John Dewey (1859—1952)

deweyJohn 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 agile adaptation of the human organism to its environment. On this view, enquiry should not exist understood as consisting of a heed passively observing the world and drawing from this ideas that if truthful stand for to reality, just rather as a procedure which initiates with a check or obstruction to successful human action, proceeds to agile manipulation of the environment to test hypotheses, and problems in a re-adaptation of organism to environment that allows once once more for human activeness to proceed. With this view every bit his starting point, Dewey developed a broad torso of work encompassing virtually all of the principal areas of philosophical concern in his mean solar day. He likewise wrote extensively on social issues in such pop publications as the New Republic, thereby gaining a reputation equally a leading social commentator of his time.

Table of Contents

  1. Life and Works
  2. Theory of Knowledge
  3. Metaphysics
  4. Upstanding and Social Theory
  5. Aesthetics
  6. Critical Reception and Influence
  7. References and Further Reading
    1. Principal Sources
    2. Secondary Sources

1. Life and Works

John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859, the third of iv sons born to Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemesia Rich of Burlington, Vermont. The eldest sibling died in infancy, just the iii surviving brothers attended the public school and the Academy of Vermont in Burlington with John. While at the Academy of Vermont, Dewey was exposed to evolutionary theory through the teaching of 1000.H. Perkins and Lessons in Simple Physiology, a text by T.H. Huxley, the famous English language evolutionist. The theory of natural choice connected to have a life-long affect upon Dewey'southward thought, suggesting the barrenness of static models of nature, and the importance of focusing on the interaction between the homo 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 almost part to the school of Scottish realism, a school of thought that Dewey soon rejected, merely his close contact both before and afterward 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 thought of pursuing a career in philosophy took concord. 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 nether 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. M. Stanley Hall, one of the well-nigh prominent American experimental psychologists at the fourth dimension, provided Dewey with an appreciation of the ability of scientific methodology equally applied to the man 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 didactics post at the University of Michigan, a postal service he was to concur for ten years, with the exception of a year at the University of Minnesota in 1888. While at Michigan Dewey wrote his get-go two books: Psychology (1887), and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888). Both works expressed Dewey's early delivery to Hegelian idealism, while the Psychology explored the synthesis between this idealism and experimental science that Dewey was and so attempting to effect. At Michigan Dewey as well met ane of his important philosophical collaborators, James Hayden Tufts, with whom he would subsequently writer 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 on idealism gave mode 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 serial of four essays entitled collectively "Thought and its Subject-Matter," which was published along with a number of other essays by Dewey'due south colleagues and students at Chicago nether the title Studies in Logical Theory (1903). Dewey as well 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 textile for his first major piece of work on education, The School and Social club (1899).

Disagreements with the assistants over the condition of the Laboratory School led to Dewey'southward resignation from his post at Chicago in 1904. His philosophical reputation at present secured, he was quickly invited to bring together the Section of Philosophy at Columbia University. Dewey spent the residue of his professional life at Columbia. At present 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 showtime 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 Gimmicky Thought (1910) and Essays in Experimental Logic(1916). His involvement in educational theory also connected during these years, fostered by his work at Teachers College at Columbia. This led to the publication of How We Remember (1910; revised ed. 1933), an application of his theory of knowledge to educational activity, and Republic and Education (1916), perhaps his nearly important work in the field.

During his years at Columbia Dewey's reputation grew not only every bit a leading philosopher and educational theorist, just also in the public mind as an important commentator on contemporary issues, the latter due to his frequent contributions to pop magazines such every bit The New Republic and Nation, besides as his ongoing political involvement in a variety of causes, such equally 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 almost significant writings during these years were the issue of such lectures, includingReconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature(1925), The Public and its Bug (1927), and The Quest for Certainty (1929).

Dewey's retirement from agile teaching in 1930 did non curtail his activity either as a public figure or productive philosopher. Of special note in his public life was his participation in the Committee 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 young man philosopher Bertrand Russell against an attempt by conservatives to remove him from his chair at the College of the Metropolis of New York in 1940. A chief focus of Dewey'southward philosophical pursuits during the 1930s was the preparation of a terminal 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 Feel (1934), A Common Faith(1934), Freedom and Civilisation (1939), Theory of Valuation (1939), and Knowing and the Known(1949), the last coauthored with Arthur F. Bentley. Dewey continued to piece of work vigorously throughout his retirement until his decease on June ii, 1952, at the age of xc-two.

