope not in what is immutable or ultimate (God, Nature, Reason, Ends) but in the human capacity to learn from life. In "Creative Democracy-The Task Before Us" (1939b) Dewey wrote,

Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education. All ends and values that are cut off from the ongoing process become arrests, fixations. They strive to fixate what has been gained instead of using it to open the road and point the way to new and better experiences. ("Creative Democracy", LW14: 229)

The success or failure of democracy rests on education. Education is most determinative of whether citizens develop the habits needed to investigate problematic beliefs and situations, to communicate openly, throughout. While every culture aims to convey values and beliefs to the coming generation, it is critical, Dewey thought, to distinguish between education which inculcates collaborative and creative hypothesizing and education which foments obeisance to parochialism and dogma. And philosophy must apply this same standard to itself.

6. Ethics

Dewey wrote extensively on ethics throughout his career; some writings were explicitly about ethics, but ethical analyses are present in works with other foci. As elsewhere, Dewey critiques then reconstructs traditional views; he argued it is typical for traditional systems (e.g., teleological, deontological, or virtue-based) to seek comprehensive and monocausal accounts of, for example, ultimate aims, duties, or values. Such ideal theory is obligated to explain morality's requirements for all individuals actions or character.

Dewey, in contrast, argued for a more experimental approach. Rather than a grand and final explanatory account of moral life, ethics describes intelligent methods for dealing with novel and morally perplexing situations. There are no stipulated, ultimate values, nor should any be sought. At best, the only value toward which he would gesture was "growth". Ethics means inquiry into concrete, problematic conditions; such inquiry may use theories to inform hypotheses tested in experience. Reliable hypotheses may come to be called "knowledge", but must, in the end, be considered fallible and revisable. Actual resolutions to moral problems, Dewey observed, typically point toward plural factors (aims, duties, virtues), rather than just one ( TIF, LW5). Moreover, actual conduct (including inquiry) is undertaken not by isolated, rational actors but by fundamentally social beings. "Conduct", Dewey wrote,

is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical "ought" that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good. ( HNC, MW14: 16)

Dewey's ethical theory, like those in education and politics, utilizes his transactional views of experience, habit, inquiry, and the communicative, social self. It also exemplifies Dewey's metaphysics of a world both precarious and stable, where conflict is natural and quests to deny or permanently eradicate it are fantastical. Conflict is a generic trait of life, not a defect; theories denying this tend to be so reductive and absolutist that they divorce inquiry from the essential details of concrete situations, cultures, and persons. Such strategies tend to fail.

Progress in ethical theory, then, means improvements that render inquiry more discriminating, more revelatory of alternatives and consequences. Improved deliberation is crucial to more effective inquiry; Dewey argued this requires being open to contributions from many sources: all sciences, social customs, jurisprudence, biographies, and, yes, even moral systems of the past. Deliberation especially benefits from what Dewey called "dramatic rehearsal", where creative and dramatic enactment adds to logical tools and helps illuminate the emotional weight and color of potential ethical choices.

For further details on Dewey's ethics, see the entry Dewey's moral philosophy by E. Anderson (2018).

7. Political Philosophy

Dewey's political philosophy, like other areas, presumes that that individuals subsist transactionally with their social environment, and can use inquiry to solve problems in hypothetical and experimental ways. As elsewhere, theory is instrumental; concepts and systems are tools initially devised to function in particular, practical circumstances. While those proving valuable can be retained for reuse, all are considered fallible and capable of reconstruction. Dewey rejected approaches relying upon non-empirical, a priori assumptions (e.g., about human nature, historical progress, etc.) or which propose ultimate, often monocausal, explanations. Dewey criticized and reconstructed core political concepts (individual, freedom, right, community, public, state, and democracy) along naturalist and experimentalist lines; besides numerous articles (for academic and lay audiences), Dewey's political thought can be found in books such as The Public and Its Problems (1927b, LW2), Individualism, Old and New (1930f, LW5), Liberalism and Social Action (1935, LW11), and Freedom and Culture (1939d, LW13). Because Democracy and Education (1916b, DE, MW9) emphasizes profound connections between education, society, and democratic habits-it also merits study as a "political" work.

Enormous changes took place during Dewey's lifetime, including massive US population growth, the rise of industrial, scientific, technological, and educational institutions, the American Civil War and two world wars, and a global economic depression. These events strained prevailing liberal theories, and Dewey labored to revise both democracy and liberalism. "The frontier is moral, not physical", Dewey urged, proposing that democracy was tantamount to a "way of life", and required continual renewal to survive. Beyond governmental machinery (universal suffrage, recurring elections, political parties, trial by peers, etc.), democracy was "primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience" ( DE, MW9: 93; see also, PP, LW2: 325). Such experience, expressed as collaborative inquiry, required the intellectual and emotional competencies necessary to tackle shared problems and negotiate value differences. Ultimately, democracy requires faith in experience as a sufficient resource for future solutions and that it is no longer necessary to place faith into transcendent rules or aims.

Dewey's analysis of individualism grew both from earlier academic interests and from his sensitivity to contemporary economic and technological pressures. The older "atomic" individualism-where natural egoists vie to maximize their standing-was now harming not protecting individuals; such individualism, deployed as a rhetorical pretext, was enabling the wealthy and powerful to undermine (for most) the protections which justified liberalism, initially!

Dewey's counter-proposal was "renascent liberalism". By reconstructing its core concept ("atomic" individuals become "social"), Dewey also revised other key political notions-e.g., "liberty", "freedom", and "rights",-and placed them in an instrumentalist framework ( LSA, LW11: 35; E, MW5: 394). Also revised are concomitant notions of "community" and "public". The Deweyan "public" forms around problems; the aim is to conduct experimental inquiry and act for redress ( PP, LW2: 314). Dewey also expressed a grave concern, still with us today, regarding "inchoate" publics. Such publics consist of members lacking the critical education, time, and attention necessary for inquiry. They present democracy with perhaps its most significant and undermining condition ( PP, LW2: 321, 317).

For further details on Dewey's political theory, see the entry on Dewey's political philosophy by M. Festenstein (2014).

8. Art and Aesthetic Experience

In his magnum opus on aesthetics, Art as Experience ( AE, LW10: 31) Dewey stated that art, as a conscious idea, is "the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity" (31). Such high praise, especially from a philosopher with expertise in (what remains) philosophy's "main" subjects (e.g., knowledge, ethics, science) deserves notice. Dewey began writing about aesthetics from early in his career-on art's relevance to psychology (1887, EW2) and education (1897c, EW5), on why the distinction between "fine" and "practical" art should be rejected (1891, EW3: 310-311), and on Bosanquet (1893, EW4). His own theory emerged in Experience and Nature (1925a, EN, LW1) and flourished in AE (1934b), proposing that aesthetics is central to philosophy's proper mission: to render everyday experience more fulfilling and meaningful.

Dewey's aesthetics has, arguably, four main objectives. First, it explicates art's ontology, the interrelated processes of making and appreciation, and specifies the functions of interpretation and criticism. Second, it examines arts' social role in presenting, reimagining, and projecting human identity. Third, it analyzes the communicative functions of art, especially in education and political life. Finally, it describes and analyzes the implications of art's expression as experience; such experience is so vivified and integrated as to be qualitatively distinct-experience as "consummatory". Consummatory experience happens occasionally; sometimes it occurs not in an "artistic" context (concert, museum, etc.) but in unexpectedly quotidian circumstances. Nevertheless, it is also life at its fullest. Determining how more of life's experiences could become consummatory is the main purpose of Dewey's aesthetics.

Thus, the main question AE poses is: How did a chasm arise between the arts, artists and ordinary people? How have cultural conditions and aesthetic theories (reinforced by institutions) isolated "art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing"? ( AE, LW10: 16) AE makes explicit art's natural continuities with everyday life, while seeking to prevent its reduction to mere entertainment or "transient pleasurable excitations" ( AE, LW10: 16). Dewey criticizes traditional aesthetics' spectatorial (or theoretical) starting point and goes on to offer radically empirical accounts of art making, appreciation, expression, form, and criticism. Because aesthetic experience has organic roots, it can be recognized even in everyday objects and events. Again, the goal is to dissolve the dualisms between "fine" and "useful" objects and to help establish a greater "continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living" ( AE, LW10: 16).

For further details on Dewey's aesthetics, see entry on Dewey's aesthetics by T. Leddy (2016).

