Dewey, John (1859–1952)

John Dewey was an American philosopher, educator, psychologist, public intellectual, social critic, and political activist. He was a major figure in American intellectual history and one of the great minds, deserving, according to his biographer G. Dykhuizen, the title of the “spokesman of humanity.” Born in Burlington, Vermont (1859), he died in New York City (1952). His multivolume works comprise writings from all areas of philosophy and also from psychology, education, political science, and the arts. As a philosopher, he is recognized worldwide as one of the founding fathers of the distinctively American [Page 742]philosophical school of pragmatism, with his own version, titled “instrumentalism.” As an educator, he is renowned for his system of teaching through experimental observation (a progressive system in education focused on learning by doing), which in the 20th century has become internationally influential for decades in many countries, including Japan, China, Turkey, and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As a psychologist, he was a pioneer in functional psychology. As a public intellectual, social critic, and political activist, he was involved in numerous cultural, social, and political actions and movements, including founding and presiding over the American Psychological Association, the American Philosophical Association, the New School for Social Research, and the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Against Leon Trotsky; issues of community and democracy; domestic and international political affairs, such as presidential elections and world peace; woman's suffrage; school reform; and academic freedom. All of these activities were directed by Dewey's reconstructed conception of philosophy as an intellectual enterprise, whose mission is to solve the problems of men and women, rather than the purely academic problems of philosophers themselves. Such a philosophy must be substantially practical in making human life and activity more creative and intelligent and serving the “construction of good,” by which he means the shared communicative experience. By understanding democracy as a creative “way of life” rather than simply the method of government, he has earned the title of true “philosopher of democracy.”

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While from the start being interested in empirical psychology,Dewey's thought has undertaken an early move, according to his own expression, “from absolutism to experimentalism,” after having dealt with German philosophers such as Leibniz, Kant, and particularly Hegel. The Hegelian flavor, stripped from idealism, has remained with Dewey for the whole subsequent career, in the sense of its unifying and organic character, and moreover its dialectics as a form of evolutionary paradigm. Dewey was an organic holist from the start. The idea of dynamic, open, evolving unity remained a guiding principle of his philosophy. His further move toward naturalistic experimentalism was substantially prompted by the revolutionary input of Darwinism. The theory of natural selection also continued to have a lifelong impact upon Dewey's thought, while he explicitly rejected Social Darwinism with its self-serving and antidemocratic rhetoric about the survival of the fittest. Thus, both Hegel and Darwin had become the particular and lasting sources of Dewey's antidualism, that is, the search for overcoming of all traditional philosophical dualisms, such as between culture and nature, subject and object, theory and practice, psychical and physical, mind and world, and individual and society. Dewey's critical stance toward past efforts in this area was expressed by his conceptions of “experimental experience,” “experimental teaching,” and even “experimental logic” in the middle stage of his career, which had provided him with an empirically based theory of knowledge that was in line with the developing American school of thought known as “pragmatism.”

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