2. Theory of Knowledge

The cardinal focus of Dewey's philosophical interests throughout his career was what has been traditionally chosen "epistemology," or the "theory of cognition." It is indicative, however, of Dewey's critical opinion toward past efforts in this area that he expressly rejected the term "epistemology," preferring the "theory of research" or "experimental logic" every bit more than representative of his own arroyo.

In Dewey's view, traditional epistemologies, whether rationalist or empiricist, had drawn also stark a distinction betwixt idea, the domain of knowledge, and the earth of fact to which thought purportedly referred: thought was believed to exist apart from the earth, epistemically as the object of immediate awareness, ontologically as the unique aspect of the self. The commitment of mod rationalism, stemming from Descartes, to a doctrine of innate ideas, ideas constituted from nascency in the very nature of the mind itself, had effected this dichotomy; but the modern empiricists, first with Locke, had washed the same simply every bit 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 globe: if thought constitutes a domain that stands apart from the world, how can its accuracy as an business relationship of the world ever exist 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 bug mainly along the lines of his early acceptance of Hegelian idealism: the world of fact does non stand up apart from idea, but is itself divers 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 alter of view. For one, Hegelian idealism was non conducive to accommodating the methodologies and results of experimental science which he accepted and admired. Dewey himself had attempted to outcome such an adaptation between experimental psychology and idealism in his early on Psychology (1887), simply 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 discipline.

Second, Darwin's theory of natural selection suggested in a more particular manner the class 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 procedure of the adaptation of lineages of organisms to their environments, environments which, Darwin understood, were significantly determined by the organisms that occupied them. The central to the naturalistic account of species was a consideration of the circuitous interrelationships between organisms and environments. In a similar way, Dewey came to believe that a productive, naturalistic approach to the theory of noesis must begin with a consideration of the development of noesis equally an adaptive human response to environing weather 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 cognition was equanimous, Dewey's approach understood thought genetically, as the product of the interaction betwixt organism and environs, and noesis every bit 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 starting time pregnant awarding 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 mean solar 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 cocky-guided activeness that coordinates and integrates sensory and motor responses. The implication for the theory of knowledge was clear: the world is non passively perceived and thereby known; active manipulation of the environment is involved integrally in the process of learning from the kickoff.

Dewey first applied this interactive naturalism in an explicit manner to the theory of knowledge in his iv introductory essays in Studies in Logical Theory. Dewey identified the view expressed in Studies with the schoolhouse of pragmatism, crediting William James every bit its progenitor. James, for his role, in an article appearing in the Psychological Bulletin, proclaimed the work equally the expression of a new schoolhouse 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 action in pursuit of the fulfillment of needs and desires. Dewey stressed inStudies and subsequent writings that the uncertainty of the problematic state of affairs is non inherently cognitive, but practical and existential. Cognitive elements enter into the process as a response to precognitive maladjustment.

The 2d stage of the process involves the isolation of the information or subject field matter which defines the parameters within which the reconstruction of the initiating state of affairs must be addressed. In the third, cogitating phase of the process, the cognitive elements of research (ideas, suppositions, theories, etc.) are entertained every bit hypothetical solutions to the originating impediment of the problematic state of affairs, the implications of which are pursued in the abstract. The final exam 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, and then the solution no longer retains the grapheme of the hypothetical that marks cognitive thought; rather, it becomes a part of the existential circumstances of homo life.

The error of mod epistemologists, as Dewey saw it, was that they isolated the reflective stages of this procedure, 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 baseless equally 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 equally an item of knowledge has this status only provisionally, contingent upon its adequacy in providing a coherent understanding of the world equally the footing for human action.

Dewey defended this full general outline of the process of inquiry throughout his long career, insisting that it was the only proper mode to understand the means by which we attain knowledge, whether it exist the commonsense knowledge that guides the ordinary affairs of our lives, or the sophisticated noesis 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 past because a number of central issues of traditional epistemology from its perspective, and responding to some of the more trenchant criticisms of the view.