9. Religion, Religious Experience and A Common Faith

The whole story of man shows that there are no objects that may not deeply stir engrossing emotion. One of the few experiments in the attachment of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of devotion, so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in social action. ( A Common Faith, 1934a, LW9: 52-53)

9.1 Dewey's Religious Background

Dewey grew up in a religious family; his mother was especially devout and pressured her sons to live up to a similar devotion. His family church was Congregationalist; a bit later, including in college, Liberal Evangelicalism proved to be a more acceptable form of Christianity. At twenty-one, while living in Oil City, Pennsylvania, Dewey had a "mystic experience" which he reported to friend Max Eastman:

There was no vision, not even a definable emotion-just a supremely blissful feeling that his worries [about whether he prayed sufficiently in earnest] were over. (Dykhuizen 1973: 22)

Dewey belonged to congregations for about thirty-five years and turned away circa 1894, as he left for a post in Chicago. From then on, Dewey's deepest loyalties lay outside religion; he was, as John J. McDermott put it,

an unregenerate philosophical naturalist, one for whom the human journey is constitutive of its own meaning and is not to be rescued by any transcendent explanations, principles of accountability, or posthumous salvation. (McDermott 2006, 50-51)

Dewey returned to philosophical issues of religion in the 1930's. "What I Believe" (1930, LW5) argued for a new kind of "faith", a "tendency toward action". Such a faith would not be directed transcendentally, but would signify that "experience itself is the sole ultimate authority" ("What I Believe", LW5: 267). This is not self-enclosed experience, of course, but comes from "the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning" ("What I Believe", LW5: 272). In 1933-34, Dewey gave the Terry Lectures at Yale, later published as A Common Faith (1934a, ACF, LW9), Dewey's major statement on religion and religious experience.

9.2 Aligning Naturalism and Religion

The challenge A Common Faith took on seems, in retrospect, insurmountable. He wished to reconstruct religion in a way which harmonized it with his empiricism and naturalism, while showing how the power of religious experience and belief could be transformed in ways which supported and advanced a secular conception of democracy. Religions vary, of course, but to a large degree they posit transcendent, eternal, unobservable entities and reveal themselves in ways which are not, shall we say, open to verification. Empirical experience (regardless of its specific construal) is seen as inferior-whether castigated as flux, illusion, uncertainty, or confusion, it must be left behind. In short, Dewey had squared himself against the metaphysics, epistemology, and seemingly the morality, of major religions.

It is worth noting who were ACF's intended audience. Dewey was not addressing believers contented with supernatural religion, nor religious liberals seeking a via media postulating discrete realms to scientific and spiritual truths. Also, he was not addressing militant atheists, whose dogmatism Dewey rejected. Rather, ACF addressed those who, despite their abandonment of supernaturalism, nevertheless believe themselves to be religious ("Experience, Knowledge, and Value", LW14: 79-80). ACF was meant to salvage whatever made the religious attitude experientially valuable while shedding both traditional religious frameworks and supernaturalistic beliefs.

9.3 "Religion" vs. "Religious"

Dewey's strategy, then, was to pry "religious" experience away from religion, to show how religious experience may be framed within a natural and social context. Because Dewey can find no clear, univocal meaning for "religion", the alternative was to look more closely at religious experience ( ACF, LW9: 7). To mention just two conclusions, Dewey found that whichever qualities exhibited by religious experience (feelings of peace, wholeness, security, etc.), none offered evidence for the supernatural. In other words, a religious experience's report can no more count as a judgment about causation than pointing to a book's description can prove a physical law ( ACF, LW9ff.).

A second conclusion was that religious experience is not hermetic, unable to color or affect other experiences. Just a sunset may have an "aesthetic" element or a linguistic remark may have a "moral" tint, there may be a religious coloration of a variety of experiences ( ACF, LW9: 9.). Understood in this sense, the "religious" character of experience is an attitude, one lending "deep and enduring support to the processes of living" ( ACF, LW9: 15). Dewey analyzed religiosity in this sense by comparing it with a certain kind of coping. Consider three options: (1) one can accommodate an obstacle by merely resigning to put up with the conditions they impose; (2) one can adapt or modify the obstacle's conditions to one's liking; finally, (3) one can adjust to the obstacle in such a way that one both changes one's attitude and alters the conditions. (Consider, as adjustment, the case of of becoming a parent which demands significant changes that encompass both self and environment.) This last option (3) of adjustment is characteristic of religious experience for it is "inclusive and deep seated" and transformative of attitudes in "generic and enduring" ways ( ACF, LW9: 12,13). In adjustment, imaginative possibilities are projected and then put into action-both in oneself (wants, aims, ideals) and in surrounding conditions-and the cumulative impact is an evolution of identity ( ACF, LW9: 13).

9.4 Faith and God

Dewey effort to naturalize religion (by shifting the focus toward a non-transcendental understanding of "religious experience") also required a reinterpretation of other traditional notions-such as "faith" and "God". Faith, typically, is juxtaposed with reason. Faith requires neither empirical inquiry nor verification; one has faith in the evidence of (transcendent, ultimate) things not seen. Also, faith typically connotes intellectual acceptance, again without proof, of religious propositions (such as "God exists and loves mankind").

The faith Dewey can accept is "natural piety". Natural piety is not grounded in unseen, supernatural powers but, Dewey wrote, in a "just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts" and the recognition that as parts we are

marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. (ACF, LW9: 18)

Faith grounded in natural piety accepts the idea that (again) "experience itself is the sole ultimate authority" ("What I Believe", LW5: 267).

Dewey's naturalism, of course, disallows a traditional God-a single being responsible for the physical and moral universe, and its inhabitants. Belief in God is neither warranted nor advisable. Instead, Dewey offers a reconstruction of "God". Very briefly, he asks that we think not of a singular object but of the qualities to which God is compared-goodness, wisdom, love. Such descriptions show that God represents our highest ideals. Remove the idea of a possessor of ideals and add in the way in which ideals pull from us the means (imagination, calculation, action) to put make ideas actual -and one begins to grasp Dewey's notion.

This idea of God, or of the divine is also connected with all the natural forces and conditions-including man and human association-that promote the growth of the ideal and that further its realization....It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name "God". ( ACF, LW9: 34; see also 29-30)

9.5 Religion as Social Intelligence-a Common Faith

As a pragmatist, a meliorist, and a humane democrat, Dewey sought a way to harness the undeniable power of religion and religious experience toward an end beneficial to all. Religion, he understood, provides people with a story about the larger universe and how they fit within it. He knew it was not enough to criticize religion, because this leaves powerful human needs unmet. Dewey did not propose swapping out old religious institutions for new ones; he hoped, rather, that the emancipation of religious experience from institutional and ideological shackles might direct its energies toward something like a "common faith", a passion for imaginative intelligence pursuing moral goods. The methods of inquiry and criticism are not mysteries; they are deeply familiar already. The necessary turn would come when religious persons realize that inquiry could be extended to enhance religious experience and values ( ACF, LW9: 23). If it could be appreciated how many celebrated accomplishments were due not to God but to intelligent, human collaboration, then perhaps the idea of community could inspire a non-sectarian, common faith.

Dewey's call for a common faith was, he thought, deeply democratic. Why? Because the idea of the supernatural was, by definition, suspicious of experience (as an adequate guide) and, consequently, suspicious of empirical methods of inquiry. Unchecked by lived experience or experiment, supernaturalism can produce especially deep divisions. The approach of Dewey's common faith is, in contrast, intertwined with experimental inquiry-drawing upon lived experience and constantly renewed through open communication. This is why Dewey's exhortation to trade traditional religious faith for a common faith in empirical intelligence is of a piece with his experimental ideal of democracy.

Bibliography

Dewey

Collections

Citations to John Dewey's works are to the thirty-seven-volume critical edition The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-1991). The series includes:

[EW] 1967, The Early Works, 1882-1898, 5 volumes.

[MW] 1976, The Middle Works, 1899-1924, 15 volumes.

[LW] 1981, The Later Works, 1925-1953, 17 volumes.

This critical edition was also published in electronic form as:

The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953: The Electronic Edition, Larry A. Hickman (ed.), Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex Corporation, 1996,available online. To insure uniformity of citation, the electronic edition preserves the line and page breaks of the print edition.

In-text citations give the original publication date, series abbreviation, followed by volume and page number. For example LW10: 12 refers to page 12 of Art as Experience, which is published as volume 10 of The Later Works.

Abbreviations of Dewey works frequently cited

[ACF] 1934a, A Common Faith

[AE] 1934b, Art as Experience

[DE] 1916b, Democracy and Education

[E] 1908, Ethics, with James H. Tufts,

[E-rev] 1932, Ethics, revised edition, with James H. Tufts,

[EEL] 1916c, "Introduction" to Essays in Experimental Logic

[EN] 1925a, Experience and Nature

[FAE] 1930a, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism"

[H&A] 1998, The Essential Dewey

[HNC] 1922a, Human Nature and Conduct

[ION] 1930f, Individualism, Old and New

[LSA] 1935, Liberalism and Social Action

[LTI] 1938c, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry

[PIE] 1905, "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism"

[PP] 1927b, The Public and Its Problems

[QC] 1929, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action

[RAC] 1896, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology"

[RIP] 1920, Reconstruction in Philosophy

[TIF] 1930d, "Three Independent Factors in Morals"

[TV] 1939e, Theory of Valuation

Individual works

1884, "The New Psychology", Andover Review, 2(Sept.): 278-289. Reprinted in EW1: 48-60.

