With William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey was a founder of pragmatism, a uniquely American philosophy. Rejecting the traditional philosophical conception of thought as a function representing or mirroring reality, pragmatism conceives of thought (and language) as an instrument for problem solving, prediction, and action. The pragmatist views the traditional objects of philosophical contemplation, such as meaning, knowledge, and belief, from the point of view of their uses. As Peirce put it, “Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.”
Dewey was a practical philosopher, a practitioner of applied philosophy, who developed important theories of education, psychology, and democratic government. He also pursued more traditional philosophical topics, including in the fields of logic, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, and even aesthetics. But his consistent position was that philosophy had become a jejune technical pursuit divorced from social and cultural engagement. He proposed reforming philosophy into a discipline dedicated to “education for living.”
John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, 1859. Brought up in the Congregationalist Church, he attended public schools and enrolled in the University of Vermont at fifteen. After graduating in 1879 at nineteen, he taught high school for two years and then returned to Vermont to study philosophy privately with Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey, an Intuitionist with a passion for Kant. Dewey next enrolled in the graduate philosophy program at Johns Hopkins University in 1882 and resolved to reconcile NeoHegelian idealism, Darwinian biology, and experimental psychology into a new psychology and a new philosophy. His objective was to synthesize the biological, functional, and materialist Darwinian pole with the creative and spiritual pole of idealism. He saw Hegel’s dialectical process as a way of synthesizing matter and spirit, the divine and the human.
Dewey developed a powerful reputation as a philosopher and psychologist through engagements at the University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, and the University of Chicago, where he was appointed chairman of the Philosophy Department, which, conveniently for him, encompassed Psychology as well as Pedagogy. This put Dewey in a unique position to apply philosophy practically. With George Herbert Mead, Harvey A. Carr, and James Rowland Angell, Dewey fostered development of the so-called Chicago School, advocating “psychological functionalism,” which focuses on the utility and purpose of behavior modified in an evolutionary manner over years of human experience. This led to Dewey’s work in educational theory. He founded at the University of Chicago the Laboratory School, which became a renowned vehicle for testing both psychological and educational theories. He also engaged in political and social causes and became a friend and colleague of Jane Addams and supported her Hull House movement in social work.
In 1904, disputes involving the Laboratory School prompted Dewey to leave Chicago and become a professor in the philosophy department of Columbia University in New York City, where he also worked closely with Columbia’s distinguished Teacher’s College.
Dewey’s philosophical orientation can best be understood through his approach to epistemology—a field he preferred to call “theory of inquiry.” His belief was that the tendency of philosophy had been to mystify thought and its relevance to the world. Dewey embraced a Hegelian view, arguing that the world does not stand apart from thought but is in fact the objective manifestation of thought and is therefore defined by thought. In the course of his work, however, he revised this initial idealistic view and instead proposed that a valid theory of knowledge had to start with a consideration of the development of knowledge as an adaptive response to the environment aimed specifically at constructively restructuring that environment. Indeed, Dewey came to see thought as the product of an interaction between organism and environment. Knowledge, in this view, was the instrument by which people could strive to guide and control the interaction with the environment. This view was set out in “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896) and developed further in Studies in Logical Theory (1903).
Dewey extended his “naturalistic” views on epistemology and logic to metaphysics. Concluding that the aim of traditional metaphysics was to find an immutable cognitive object as the foundation for knowledge, Dewey countered that knowledge is the product of activity intended to fulfill human purposes; therefore, the truth of a belief (“knowledge”) is discovered by the consequences of its practical employment, not by an abstruse analysis of its ontological origins. His 1908 article “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?” addressed this redefinition directly.
Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy—with respect both to epistemology and metaphysics —lent itself naturally to ethics and social theory, which Dewey saw as rich fields for the practical application of philosophy. Both moral and social problems, as Dewey saw them, begged for answers that guide human action to achieve socially defined productive ends, which manifest themselves in a satisfying life. From this basis, he went on to discuss the nature of democracy and democratic society, thereby seamlessly extending his pragmatism into political philosophy.
In 1931, Dewey delivered the William James Lectures at Harvard University in what was a new field for him, aesthetics. The lectures became one of Dewey’s most widely read and influential books, Art as Experience, which argues that the roots of aesthetic experience are to be found in commonplace human experience as a coalescence of meanings and values drawn from previous experience and present circumstances.
Dewey’s career as philosopher is enviable in the degree to which he engaged culture at every level, giving philosophy a popular relevance that is rare in the modern world—perhaps rare at any time. Dewey lived a long life, dying on June 1, 1952, at the age of ninety-two.