1 traditional question that Dewey addressed in a series of essays between 1906 and 1909 was that of the meaning of truth. Dewey at that fourth dimension considered the pragmatic theory of truth as central to the pragmatic schoolhouse 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 thought agrees with reality, and is therefore true, if and only if information technology is successfully employed in homo action in pursuit of human goals and interests, that is, if it leads to the resolution of a problematic situation in Dewey'due south terms. The businesslike theory of truth met with strong opposition amongst its critics, perhaps most notably from the British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. Dewey afterward began to suspect that the problems surrounding the weather condition of truth, as well as cognition, were hopelessly obscured past the accretion of traditional, and in his view misguided, meanings to the terms, resulting in disruptive ambiguity. He later abased these terms in favor of "warranted assertiblity" to describe the distinctive property of ideas that results from successful inquiry.

One of the near 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 Enquiry.

The basis of Dewey's word 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 well-nigh intelligent research is that information technology is facilitated by the utilise of linguistic communication, which allows, by its symbolic meanings and implication relationships, the hypothetical rehearsal of adaptive behaviors before their employment nether actual, prevailing atmospheric condition for the purpose of resolving problematic situations. Logical course, the specialized discipline matter of traditional logic, owes its genesis not to rational intuition, every bit had oft been assumed by logicians, but due to its functional value in (one) managing factual evidence pertaining to the problematic situation that elicits inquiry, and (2) controlling the procedures involved in the conceptualized amusement of hypothetical solutions. As Dewey puts information technology, "logical forms accumulate 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 every bit the distinction between deductive and anterior inference, propositional course, and the nature of logical necessity. One important result 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 Equally 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 research. Thus in keeping with his stardom between the factual and conceptual elements of inquiry, he replaced the accepted distinctions between universal, detail, and singular propositions based on syntactical meaning with a distinction between existential and ideational propositions, a stardom 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 every bit Dewey understood information technology.

The breadth of topics treated and the depth and continuity of the discussion of these topics mark theLogic as Dewey's decisive statement in logical theory. The recognition of the work's importance inside the philosophical community of the time tin can be gauged by the fact that the Journal of Philosophy, the well-nigh prominent American periodical in the field, defended an unabridged consequence to a give-and-take of the work, including contributions by such philosophical luminaries as C. I. Lewis of Harvard Academy, and Ernest Nagel, Dewey's colleague at Columbia University. Although many of his critics did question, and continue to question, the assumptions of his arroyo, one that is certainly unique in the development of twentieth century logical theory, there is no dubiety that the work was and continues to be an of import contribution to the field.

3. Metaphysics

Dewey's naturalistic metaphysics first took shape in articles that he wrote during the decade afterwards the publication of Studies in Logical Theory, a period when he was attempting to elucidate the implications of instrumentalism. Dewey disagreed with William James'due south assessment that businesslike principles were metaphysically neutral. (He discusses this disagreement in "What Does Pragmatism Mean by Applied," published in 1908.) Dewey'southward view was based in part on an cess of the motivations behind traditional metaphysics: a primal aim of the metaphysical tradition had been the discovery of an immutable cognitive object that could serve equally a foundation for noesis. The pragmatic theory, by showing that knowledge is a product of an activity directed to the fulfillment of human being purposes, and that a true (or warranted) conventionalities 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'south view, moot, and opened the door to renewed metaphysical discussion grounded firmly on an empirical basis.

Dewey begins to define the general grade that an empirical metaphysics should take in a number of manufactures, including "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (1905) and "Does Reality Possess Practical Character?" (1908). In the onetime article, Dewey asserts that things experienced empirically "are what they are experienced equally." Dewey uses as an instance a noise heard in a darkened room that is initially experienced as fearsome. Subsequent inquiry (due east.grand., 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 racket: it was experienced every bit fearsome, and in fact was fearsome. The point stems from the naturalistic roots of Dewey's logic. Our feel of the earth 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 graphic symbol of the situation, an uncertainty that is not merely subjective or mental, only a product of the potential inadequacy of previously established modes of behavior to deal finer with the pragmatic demands of present circumstances. The subsequent inquiry does not, therefore, uncover a reality (the innocuousness of the dissonance) underlying a mere appearance (its fearsomeness), but by settling the demands of the situation, information technology furnishings a modify in the inter-dynamics of the organism-environment human relationship of the initial situation–a modify in reality.

There are ii important implications of this line of thought that distinguish it from the metaphysical tradition. Starting time, although enquiry is aimed at resolving the precarious and disruptive aspects of experience to provide a stable basis for activeness, 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 nomenclature does non justify according ultimate reality to essences or Platonic forms whatsoever more than than, every bit rationalist metaphysicians in the modern era have thought, the similar usefulness of mathematical reasoning in understanding natural processes justifies the conclusion that the world tin be exhaustively defined mathematically.