1886, "Psychology as Philosophic Method", Mind, old series, 11(42), 153-173. Reprinted in EW1: 144-67. doi:10.1093/mind/os-XI.42.153

1887, Psychology, New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted in EW2.

1891, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Register Publishing Company. Reprinted in EW3: 239-388.

1893, Dewey, review of Bosanquet, "A History of Aesthetic, by Bernard Bosanquet, formerly Fellow of University College, Oxford", Philosophical Review, 2 (Jan. 1893):63-69. Reprinted in EW4: 189-197.

1894a, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus, Ann Arbor, MI: The Inland Press. Reprinted in EW4: 220-362.

1894b, "The Theory of Emotion I: Emotional Attitudes", Psychological Review, 1(6): 553-569. Reprinted in EW4: 152-169. doi:10.1037/h0069054

1895, "The Theory of Emotion II: The Significance of Emotions", Psychological Review, 2(1): 13-32. Reprinted in EW4: 169-188. doi:10.1037/h0070927

[RAC] 1896, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology",Psychological Review, 3(4): 357-370. Reprinted in EW5: 96-109. doi:10.1037/h0070405

1897a, "Ethical Principles Underlying Education", in Third Yearbook of the National Herbart Society, Chicago: The National Herbart Society, pp. 7-33. Reprinted in EW5: 54-83.

1897b, "My Pedagogic Creed", School Journal, 54(Jan.): 77-80. Reprinted in EW5: 84-95.

1897c, "The Aesthetic Element in Education", Addresses and Proceedings of the National Educational Association, pp. 329-30. Reprinted in EW5: 202-204.

1899, The School and Society, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in MW1.

1900 [1916], "Some Stages of Logical Thought", The Philosophical Review, 9(5): 465-489. Revised and reprinted in 1916d: 183-219. Reprinted in MW1: 152-175. doi:10.2307/2176692

1903a, "Democracy in Education", Elementary School Teacher, 4 (1903): 193-204. Reprinted in MW3: 229-239.

1903b, Studies in Logical Theory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in MW2: 293-378.

[PIE] 1905, "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism",The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 2(15): 393-399. Reprinted in MW3: 158-167. doi:10.2307/2011400

1906, "Beliefs and Realities" (later retitled "Beliefs and Existences"), Philosophical Review, 15(2): 113-119; originally read as the Presidential Address at the fifth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, at Cambridge, December 28, 1905. Reprinted in MW3: 83-100. doi:10.2307/2177731

[E] 1908, with James H. Tufts, Ethics, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW5.

1908-1909, "The Bearings of Pragmatism Upon Education", Progressive Journal of Education, originally three papers, 1(Dec. 1908): 1-3; 1(Jan. 1909): 5-8; 1-(Feb. 1909): 6-7. Reprinted in MW4: 178-191

1910a, "A Short Catechism Concerning Truth", in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 154-168. Reprinted in MW6: 3-11.

1910b, "The Experimental Theory of Knowledge", The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 77-111. Reprinted in MW3: 107-127.

[HWT] 1910c, How We Think, Boston: D. C. Heath and Co. Reprinted in MW6.

1912, "Contributions to A Cyclopedia of Education", in MW7: 207-366.

1915, "The Subject-Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry", The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 12(13): 337. Reprinted in MW8: 3-13. doi:10.2307/2013770

1916a, "Brief Studies in Realism", in 1916d: 250-280. Reprinted in MW6: 103-122. Revised version of an article in two parts in 1911, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 8(15): 393-400, 8(20): 546-454.

1916b, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, New York: Macmillan. Reprinted in MW9.

[EEL] 1916c, "Introduction" to 1916d: v-vi. Reprinted in MW10: 320-365.

1916d, Essays in Experimental Logic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1917, "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy", in his Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude, New York: Henry Holt and Co., pp. 3-69. Reprinted in MW10: 3-49

[RIP] 1920, Reconstruction in Philosophy, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW12.

[HNC] 1922a, Human Nature and Conduct, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in MW14.

1922b, "Realism without Monism or Dualism", Journal of Philosophy, 19(12): 309-317, 19(13): 351-361 Reprinted in MW13: 40-60. doi:10.2307/2939872 doi:10.2307/2939610

1923, "Individuality in Education", General Science Quarterly, 7(3): 157-166. Reprinted in MW15: 170-179. doi:10.1002/sce.3730070301

[EN] 1925a, Experience and Nature, Chicago: Open Court Publishing.

1925, "The Naturalistic Theory of Perception by the Senses", The Journal of Philosophy, 22(22): 596-606. Reprinted in LW2: 44-54 as "A Naturalistic Theory of Sense-Perception". doi:10.2307/2015056

1927a, "Half-Hearted Naturalism", The Journal of Philosophy, 24(3): 57-64. Reprinted in LW3: 73-81. doi:10.2307/2014856

[PP] 1927b, The Public and Its Problems, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in LW2.

1927c, "The Rôle of Philosophy in the History of Civilization", The Philosophical Review, 36(1): 1-9. Reprinted in LW3: 3-11 as "Philosophy and Civilization". doi:10.2307/2179154

1928, "Social as a Category", Monist, 38(2): 161-177. Reprinted in LW3: 41-54 as "The Inclusive Philosophical Idea",. doi:10.5840/monist192838218

[QC] 1929, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW4.

[FAE] 1930a, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism", inContemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, George Plimpton Adams and William Pepperell Montague (eds), London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan Co., volume 2: 13-27. Reprinted in LW5: 147-60.

1930b, "Psychology and Work", Personnel Journal, 8(February): 337-341. Reprinted in LW5: 236-242

1930c, "Qualitative Thought", Symposium, 1(January): 5-32. Reprinted in hisPhilosophy and Civilization, New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1931, pp. 93-116. Reprinted in LW5: 243-262.

[TIF] 1930d, "Trois facteurs indépendants en matière de morale", Charles Cestre (trans.),Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, 30(4): 118-127. First publication in English, 1966, "Three Independent Factors in Morals",Educational Theory, 16(3): 198-209, Jo Ann Boydston (trans.). Reprinted in LW5: 279-288. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1966.tb00259.x

1930e, "What I Believe", Forum, 83(March): 176-182. Reprinted in LW5: 267-278.

[ION] 1930f, Individualism, Old and New, New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW5: 41-124.

1931, "Context and Thought", University of California Publications in Philosophy, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 12(3): 203-224. Reprinted in LW6: 3-21.

[E-rev] 1932, with James H. Tufts, Ethics, Revised Edition, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in LW7.

1933, "Analysis of Reflective Thinking", in How We Think. a Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process, new edition, Boston: D. C. Heath and Co., ch. 7. Reprinted in LW8: 196-209.

[ACF] 1934a, A Common Faith, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reprinted in LW9.

[AE] 1934b, Art as Experience, New York: Minton, Balch and Co. Reprinted in LW10.

[LSA] 1935, Liberalism and Social Action, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Reprinted in LW11: 1-66.

1936a, "A Liberal Speaks Out for Liberalism", New York Times Magazine, 23 February 1936, pp. 3, 24. Reprinted in LW11: 282-288.

1936b, "Authority and Social Change", School and Society, 44(10 October 1936): 457-466. Reprinted in LW11: 130-145.

1937, "Freedom", chapter 9 in National Education Association, Implications of Social-Economic Goals for Education: A Report of the Committee on Social- Economic Goals of America, Washington, DC: National Education Association, pp. 99-105. Reprinted in LW11: 247-255.

1938a, "Democracy and Education in the World of Today", pamphlet by the Society for Ethical Culture, New York. Reprinted in LW13: 294-303.

1938b, Experience and Education, New York: Macmillan. Reprinted in LW13.

[LTI] 1938c, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted in LW12.

1939a, "Biography of John Dewey", Jane M. Dewey (ed.), in Schilpp 1939: 3-45.

1939b, "Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us", in John Dewey and the Promise of America, Progressive, (Education Booklet No. 14), Columbus, OH: American Education Press. Reprinted in LW14: 224-230.

1939c, "Experience, Knowledge, and Value: A Rejoinder", in Schilpp 1939: 515-608, in LW14: 3-90.

1939d, Freedom and Culture, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Reprinted in LW13: 65-188.

[TV] 1939e, Theory of Valuation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reprinted in LW13.

1940a, "Nature in Experience", The Philosophical Review, 49(2): 244-258. Reprinted in LW14: 141-154. doi:10.2307/2180802

1940b, "Time and Individuality", in Time and Its Mysteries, series 2, New York: New York University Press, pp. 85-109. Reprinted in LW14: 98-114.

