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 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.

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,
includingReconstruction 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
inStudies 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 theLogic 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 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 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 theEthics (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 andDemocracy 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.