Second, the fact that the meanings nosotros aspect to natural events might change in whatsoever item in the future every bit renewed inquiries lead to more adequate understandings of natural events (equally was implied past Dewey'south 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 bespeak that sensations, hypotheses, ideas, etc., come up into play to mediate our encounter with the world only in the context of active inquiry. Once inquiry is successful in resolving a problematic state of affairs, mediatory sensations and ideas, as Dewey says, "driblet out; and things are present to the agent in the most naively realistic fashion."

These contentions positioned Dewey'southward metaphysics within the territory of a naive realism, and in a number of his manufactures, 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 advisedly 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 total ontological condition only to certain, typically the virtually 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 ane of his almost 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 process and so pervasive in the history of thought that he calls it simplythe 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 every bit nosotros 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 clarification must take into account both of these elements of feel. Dewey endeavors to do this by an consequence ontology. The earth, 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 past which they are immediately enjoyed or suffered, thus providing the basis for experienced value and artful appreciation. Extrinsically events are connected to one another by patterns of modify and development; any given event arises out of determinant prior conditions and leads to likely consequences. The patterns of these temporal processes is the proper discipline matter of human cognition–we know the world in terms of causal laws and mathematical relationships–but the instrumental value of agreement and controlling them should not blind united states of america 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 nether which immediate enjoyments may be realized.

It is in terms of the stardom 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 accomplishment of foreseen aims, what Dewey calls "ends-in-view," with the fruition of endeavour in the immediate satisfaction of "consummatory experience." Dewey's insistence that man life follows the patterns of nature, as a role of nature, is the core tenet of his naturalistic outlook.

Dewey also addresses the social aspect of human feel facilitated by symbolic activity, specially that of linguistic communication. For Dewey the question of the nature of social relationships is a pregnant thing non only for social theory, but metaphysics besides, for it is from commonage homo action, 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 witting and intentional action, as was typical in the philosophical tradition since Descartes, Dewey offers a genetic analysis of mind as an emerging attribute of cooperative activity mediated past linguistic communication. Consciousness, in plow, is non to exist understood every bit a domain of private awareness, merely rather as the fulcrum point of the organism's readjustment to the claiming of novel conditions where the meanings and attitudes that formulate habitual behavioral responses to the environment neglect 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-trunk problem of the metaphysical tradition, a response that understands the listen as an emergent issue of natural processes, more particularly the web of interactive relationships between human being beings and the globe in which they live.

iv. Ethical and Social Theory

Dewey's mature idea in ethics and social theory is not just intimately linked to the theory of noesis 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 exist reasonable to claim that Dewey's theory of research cannot be fully understood either in the significant of its fundamental 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 club of the Hobbesian social contract theory, according to which the social, cooperative attribute 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 heed have a social origin expresses the basic contention, 1 that he maintained throughout his career, that the homo private is a social being from the offset, and that individual satisfaction and accomplishment tin can be realized only inside the context of social habits and institutions that promote information technology.

Moral and social bug, for Dewey, are concerned with the guidance of human being 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 appurtenances can be divers only in detail socio-historical contexts. In theIdeals (1932) he speaks of the ends simply equally 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 (ane) the harmonizing of experience (the resolution of conflicts of habit and involvement both inside the individual and within society), (2) the release from tedium in favor of the enjoyment of diverseness and artistic action, and (3) the expansion of meaning (the enrichment of the individual's appreciation of his or her circumstances within human civilisation and the world at big). The attunement of private efforts to the promotion of these social ends constitutes, for Dewey, the primal issue of ethical concern of the individual; the collective ways for their realization is the paramount question of political policy.

Conceived in this manner, the advisable 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 most a reconstruction and resolution of the original situations. Dewey, throughout his ethical and social writings, stressed the need for an open up-ended, flexible, and experimental arroyo to problems of exercise 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'due south criticism of the tradition of upstanding thought is its tendency to seek solutions to moral and social bug in dogmatic principles and simplistic criteria which in his view were incapable of dealing finer with the changing requirements of man 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 upshot of inhibiting the intelligent adaptation of human being practice to the ineluctable changes in the physical and social environment. Ethics and values must be evaluated with respect to their social consequences, either as inhibitors or every bit valuable instruments for social progress, and Dewey argues that philosophy, considering of the latitude of its concern and its critical arroyo, can play a crucial role in this evaluation.