1941, "Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth", The Journal of Philosophy, 38(7): 169-186. Reprinted in LW14: 168-188. doi:10.2307/2017978

1944, "Between Two Worlds", Address delivered at the Winter Institute of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Fla., 20 March 1944. Printed in LW17: 451-465.

1949, "Experience and Existence: A Comment", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 9(4): 709-713. Reprinted in LW16: 383-390. doi:10.2307/2103300

[H&A] 1998, The Essential Dewey, L. Hickman and T. M. Alexander (eds.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Other sources

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John Dewey lead an active and multifarious life. He is the subject of numerous biographies and an enormous literature interpreting and evaluating his extraordinary body of work: forty books and approximately seven hundred articles in over one hundred and forty journals.

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Summary:
This article focuses on John Dewey, who was born in 1859 and died in 1952.
He was known for his views on progressive education, and from this, developed a broad body of work focusing on philosophical concerns.
The central focus of his work was "theory of knowledge"
John Dewey started in University of Chicago, then moved to Columbia and continued his life there.
Dewey not only grew as a leading philosopher and educational theorist, but also in the public mind.
Dewey's philosophical work received many varied responses from his colleagues and he was sensitive and responsive to the critics.
The influence of Dewey's work and other methods expanded over the world, causing change in many schools and educational practices.

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John Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism, a view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment. On this view, inquiry should not be understood as consisting of a mind passively observing the world and drawing from this ideas that if true correspond to reality, but rather as a process which initiates with a check or obstacle to successful human action, proceeds to active manipulation of the environment to test hypotheses, and issues in a re-adaptation of organism to environment that allows once again for human action to proceed. With this view as his starting point, Dewey developed a broad body of work encompassing virtually all of the main areas of philosophical concern in his day. He also wrote extensively on social issues in such popular publications as the New Republic, thereby gaining a reputation as a leading social commentator of his time.

Dewey's philosophical work received varied responses from his philosophical colleagues during his lifetime. There were many philosophers who saw his work, as Dewey himself understood it, as a genuine attempt to apply the principles of an empirical naturalism to the perennial questions of philosophy, providing a beneficial clarification of issues and the concepts used to address them. Dewey's critics, however, often expressed the opinion that his views were more confusing than clarifying, and that they appeared to be more akin to idealism than the scientifically based naturalism Dewey expressly avowed.

Table of Contents

1. Life and Works

John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859, the third of four sons born to Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemesia Rich of Burlington, Vermont. The eldest sibling died in infancy, but the three surviving brothers attended the public school and the University of Vermont in Burlington with John. While at the University of Vermont, Dewey was exposed to evolutionary theory through the teaching of G.H. Perkins and Lessons in Elementary Physiology, a text by T.H. Huxley, the famous English evolutionist. The theory of natural selection continued to have a life-long impact upon Dewey's thought, suggesting the barrenness of static models of nature, and the importance of focusing on the interaction between the human organism and its environment when considering questions of psychology and the theory of knowledge. The formal teaching in philosophy at the University of Vermont was confined for the most part to the school of Scottish realism, a school of thought that Dewey soon rejected, but his close contact both before and after graduation with his teacher of philosophy, H.A.P. Torrey, a learned scholar with broader philosophical interests and sympathies, was later accounted by Dewey himself as "decisive" to his philosophical development.

After graduation in 1879, Dewey taught high school for two years, during which the idea of pursuing a career in philosophy took hold. With this nascent ambition in mind, he sent a philosophical essay to W.T. Harris, then editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and the most prominent of the St. Louis Hegelians. Harris's acceptance of the essay gave Dewey the confirmation he needed of his promise as a philosopher. With this encouragement he traveled to Baltimore to enroll as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University.

At Johns Hopkins Dewey came under the tutelage of two powerful and engaging intellects who were to have a lasting influence on him. George Sylvester Morris, a German-trained Hegelian philosopher, exposed Dewey to the organic model of nature characteristic of German idealism. G. Stanley Hall, one of the most prominent American experimental psychologists at the time, provided Dewey with an appreciation of the power of scientific methodology as applied to the human sciences. The confluence of these viewpoints propelled Dewey's early thought, and established the general tenor of his ideas throughout his philosophical career.

Upon obtaining his doctorate in 1884, Dewey accepted a teaching post at the University of Michigan, a post he was to hold for ten years, with the exception of a year at the University of Minnesota in 1888. While at Michigan Dewey wrote his first two books: Psychology (1887), and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888). Both works expressed Dewey's early commitment to Hegelian idealism, while the Psychology explored the synthesis between this idealism and experimental science that Dewey was then attempting to effect. At Michigan Dewey also met one of his important philosophical collaborators, James Hayden Tufts, with whom he would later author Ethics (1908; revised ed. 1932).

In 1894, Dewey followed Tufts to the recently founded University of Chicago. It was during his years at Chicago that Dewey's early idealism gave way to an empirically based theory of knowledge that was in concert with the then developing American school of thought known as pragmatism. This change in view finally coalesced into a series of four essays entitled collectively "Thought and its Subject-Matter," which was published along with a number of other essays by Dewey's colleagues and students at Chicago under the title Studies in Logical Theory (1903). Dewey also founded and directed a laboratory school at Chicago, where he was afforded an opportunity to apply directly his developing ideas on pedagogical method. This experience provided the material for his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899).

Disagreements with the administration over the status of the Laboratory School led to Dewey's resignation from his post at Chicago in 1904. His philosophical reputation now secured, he was quickly invited to join the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University. Dewey spent the rest of his professional life at Columbia. Now in New York, located in the midst of the Northeastern universities that housed many of the brightest minds of American philosophy, Dewey developed close contacts with many philosophers working from divergent points of view, an intellectually stimulating atmosphere which served to nurture and enrich his thought.

During his first decade at Columbia Dewey wrote a great number of articles in the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, many of which were published in two important books: The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (1910) and Essays in Experimental Logic(1916). His interest in educational theory also continued during these years, fostered by his work at Teachers College at Columbia. This led to the publication of How We Think (1910; revised ed. 1933), an application of his theory of knowledge to education, and Democracy and Education (1916), perhaps his most important work in the field.

During his years at Columbia Dewey's reputation grew not only as a leading philosopher and educational theorist, but also in the public mind as an important commentator on contemporary issues, the latter due to his frequent contributions to popular magazines such as The New Republic and Nation, as well as his ongoing political involvement in a variety of causes, such as women's suffrage and the unionization of teachers. One outcome of this fame was numerous invitations to lecture in both academic and popular venues. Many of his most significant writings during these years were the result of such lectures, including Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature(1925), The Public and its Problems (1927), and The Quest for Certainty (1929).

Dewey's retirement from active teaching in 1930 did not curtail his activity either as a public figure or productive philosopher. Of special note in his public life was his participation in the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Against Leon Trotsky at the Moscow Trial, which exposed Stalin's political machinations behind the Moscow trials of the mid-1930s, and his defense of fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell against an attempt by conservatives to remove him from his chair at the College of the City of New York in 1940. A primary focus of Dewey's philosophical pursuits during the 1930s was the preparation of a final formulation of his logical theory, published as Logic: The Theory of Inquiry in 1938. Dewey's other significant works during his retirement years include Art as Experience (1934), A Common Faith(1934), Freedom and Culture (1939), Theory of Valuation (1939), and Knowing and the Known(1949), the last coauthored with Arthur F. Bentley. Dewey continued to work vigorously throughout his retirement until his death on June 2, 1952, at the age of ninety-two.

2. Theory of Knowledge

The central focus of Dewey's philosophical interests throughout his career was what has been traditionally called "epistemology," or the "theory of knowledge." It is indicative, however, of Dewey's critical stance toward past efforts in this area that he expressly rejected the term "epistemology," preferring the "theory of inquiry" or "experimental logic" as more representative of his own approach.

In Dewey's view, traditional epistemologies, whether rationalist or empiricist, had drawn too stark a distinction between thought, the domain of knowledge, and the world of fact to which thought purportedly referred: thought was believed to exist apart from the world, epistemically as the object of immediate awareness, ontologically as the unique aspect of the self. The commitment of modern rationalism, stemming from Descartes, to a doctrine of innate ideas, ideas constituted from birth in the very nature of the mind itself, had effected this dichotomy; but the modern empiricists, beginning with Locke, had done the same just as markedly by their commitment to an introspective methodology and a representational theory of ideas. The resulting view makes a mystery of the relevance of thought to the world: if thought constitutes a domain that stands apart from the world, how can its accuracy as an account of the world ever be established? For Dewey a new model, rejecting traditional presumptions, was wanting, a model that Dewey endeavored to develop and refine throughout his years of writing and reflection.

In his early writings on these issues, such as "Is Logic a Dualistic Science?" (1890) and "The Present Position of Logical Theory" (1891), Dewey offered a solution to epistemological issues mainly along the lines of his early acceptance of Hegelian idealism: the world of fact does not stand apart from thought, but is itself defined within thought as its objective manifestation. But during the succeeding decade Dewey gradually came to reject this solution as confused and inadequate.