In big 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 guild to place 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 in that location 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 assay is reminiscent of Aristotelian ethics, concentrating on the central function of addiction in formulating the dispositions of activeness that comprise graphic symbol, 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 accommodation that Dewey believed was crucial for human advancement is a democratic grade of life, not instituted merely by autonomous 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 andDemocracy and Education, must begin in the primeval years of a child'due south educational experience. Dewey rejected the notion that a kid'south educational activity should exist viewed as merely a preparation for civil life, during which disjoint facts and ideas are conveyed by the teacher and memorized by the educatee only to be utilized later on. The school should rather be viewed as an extension of civil gild and continuous with it, and the educatee encouraged to operate as a fellow 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 past teachers, that Dewey believed a child is best prepared for the demands of responsible membership inside the democratic customs.

5. Aesthetics

Dewey'due south ane pregnant treatment of aesthetic theory is offered in Fine art as Experience, a book that was based on the William James Lectures that he delivered at Harvard University in 1931. The volume stands out every bit a diversion into uncommon philosophical territory for Dewey, adumbrated only past a somewhat sketchy and tangential treatment of art in ane chapter of Experience and Nature. The unique status of the work in Dewey's corpus evoked some criticism from Dewey's followers, well-nigh notably Stephen Pepper, who believed that it marked an unfortunate deviation from the naturalistic standpoint of his instrumentalism, and a return to the idealistic viewpoints of his youth. On close reading, nonetheless, Art equally Experience reveals a considerable continuity of Dewey'southward views on art with the master 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 Feel 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'due south view, the fruition of the re-accommodation of the individual with surroundings is realized. These central themes are enriched and deepened in Art as Experience, making it i of Dewey'southward nearly significant works.

The roots of aesthetic experience prevarication, Dewey argues, in commonplace feel, in the consummatory experiences that are ubiquitous in the course of human being 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 artful quality–what Dewey called having "an experience." Nor is the creative piece of work of the artist, in its broad parameters, unique. The process of intelligent use of materials and the imaginative evolution of possible solutions to problems issuing in a reconstruction of feel that affords immediate satisfaction, the process institute in the creative work of artists, is also to be found in all intelligent and creative human action. What distinguishes artistic cosmos is the relative stress laid upon the immediate enjoyment of unified qualitative complexity as the rationalizing aim of the activity itself, and the power 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 function in artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation. Dewey, yet, 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 equally color, aroma, texture, etc., divorced from the funded meanings of past experience. It is not only the sensible qualities nowadays in the physical media the artist uses, but the wealth of meaning that attaches to these qualities, that constitute the textile that is refined and unified in the process of artistic expression. The creative person concentrates, clarifies, and vivifies these meanings in the artwork. The unifying element in this procedure is emotion–non the emotion of raw passion and burst, but emotion that is reflected upon and used every bit a guide to the overall grapheme of the artwork. Although Dewey insisted that emotion is not the significant content of the work of fine art, he clearly understands it to be the crucial tool of the artist'southward creative activity.

Dewey repeatedly returns in Fine art as Experience to a familiar theme of his disquisitional reflections upon the history of ideas, namely that a distinction too strongly drawn too often sacrifices accuracy of business relationship for a misguided simplicity. Two applications of this theme are worth mentioning here. Dewey rejects the sharp stardom frequently made in aesthetics between the matter and the course of an artwork. What Dewey objected to was the implicit suggestion that thing and form stand side by side, equally it were, in the artwork as distinct and precisely distinguishable elements. For Dewey, form is improve 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 stardom that Dewey rejects is that between the artist as the active creator and the audition equally the passive recipient of art. This stardom artificially truncates the artistic process by in upshot suggesting that the procedure ends with the final artifact of the artist'southward creativity. Dewey argues that, to the reverse, the process is barren without the bureau of the appreciator, whose agile absorption of the artist's work requires a recapitulation of many of the same processes of bigotry, comparison, and integration that are present in the creative person'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 past the artist, and the "work of art" proper, which is but realized through the active engagement of an astute audience.