A number of influences have bearing on Dewey's change of view. For one, Hegelian idealism was not conducive to accommodating the methodologies and results of experimental science which he accepted and admired. Dewey himself had attempted to effect such an accommodation between experimental psychology and idealism in his early Psychology (1887), but the publication of William James' Principles of Psychology (1891), written from a more thoroughgoing naturalistic stance, suggested the superfluity of idealist principles in the treatment of the subject.

Second, Darwin's theory of natural selection suggested in a more particular way the form which a naturalistic approach to the theory of knowledge should take. Darwin's theory had renounced supernatural explanations of the origins of species by accounting for the morphology of living organisms as a product of a natural, temporal process of the adaptation of lineages of organisms to their environments, environments which, Darwin understood, were significantly determined by the organisms that occupied them. The key to the naturalistic account of species was a consideration of the complex interrelationships between organisms and environments. In a similar way, Dewey came to believe that a productive, naturalistic approach to the theory of knowledge must begin with a consideration of the development of knowledge as an adaptive human response to environing conditions aimed at an active restructuring of these conditions. Unlike traditional approaches in the theory of knowledge, which saw thought as a subjective primitive out of which knowledge was composed, Dewey's approach understood thought genetically, as the product of the interaction between organism and environment, and knowledge as having practical instrumentality in the guidance and control of that interaction. Thus Dewey adopted the term "instrumentalism" as a descriptive appellation for his new approach.

Dewey's first significant application of this new naturalistic understanding was offered in his seminal article "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896). In this article, Dewey argued that the dominant conception of the reflex arc in the psychology of his day, which was thought to begin with the passive stimulation of the organism, causing a conscious act of awareness eventuating in a response, was a carry-over of the old, and errant, mind-body dualism. Dewey argued for an alternative view: the organism interacts with the world through self-guided activity that coordinates and integrates sensory and motor responses. The implication for the theory of knowledge was clear: the world is not passively perceived and thereby known; active manipulation of the environment is involved integrally in the process of learning from the start.

Dewey first applied this interactive naturalism in an explicit manner to the theory of knowledge in his four introductory essays in Studies in Logical Theory. Dewey identified the view expressed in Studies with the school of pragmatism, crediting William James as its progenitor. James, for his part, in an article appearing in the Psychological Bulletin, proclaimed the work as the expression of a new school of thought, acknowledging its originality.

A detailed genetic analysis of the process of inquiry was Dewey's signal contribution to Studies. Dewey distinguished three phases of the process. It begins with the problematic situation, a situation where instinctive or habitual responses of the human organism to the environment are inadequate for the continuation of ongoing activity in pursuit of the fulfillment of needs and desires. Dewey stressed in Studies and subsequent writings that the uncertainty of the problematic situation is not inherently cognitive, but practical and existential. Cognitive elements enter into the process as a response to precognitive maladjustment.

The second phase of the process involves the isolation of the data or subject matter which defines the parameters within which the reconstruction of the initiating situation must be addressed. In the third, reflective phase of the process, the cognitive elements of inquiry (ideas, suppositions, theories, etc.) are entertained as hypothetical solutions to the originating impediment of the problematic situation, the implications of which are pursued in the abstract. The final test of the adequacy of these solutions comes with their employment in action. If a reconstruction of the antecedent situation conducive to fluid activity is achieved, then the solution no longer retains the character of the hypothetical that marks cognitive thought; rather, it becomes a part of the existential circumstances of human life.

The error of modern epistemologists, as Dewey saw it, was that they isolated the reflective stages of this process, and hypostatized the elements of those stages (sensations, ideas, etc.) into pre-existing constituents of a subjective mind in their search for an incorrigible foundation of knowledge. For Dewey, the hypostatization was as groundless as the search for incorrigibility was barren. Rejecting foundationalism, Dewey accepted the fallibilism that was characteristic of the school of pragmatism: the view that any proposition accepted as an item of knowledge has this status only provisionally, contingent upon its adequacy in providing a coherent understanding of the world as the basis for human action.

Dewey defended this general outline of the process of inquiry throughout his long career, insisting that it was the only proper way to understand the means by which we attain knowledge, whether it be the commonsense knowledge that guides the ordinary affairs of our lives, or the sophisticated knowledge arising from scientific inquiry. The latter is only distinguished from the former by the precision of its methods for controlling data, and the refinement of its hypotheses. In his writings in the theory of inquiry subsequent to Studies, Dewey endeavored to develop and deepen instrumentalism by considering a number of central issues of traditional epistemology from its perspective, and responding to some of the more trenchant criticisms of the view.

One traditional question that Dewey addressed in a series of essays between 1906 and 1909 was that of the meaning of truth. Dewey at that time considered the pragmatic theory of truth as central to the pragmatic school of thought, and vigorously defended its viability. Both Dewey and William James, in his book Pragmatism (1907), argued that the traditional correspondence theory of truth, according to which the true idea is one that agrees or corresponds to reality, only begs the question of what the "agreement" or "correspondence" of idea with reality is. Dewey and James maintained that an idea agrees with reality, and is therefore true, if and only if it is successfully employed in human action in pursuit of human goals and interests, that is, if it leads to the resolution of a problematic situation in Dewey's terms. The pragmatic theory of truth met with strong opposition among its critics, perhaps most notably from the British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Dewey later began to suspect that the issues surrounding the conditions of truth, as well as knowledge, were hopelessly obscured by the accretion of traditional, and in his view misguided, meanings to the terms, resulting in confusing ambiguity. He later abandoned these terms in favor of "warranted assertiblity" to describe the distinctive property of ideas that results from successful inquiry.

One of the most important developments of his later writings in the theory of knowledge was the application of the principles of instrumentalism to the traditional conceptions and formal apparatus of logical theory. Dewey made significant headway in this endeavor in his lengthy introduction to Essays in Experimental Logic, but the project reached full fruition in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.

The basis of Dewey's discussion in the Logic is the continuity of intelligent inquiry with the adaptive responses of pre-human organisms to their environments in circumstances that check efficient activity in the fulfillment of organic needs. What is distinctive about intelligent inquiry is that it is facilitated by the use of language, which allows, by its symbolic meanings and implication relationships, the hypothetical rehearsal of adaptive behaviors before their employment under actual, prevailing conditions for the purpose of resolving problematic situations. Logical form, the specialized subject matter of traditional logic, owes its genesis not to rational intuition, as had often been assumed by logicians, but due to its functional value in (1) managing factual evidence pertaining to the problematic situation that elicits inquiry, and (2) controlling the procedures involved in the conceptualized entertainment of hypothetical solutions. As Dewey puts it, "logical forms accrue to subject-matter when the latter is subjected to controlled inquiry."

From this new perspective, Dewey reconsiders many of the topics of traditional logic, such as the distinction between deductive and inductive inference, propositional form, and the nature of logical necessity. One important outcome of this work was a new theory of propositions. Traditional views in logic had held that the logical import of propositions is defined wholly by their syntactical form (e.g., "All As are Bs," "Some Bs are Cs"). In contrast, Dewey maintained that statements of identical propositional form can play significantly different functional roles in the process of inquiry. Thus in keeping with his distinction between the factual and conceptual elements of inquiry, he replaced the accepted distinctions between universal, particular, and singular propositions based on syntactical meaning with a distinction between existential and ideational propositions, a distinction that largely cuts across traditional classifications. The same general approach is taken throughout the work: the aim is to offer functional analyses of logical principles and techniques that exhibit their operative utility in the process of inquiry as Dewey understood it.

The breadth of topics treated and the depth and continuity of the discussion of these topics mark the Logic as Dewey's decisive statement in logical theory. The recognition of the work's importance within the philosophical community of the time can be gauged by the fact that the Journal of Philosophy, the most prominent American journal in the field, dedicated an entire issue to a discussion of the work, including contributions by such philosophical luminaries as C. I. Lewis of Harvard University, and Ernest Nagel, Dewey's colleague at Columbia University. Although many of his critics did question, and continue to question, the assumptions of his approach, one that is certainly unique in the development of twentieth century logical theory, there is no doubt that the work was and continues to be an important contribution to the field.

3. Metaphysics

Dewey's naturalistic metaphysics first took shape in articles that he wrote during the decade after the publication of Studies in Logical Theory, a period when he was attempting to elucidate the implications of instrumentalism. Dewey disagreed with William James's assessment that pragmatic principles were metaphysically neutral. (He discusses this disagreement in "What Does Pragmatism Mean by Practical," published in 1908.) Dewey's view was based in part on an assessment of the motivations behind traditional metaphysics: a central aim of the metaphysical tradition had been the discovery of an immutable cognitive object that could serve as a foundation for knowledge. The pragmatic theory, by showing that knowledge is a product of an activity directed to the fulfillment of human purposes, and that a true (or warranted) belief is known to be such by the consequences of its employment rather than by any psychological or ontological foundations, rendered this longstanding aim of metaphysics, in Dewey's view, moot, and opened the door to renewed metaphysical discussion grounded firmly on an empirical basis.

Dewey begins to define the general form that an empirical metaphysics should take in a number of articles, including "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (1905) and "Does Reality Possess Practical Character?" (1908). In the former article, Dewey asserts that things experienced empirically "are what they are experienced as." Dewey uses as an example a noise heard in a darkened room that is initially experienced as fearsome. Subsequent inquiry (e.g., turning on the lights and looking about) reveals that the noise was caused by a shade tapping against a window, and thus innocuous. But the subsequent inquiry, Dewey argues, does not change the initial status of the noise: it was experienced as fearsome, and in fact was fearsome. The point stems from the naturalistic roots of Dewey's logic. Our experience of the world is constituted by our interrelationship with it, a relationship that is imbued with practical import. The initial fearsomeness of the noise is the experiential correlate of the uncertain, problematic character of the situation, an uncertainty that is not merely subjective or mental, but a product of the potential inadequacy of previously established modes of behavior to deal effectively with the pragmatic demands of present circumstances. The subsequent inquiry does not, therefore, uncover a reality (the innocuousness of the noise) underlying a mere appearance (its fearsomeness), but by settling the demands of the situation, it effects a change in the inter-dynamics of the organism-environment relationship of the initial situation-a change in reality.

There are two important implications of this line of thought that distinguish it from the metaphysical tradition. First, although inquiry is aimed at resolving the precarious and confusing aspects of experience to provide a stable basis for action, this does not imply the unreality of the unstable and contingent, nor justify its relegation to the status of mere appearance. Thus, for example, the usefulness and reliability of utilizing certain stable features of things encountered in our experience as a basis for classification does not justify according ultimate reality to essences or Platonic forms any more than, as rationalist metaphysicians in the modern era have thought, the similar usefulness of mathematical reasoning in understanding natural processes justifies the conclusion that the world can be exhaustively defined mathematically.

Second, the fact that the meanings we attribute to natural events might change in any particular in the future as renewed inquiries lead to more adequate understandings of natural events (as was implied by Dewey's fallibilism) does not entail that our experience of the world at any given time may as a whole be errant. Thus the implicit skepticism that underlies the representational theory of ideas and raises questions concerning the veracity of perceptual experience as such is unwarranted. Dewey stresses the point that sensations, hypotheses, ideas, etc., come into play to mediate our encounter with the world only in the context of active inquiry. Once inquiry is successful in resolving a problematic situation, mediatory sensations and ideas, as Dewey says, "drop out; and things are present to the agent in the most naively realistic fashion."

These contentions positioned Dewey's metaphysics within the territory of a naive realism, and in a number of his articles, such as "The Realism of Pragmatism" (1905), "Brief Studies in Realism" (1911), and "The Existence of the World as a Logical Problem" (1915), it is this view that Dewey expressly avows (a view that he carefully distinguishes from what he calls "presentational realism," which he attributes to a number of the other realists of his day). Opposing narrow-minded positions that would accord full ontological status only to certain, typically the most stable or reliable, aspects of experience, Dewey argues for a position that recognizes the real significance of the multifarious richness of human experience.

Dewey offered a fuller statement of his metaphysics in 1925, with the publication of one of his most significant philosophical works, Experience and Nature. In the introductory chapter, Dewey stresses a familiar theme from his earlier writings: that previous metaphysicians, guided by unavowed biases for those aspects of experience that are relatively stable and secure, have illicitly reified these biases into narrow ontological presumptions, such as the temporal identity of substance, or the ultimate reality of forms or essences. Dewey finds this procedure so pervasive in the history of thought that he calls it simply the philosophic fallacy, and signals his intention to eschew the disastrous consequences of this approach by offering a descriptive account of all of the various generic features of human experience, whatever their character.

Dewey begins with the observation that the world as we experience it both individually and collectively is an admixture of the precarious, the transitory and contingent aspect of things, and the stable, the patterned regularity of natural processes that allows for prediction and human intervention. Honest metaphysical description must take into account both of these elements of experience. Dewey endeavors to do this by an event ontology. The world, rather than being comprised of things or, in more traditional terms, substances, is comprised of happenings or occurrences that admit of both episodic uniqueness and general, structured order. Intrinsically events have an ineffable qualitative character by which they are immediately enjoyed or suffered, thus providing the basis for experienced value and aesthetic appreciation. Extrinsically events are connected to one another by patterns of change and development; any given event arises out of determinant prior conditions and leads to probable consequences. The patterns of these temporal processes is the proper subject matter of human knowledge-we know the world in terms of causal laws and mathematical relationships-but the instrumental value of understanding and controlling them should not blind us to the immediate, qualitative aspect of events; indeed, the value of scientific understanding is most significantly realized in the facility it affords for controlling the circumstances under which immediate enjoyments may be realized.

It is in terms of the distinction between qualitative immediacy and the structured order of events that Dewey understands the general pattern of human life and action. This understanding is captured by James' suggestive metaphor that human experience consists of an alternation of flights and perchings, an alternation of concentrated effort directed toward the achievement of foreseen aims, what Dewey calls "ends-in-view," with the fruition of effort in the immediate satisfaction of "consummatory experience." Dewey's insistence that human life follows the patterns of nature, as a part of nature, is the core tenet of his naturalistic outlook.

Dewey also addresses the social aspect of human experience facilitated by symbolic activity, particularly that of language. For Dewey the question of the nature of social relationships is a significant matter not only for social theory, but metaphysics as well, for it is from collective human activity, and specifically the development of shared meanings that govern this activity, that the mind arises. Thus rather than understanding the mind as a primitive and individual human endowment, and a precondition of conscious and intentional action, as was typical in the philosophical tradition since Descartes, Dewey offers a genetic analysis of mind as an emerging aspect of cooperative activity mediated by linguistic communication. Consciousness, in turn, is not to be understood as a domain of private awareness, but rather as the fulcrum point of the organism's readjustment to the challenge of novel conditions where the meanings and attitudes that formulate habitual behavioral responses to the environment fail to be adequate. Thus Dewey offers in the better part of a number of chapters of Experience and Nature a response to the traditional mind-body problem of the metaphysical tradition, a response that understands the mind as an emergent issue of natural processes, more particularly the web of interactive relationships between human beings and the world in which they live.

4. Ethical and Social Theory

Dewey's mature thought in ethics and social theory is not only intimately linked to the theory of knowledge in its founding conceptual framework and naturalistic standpoint, but also complementary to it in its emphasis on the social dimension of inquiry both in its processes and its consequences. In fact, it would be reasonable to claim that Dewey's theory of inquiry cannot be fully understood either in the meaning of its central tenets or the significance of its originality without considering how it applies to social aims and values, the central concern of his ethical and social theory.

Dewey rejected the atomistic understanding of society of the Hobbesian social contract theory, according to which the social, cooperative aspect of human life was grounded in the logically prior and fully articulated rational interests of individuals. Dewey's claim in Experience and Nature that the collection of meanings that constitute the mind have a social origin expresses the basic contention, one that he maintained throughout his career, that the human individual is a social being from the start, and that individual satisfaction and achievement can be realized only within the context of social habits and institutions that promote it.

Moral and social problems, for Dewey, are concerned with the guidance of human action to the achievement of socially defined ends that are productive of a satisfying life for individuals within the social context. Regarding the nature of what constitutes a satisfying life, Dewey was intentionally vague, out of his conviction that specific ends or goods can be defined only in particular socio-historical contexts. In the Ethics (1932) he speaks of the ends simply as the cultivation of interests in goods that recommend themselves in the light of calm reflection. In other works, such as Human Nature and Conduct and Art as Experience, he speaks of (1) the harmonizing of experience (the resolution of conflicts of habit and interest both within the individual and within society), (2) the release from tedium in favor of the enjoyment of variety and creative action, and (3) the expansion of meaning (the enrichment of the individual's appreciation of his or her circumstances within human culture and the world at large). The attunement of individual efforts to the promotion of these social ends constitutes, for Dewey, the central issue of ethical concern of the individual; the collective means for their realization is the paramount question of political policy.

Conceived in this manner, the appropriate method for solving moral and social questions is the same as that required for solving questions concerning matters of fact: an empirical method that is tied to an examination of problematic situations, the gathering of relevant facts, and the imaginative consideration of possible solutions that, when utilized, bring about a reconstruction and resolution of the original situations. Dewey, throughout his ethical and social writings, stressed the need for an open-ended, flexible, and experimental approach to problems of practice aimed at the determination of the conditions for the attainment of human goods and a critical examination of the consequences of means adopted to promote them, an approach that he called the "method of intelligence."