Ever concerned with the interrelationships between the various domains of human activeness and concern, Dewey ends Art as Feel with a chapter devoted to the social implications of the arts. Fine art is a product of culture, and it is through art that the people of a given culture limited the significance of their lives, besides equally their hopes and ethics. Because fine art has its roots in the consummatory values experienced in the course of human life, its values have an affinity to commonplace values, an analogousness that accords to art a critical role in relation to prevailing social conditions. Insofar every bit the possibility for a meaningful and satisfying life disclosed in the values embodied in fine art is not realized in the lives of the members of a society, the social relationships that foreclose this realization are condemned. Dewey'south specific target in this affiliate was the weather of workers in industrialized lodge, conditions which force upon the worker the functioning of repetitive tasks that are devoid of personal involvement and beget no satisfaction in personal accomplishment. The degree to which this critical function of art is ignored is a farther indication of what Dewey regarded every bit 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.

six. Critical Reception and Influence

Dewey's philosophical piece of work received varied responses from his philosophical colleagues during his lifetime. At that place were many philosophers who saw his work, as Dewey himself understood information technology, as a genuine attempt to employ the principles of an empirical naturalism to the perennial questions of philosophy, providing a benign clarification of problems and the concepts used to address them. Dewey'south critics, withal, oftentimes expressed the opinion that his views were more disruptive 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'due south 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 cognition must be understood equally existing apart from the knowing bailiwick, setting the truth weather condition for propositions, Dewey defended the view that things understood as isolated from any human relationship with the homo organism could not be objects of knowledge at all.

Dewey was sensitive and responsive to the criticisms brought against his views. He ofttimes 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 cess 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, non the domain of man thought alone, equally some of his critics read him to mean. Dewey's business concern for clarity of expression motivated efforts in his later writings to revise his terminology. Thus, for example, he subsequently substituted "transaction" for his before "interaction" to denote the human relationship between organism and environment, since the erstwhile better suggested a dynamic interdependence between the two, and in a new introduction to Feel and Nature, never published during his lifetime, he offered the term "culture" as an culling to "experience." Tardily in his career he attempted a more than 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 schoolhouse of idea itself, although considerable in the first few decades of the twentieth century, was gradually eclipsed during the heart role of the century equally 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, notwithstanding, leading to the dissolution of these rigid paradigms, take led to approaches that continue and expand on the themes of Dewey's work. West. 5. O. Quine'southward projection of naturalizing epistemology works upon naturalistic presumptions anticipated in Dewey'south own naturalistic theory of enquiry. The social dimension and role of conventionalities systems, explored past Dewey and other pragmatists, has received renewed attending by such writers equally 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 best-selling the affinity of his own arroyo to ethics to that of Dewey'south. The renewed openness and pluralism of recent philosophical give-and-take has meant a renewed involvement in Dewey's philosophy, an interest that promises to continue for some fourth dimension 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 Nerveless Works of John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, ed., 37 volumes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1991).

Dewey'due south consummate 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'south writings is The Essential Dewey, two vols., Larry Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Academy Press, 1998).

b. Secondary Sources

  • Alexander, Thomas M. The Horizons of Feeling: John Dewey's Theory of Art, Feel, and Nature. Albany: State University of New York Printing, 1987.
  • Boisvert, Raymond D. Dewey's Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press, 1988.
  • Boisvert, Raymond D. John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time. Albany: Country 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 Customs: 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 Academy Press, 1973.
  • Eames, Due south. Morris. Feel and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Businesslike Naturalism.Elizabeth R. Eames and Richard W. Field, eds. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Printing, 2003.
  • Eldridge, Michael. Transforming Experience: John Dewey's Cultural Instrumentalism. Nashville: Vanderbilt Academy Press, 1998.
  • Gouinlock, James. John Dewey's Philosophy of Value. New York: Humanities Press, 1972.
  • Hickman, Larry. John Dewey'due south Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington: Indiana Academy Printing, 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 Twenty-four hour period Co., 1939; New York: Prometheus Books, 1995.
  • Jackson, Philip Westward. John Dewey and the Lessons of Art. New Haven: Yale University Printing, 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 Organized religion 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'due south Conception of Philosophy. New York: Yale University Printing, 1987.
  • Thayer, H. South. The Logic of Pragmatism: An Exam of John Dewey's Logic. New York: Humanities Press, 1952.
  • Tiles, J. East. Dewey. London: Routledge, 1988.
  • Welchman, Jennifer. Dewey's Upstanding Idea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Author Information

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