The central focus of Dewey's criticism of the tradition of ethical thought is its tendency to seek solutions to moral and social problems in dogmatic principles and simplistic criteria which in his view were incapable of dealing effectively with the changing requirements of human events. In Reconstruction of Philosophyand The Quest for Certainty, Dewey located the motivation of traditional dogmatic approaches in philosophy in the forlorn hope for security in an uncertain world, forlorn because the conservatism of these approaches has the effect of inhibiting the intelligent adaptation of human practice to the ineluctable changes in the physical and social environment. Ideals and values must be evaluated with respect to their social consequences, either as inhibitors or as valuable instruments for social progress, and Dewey argues that philosophy, because of the breadth of its concern and its critical approach, can play a crucial role in this evaluation.

In large part, then, Dewey's ideas in ethics and social theory were programmatic rather than substantive, defining the direction that he believed human thought and action must take in order to identify the conditions that promote the human good in its fullest sense, rather than specifying particular formulae or principles for individual and social action. He studiously avoided participating in what he regarded as the unfortunate practice of previous moral philosophers of offering general rules that legislate universal standards of conduct. But there are strong suggestions in a number of his works of basic ethical and social positions. In Human Nature and Conduct Dewey approaches ethical inquiry through an analysis of human character informed by the principles of scientific psychology. The analysis is reminiscent of Aristotelian ethics, concentrating on the central role of habit in formulating the dispositions of action that comprise character, and the importance of reflective intelligence as a means of modifying habits and controlling disruptive desires and impulses in the pursuit of worthwhile ends.

The social condition for the flexible adaptation that Dewey believed was crucial for human advancement is a democratic form of life, not instituted merely by democratic forms of governance, but by the inculcation of democratic habits of cooperation and public spiritedness, productive of an organized, self-conscious community of individuals responding to society's needs by experimental and inventive, rather than dogmatic, means. The development of these democratic habits, Dewey argues in School and Society and Democracy and Education, must begin in the earliest years of a child's educational experience. Dewey rejected the notion that a child's education should be viewed as merely a preparation for civil life, during which disjoint facts and ideas are conveyed by the teacher and memorized by the student only to be utilized later on. The school should rather be viewed as an extension of civil society and continuous with it, and the student encouraged to operate as a member of a community, actively pursuing interests in cooperation with others. It is by a process of self-directed learning, guided by the cultural resources provided by teachers, that Dewey believed a child is best prepared for the demands of responsible membership within the democratic community.

5. Aesthetics

Dewey's one significant treatment of aesthetic theory is offered in Art as Experience, a book that was based on the William James Lectures that he delivered at Harvard University in 1931. The book stands out as a diversion into uncommon philosophical territory for Dewey, adumbrated only by a somewhat sketchy and tangential treatment of art in one chapter of Experience and Nature. The unique status of the work in Dewey's corpus evoked some criticism from Dewey's followers, most notably Stephen Pepper, who believed that it marked an unfortunate departure from the naturalistic standpoint of his instrumentalism, and a return to the idealistic viewpoints of his youth. On close reading, however, Art as Experience reveals a considerable continuity of Dewey's views on art with the main themes of his previous philosophical work, while offering an important and useful extension of those themes. Dewey had always stressed the importance of recognizing the significance and integrity of all aspects of human experience. His repeated complaint against the partiality and bias of the philosophical tradition expresses this theme. Consistent with this theme, Dewey took account of qualitative immediacy in Experience and Nature, and incorporated it into his view of the developmental nature of experience, for it is in the enjoyment of the immediacy of an integration and harmonization of meanings, in the "consummatory phase" of experience that, in Dewey's view, the fruition of the re-adaptation of the individual with environment is realized. These central themes are enriched and deepened in Art as Experience, making it one of Dewey's most significant works.

The roots of aesthetic experience lie, Dewey argues, in commonplace experience, in the consummatory experiences that are ubiquitous in the course of human life. There is no legitimacy to the conceit cherished by some art enthusiasts that aesthetic enjoyment is the privileged endowment of the few. Whenever there is a coalesence into an immediately enjoyed qualitative unity of meanings and values drawn from previous experience and present circumstances, life then takes on an aesthetic quality-what Dewey called having " an experience." Nor is the creative work of the artist, in its broad parameters, unique. The process of intelligent use of materials and the imaginative development of possible solutions to problems issuing in a reconstruction of experience that affords immediate satisfaction, the process found in the creative work of artists, is also to be found in all intelligent and creative human activity. What distinguishes artistic creation is the relative stress laid upon the immediate enjoyment of unified qualitative complexity as the rationalizing aim of the activity itself, and the ability of the artist to achieve this aim by marshalling and refining the massive resources of human life, meanings, and values.

The senses play a key role in artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation. Dewey, however, argues against the view, stemming historically from the sensationalistic empiricism of David Hume, that interprets the content of sense experience simply in terms of the traditionally codified list of sense qualities, such as color, odor, texture, etc., divorced from the funded meanings of past experience. It is not only the sensible qualities present in the physical media the artist uses, but the wealth of meaning that attaches to these qualities, that constitute the material that is refined and unified in the process of artistic expression. The artist concentrates, clarifies, and vivifies these meanings in the artwork. The unifying element in this process is emotion-not the emotion of raw passion and outburst, but emotion that is reflected upon and used as a guide to the overall character of the artwork. Although Dewey insisted that emotion is not the significant content of the work of art, he clearly understands it to be the crucial tool of the artist's creative activity.

Dewey repeatedly returns in Art as Experience to a familiar theme of his critical reflections upon the history of ideas, namely that a distinction too strongly drawn too often sacrifices accuracy of account for a misguided simplicity. Two applications of this theme are worth mentioning here. Dewey rejects the sharp distinction often made in aesthetics between the matter and the form of an artwork. What Dewey objected to was the implicit suggestion that matter and form stand side by side, as it were, in the artwork as distinct and precisely distinguishable elements. For Dewey, form is better understood in a dynamic sense as the coordination and adjustment of the qualities and associated meanings that are integrated within the artwork.

A second misguided distinction that Dewey rejects is that between the artist as the active creator and the audience as the passive recipient of art. This distinction artificially truncates the artistic process by in effect suggesting that the process ends with the final artifact of the artist's creativity. Dewey argues that, to the contrary, the process is barren without the agency of the appreciator, whose active assimilation of the artist's work requires a recapitulation of many of the same processes of discrimination, comparison, and integration that are present in the artist's initial work, but now guided by the artist's perception and skill. Dewey underscores the point by distinguishing between the "art product," the painting, sculpture, etc., created by the artist, and the "work of art" proper, which is only realized through the active engagement of an astute audience.

Ever concerned with the interrelationships between the various domains of human activity and concern, Dewey ends Art as Experience with a chapter devoted to the social implications of the arts. Art is a product of culture, and it is through art that the people of a given culture express the significance of their lives, as well as their hopes and ideals. Because art has its roots in the consummatory values experienced in the course of human life, its values have an affinity to commonplace values, an affinity that accords to art a critical office in relation to prevailing social conditions. Insofar as the possibility for a meaningful and satisfying life disclosed in the values embodied in art is not realized in the lives of the members of a society, the social relationships that preclude this realization are condemned. Dewey's specific target in this chapter was the conditions of workers in industrialized society, conditions which force upon the worker the performance of repetitive tasks that are devoid of personal interest and afford no satisfaction in personal accomplishment. The degree to which this critical function of art is ignored is a further indication of what Dewey regarded as the unfortunate distancing of the arts from the common pursuits and interests of ordinary life. The realization of art's social function requires the closure of this bifurcation.

6. Critical Reception and Influence

Dewey's philosophical work received varied responses from his philosophical colleagues during his lifetime. There were many philosophers who saw his work, as Dewey himself understood it, as a genuine attempt to apply the principles of an empirical naturalism to the perennial questions of philosophy, providing a beneficial clarification of issues and the concepts used to address them. Dewey's critics, however, often expressed the opinion that his views were more confusing than clarifying, and that they appeared to be more akin to idealism than the scientifically based naturalism Dewey expressly avowed. Notable in this connection are Dewey's disputes concerning the relation of the knowing subject to known objects with the realists Bertrand Russell, A. O. Lovejoy, and Evander Bradley McGilvery. Whereas these philosophers argued that the object of knowledge must be understood as existing apart from the knowing subject, setting the truth conditions for propositions, Dewey defended the view that things understood as isolated from any relationship with the human organism could not be objects of knowledge at all.

Dewey was sensitive and responsive to the criticisms brought against his views. He often attributed them to misinterpretations based on the traditional, philosophical connotations that some of his readers would attach to his terminology. This was clearly a fair assessment with respect to some of his critics. To take one example, Dewey used the term "experience," found throughout his philosophical writings, to denote the broad context of the human organism's interrelationship with its environment, not the domain of human thought alone, as some of his critics read him to mean. Dewey's concern for clarity of expression motivated efforts in his later writings to revise his terminology. Thus, for example, he later substituted "transaction" for his earlier "interaction" to denote the relationship between organism and environment, since the former better suggested a dynamic interdependence between the two, and in a new introduction to Experience and Nature, never published during his lifetime, he offered the term "culture" as an alternative to "experience." Late in his career he attempted a more sweeping revision of philosophical terminology in Knowing and the Known, written in collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley.

The influence of Dewey's work, along with that of the pragmatic school of thought itself, although considerable in the first few decades of the twentieth century, was gradually eclipsed during the middle part of the century as other philosophical methods, such as those of the analytic school in England and America and phenomenology in continental Europe, grew to ascendency. Recent trends in philosophy, however, leading to the dissolution of these rigid paradigms, have led to approaches that continue and expand on the themes of Dewey's work. W. V. O. Quine's project of naturalizing epistemology works upon naturalistic presumptions anticipated in Dewey's own naturalistic theory of inquiry. The social dimension and function of belief systems, explored by Dewey and other pragmatists, has received renewed attention by such writers as Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas. American phenomenologists such as Sandra Rosenthal and James Edie have considered the affinities of phenomenology and pragmatism, and Hilary Putnam, an analytically trained philosophy, has recently acknowledged the affinity of his own approach to ethics to that of Dewey's. The renewed openness and pluralism of recent philosophical discussion has meant a renewed interest in Dewey's philosophy, an interest that promises to continue for some time to come.

7. References and Further Reading

a. Primary Sources

All of the published writings of John Dewey have been newly edited and published in The Collected Works of John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, ed., 37 volumes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1991).

Dewey's complete correspondence has know been published in electronic form in The Correspondence of John Dewey, 3 vols., Larry Hickman, ed. (Charlottesville, Va: Intelex Corporation).

An authoritative collection of Dewey's writings is The Essential Dewey, 2 vols., Larry Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

b. Secondary Sources

Alexander, Thomas M. The Horizons of Feeling: John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Boisvert, Raymond D. Dewey's Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press, 1988.

Boisvert, Raymond D. John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Bullert, Gary. The Politics of John Dewey. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1983.

Campbell, James. Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1995.

Damico, Alfonso J. Individuality and Community: The Social and Political Thought of John Dewey. Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1978.

Dykhuizen, George. The Life and Mind of John Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.

Eames, S. Morris. Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism.Elizabeth R. Eames and Richard W. Field, eds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.

Eldridge, Michael. Transforming Experience: John Dewey's Cultural Instrumentalism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998.

Gouinlock, James. John Dewey's Philosophy of Value. New York: Humanities Press, 1972.

Hickman, Larry. John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Hickman, Larry A., ed. Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Hook, Sidney. John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait. New York: John Day Co., 1939; New York: Prometheus Books, 1995.

Jackson, Philip W. John Dewey and the Lessons of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Haskins, Casey and David I. Seiple, eds. Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism.Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Levine, Barbara. Works about John Dewey: 1886-1995. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

Rockefeller, Steven C. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Schilpp, Paul Arthur and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds. The Philosophy of John Dewey, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 1. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989.

Sleeper, Ralph. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy. New York: Yale University Press, 1987.

Thayer, H. S. The Logic of Pragmatism: An Examination of John Dewey's Logic. New York: Humanities Press, 1952.

Tiles, J. E. Dewey. London: Routledge, 1988.

Welchman, Jennifer. Dewey's Ethical Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Author Information

Richard Field
Email: rfield(at)nwmissouri.edu
Northwest Missouri State University
U. S. A.

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John Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism, a view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment.

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Summary:
Some sources say that schooling in the United States was to prepare the young people for their role as citizens in representative democracy. From Thomas Jefferson, to Horace Mann and then to John Dewey, schooling and education grew over the many years.
This article goes into detail about many different things like the Civic Mission of Schools, teaching current and controversial political and social issues, student voice in school governance, and many other different topics relating to education and children.
This article is also mainly focused on Illinois education and schooling, but also can be applied to anywhere.

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Summary:
From the 1890's to the 1920's, education changed drastically.
These years were known as the Progressive Era, aiming at making progress toward a better society.
During this era many things happened, like protection for workers was stronger, and women finally got the right to vote, among other things.
Events like the Progressive Movement arose in response to the negative affects of things like industrialization, and workers fought to improve society.
There were also many famous reformers in this era like Jane Addams who founded Hull House in Chicago  to help immigrants, and even Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt who implemented worker protection.
Although there was mostly good outcomes from the Progressive Era, there was also downsides to progressivism.
Reformers achieved many goals, but also promoted discriminatory policies like pursuing a racial agenda that culminated segregation, or the effects Labor unions had on immigration.

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The period of US history from the 1890s to the 1920s is usually referred to as the Progressive Era, an era of intense social and political reform aimed at making progress toward a better society.

Progressive Era reformers sought to harness the power of the federal government to eliminate unethical and unfair business practices, reduce corruption, and counteract the negative social effects of industrialization.

During the Progressive Era, protections for workers and consumers were strengthened, and women finally achieved the right to vote.

The problems of industrialization

The ideology and politics of progressivism

The worldview of Progressive reformers was based on certain key assumptions. The first was that human nature could be improved through the enlightened application of regulations, incentives, and punishments. The second key assumption was that the power of the federal government could be harnessed to improve the individual and transform society. These two assumptions were not shared by political conservatives, who tended to believe that human nature was unchanging, and that the federal government should remain limited in size and scope.

Some of the most famous Progressive reformers were Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago to help immigrants adapt to life in the United States; Ida Tarbell, a "muckraker" who exposed the corrupt business practices of Standard Oil and became an early pioneer of investigative journalism; and Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, who both expanded the power of the federal government to impose regulations on private industry and implement protections for workers, consumers, and the natural environment.

Progressive reformers successfully influenced the passage of much substantive legislation, including several amendments to the US Constitution. The Sixteenth Amendment established a federal income tax, the Seventeenth Amendment allowed for the direct election of Senators, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited sales of alcohol, and the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.

The dark side of progressivism

Though Progressive reformers achieved many noteworthy goals during this period, they also promoted discriminatory policies and espoused intolerant ideas. The Wilson administration, for instance, despite its embrace of modernity and progress, pursued a racial agenda that culminated in the segregation of the federal government. The years of Wilson's presidency (1913-1921) witnessed a revival of the Ku Klux Klan and a viciously racist backlash against the economic and political gains of African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period.

In line with their view of human nature as capable of being engineered and manipulated, many Progressive reformers advocated selective breeding, or eugenics. Eugenics was considered "the science of better breeding" and aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human population through policies that would encourage the more "desirable" elements of society to have more children while preventing "undesirables" from reproducing. Eugenics was based on a racial and class hierarchy that placed white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants at the top. Lower classes, ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, the mentally ill, and the developmentally disabled all occupied lower rungs on this hierarchy. In 1907, the United States became the first country to pass a compulsory sterilization law.

The genocidal policies of Nazi Germany ultimately discredited the "science" of eugenics, but not before over 60,000 American men and women were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from having children.

What do you think?

How would you describe the Progressive worldview? Do you agree with the ideological assumptions of progressivism?

What were the most impressive achievements of Progressive reformers?

Overall, were the effects of progressivism more harmful or beneficial to American society?

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The Progressive Era (Progressive movement) (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Summary:
The Child and the Curriculum was published in 1902, and it is a centerpiece for John Dewey and his thinking about education. There are other notable works, but this one remains a huge importance because of John Dewey and his brief, but influential affect on progressive education.
For Dewey, educational theory was largely a matter of making sense of education and practices in schools. Dewey connected both educative process and educational theory to help students aim high and teach them important values.
From Dewey's perspective, learning needed to be seen as many different processes to help not only the students, but the parents, teachers, administratiors, and more.

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Summary:
This article talks about how progressive education was a large part of society and began to change the 20th century.
This article then continues to talk about how since the beginning of schooling in the late 19th century, beliefs about education have swung between two extremes.
Since the 1980's, traditionalism has dominated the schooling system.
Progressive education today is typically associated with child-centered progressivism.
Progressive educators believed that education should be child-centered, should serve as a guide, teach them problem solving, educate them not only intellectually but also emotionally, spiritually, morality, physically, and socially.
Although progressivism is often associated with education and schooling, it was former known as "the progressive era" advocating universal schooling.
John Dewey was a huge philosopher who's name is most associated with progressive education.

# data[].attributes.body
Progressive Education aimed to change the way education was in schools. It began to change the curriculum based on the needs and interests of the students. One philosopher, John Dewey, disagreed with many of the progressives' views about the change of education.
Some things he disagreed with was the differentiated curriculum, vocational training in schools, and a limited view of human capacity.
Instead he supported things like a unified curriculum, manual training like occupations of life, and proper education.