DEWEY, JOHN
(1859–1952)

The American philosopher, educator, and social critic John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont. A shy youth, he enjoyed reading books and was a good but not a brilliant student. He entered the University of Vermont in 1875, and although his interest in philosophy and social thought was awakened during his last two years there, he was uncertain about his future career. He taught classics, science, and algebra at a high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania, from 1879 to 1881 and then returned to Burlington, where he continued to teach. He also arranged for private tutorials in philosophy with his former teacher, H. A. P. Torrey. Encouraged by Torrey and W. T. Harris, the editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy who accepted Dewey's first two philosophical articles, Dewey applied for the graduate program at the newly organized Johns Hopkins University. He was twice refused fellowship aid, but he borrowed $500 from an aunt to begin his professional philosophical career.

The external events of Dewey's Vermont years were relatively unexciting, and there is very little to indicate that he would become America's most influential philosopher and educator as well as one of the most outspoken champions of social reform. Yet the New England way of life left a deep imprint on the man and his thought. His modesty, forthrightness, doggedness, deep faith in the workings of the democratic process, and respect for his fellow man are evidenced in almost everything that he did and wrote.

Under the imaginative guidance of Daniel Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins, the university had become one of the most exciting centers for intellectual and scholarly activity. Dewey studied with C. S. Peirce, who taught logic, and with G. S. Hall, one of the first experimental psychologists in America. The greatest initial influence on Dewey, however, was G. S. Morris, whose philosophical outlook had been shaped by G. W. F. Hegel and the idealism so much in vogue on the Continent and in England.

Dewey was an eager participant in the controversies stirred up by Hegelianism. He dated his earliest interest in philosophy to a course in physiology that he took during his junior year at the University of Vermont, where he read T. H. Huxley's text on physiology. Dewey discovered the concept of the organic and developed a sense of the interdependence and interrelated unity of all things. He tells us that subconsciously he desired a world and a life that would have the same properties as had the human organism that Huxley described. In Hegel and the idealists, Dewey discovered the most profound philosophical expression of this emotional and intellectual craving. From this organic perspective, which emphasized process and change, all distinctions are functional and relative to a developing unified whole. The organic perspective could be used to oppose the static and the fixed and to break down the hard and fast dichotomies and dualisms that had plagued philosophy.

Dewey's writings during his Hegelian period are infused with an evangelical spirit and are as enthusiastic as they are vague. Whatever issue Dewey considered, he was convinced that once viewed from the perspective of the organic, old problems would dissolve and new insights would emerge. Long after Dewey had drifted away from his early Hegelianism, his outlook was shaped by his intellectual bias for a philosophy based on change, process, and dynamic, organic interaction.

After completing his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins with a dissertation on the psychology of Immanuel Kant, Dewey joined Morris at the University of Michigan in 1884. He remained there for the next ten years, with the exception of one year (1888) when he was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. At Michigan, Dewey worked with G. H. Mead, who later joined Dewey at Chicago. During his years at Michigan, Dewey became dissatisfied with pure speculation and sought ways to make philosophy directly relevant to the practical affairs of men. His political, economic, and social views became increasingly radical. He agreed to edit a new weekly with a socialist orientation, to be called Thought News, but it never reached publication. Dewey also became directly involved with public education in Michigan. His scientific interests, especially in the field of psychology, gradually overshadowed his interest in pure speculation. He published several books on theoretical and applied psychology, including Psychology (New York, 1887; 3rd rev. ed., 1891), Applied Psychology (Boston, 1889), and The Psychology of Number and Its Applications to Methods of Teaching Arithmetic (New York, 1895). The latter two books were written with J. A. McLellan.

Dewey's appointment in 1894 as chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and education at the University of Chicago provided an ideal opportunity for consolidating his diverse interests. In addition to his academic responsibilities, Dewey actively participated in the life of Hull House, founded by Jane Addams, where he had an opportunity to become directly acquainted with the social and economic problems brought about by urbanization, rapid technological advance, and the influx of immigrant populations. Dewey mixed with workers, union organizers, and political radicals of all sorts. At the university, Dewey assembled a group of sympathetic colleagues who worked closely together. Collectively they published the results of their research in a volume of the Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago titled Studies in Logical Theory (Chicago, 1903). William James, to whom the book was dedicated, rightly predicted that the ideas developed in the Studies would dominate the American philosophical scene for the next twenty-five years.

Shortly after Dewey arrived in Chicago, he helped found the famous laboratory school, commonly known as the Dewey School, which served as a laboratory for testing and developing his psychological and pedagogic hypotheses. Some of Dewey's earliest and most important books on education were based on lectures delivered at the school: The School and Society (Chicago, 1900) and The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago, 1902). When Dewey left Chicago for Columbia in 1904 because of increasing friction with the university administration concerning the laboratory school, he had already acquired a national reputation for his philosophical ideas and educational theories. The move to Columbia, where he remained until his retirement in 1930, provided a further opportunity for development, and Dewey soon gained international prominence. Through the Columbia Teachers College, which was a training center for teachers from many countries, Dewey's educational philosophy spread throughout the world.

At the time that Dewey joined the Columbia faculty, the Journal of Philosophy was founded by F. J. E. Woodbridge, and it became a forum for the discussion and defense of Dewey's ideas. There is scarcely a volume from the time of its founding until Dewey's death that does not contain an article either by Dewey or about his philosophy. As the journalistic center of the country, New York also provided Dewey with an opportunity to express himself on pressing political and social issues. He became a regular contributor to the New Republic. A selection of Dewey's popular essays is collected in Characters and Events, 2 vols. (New York, 1929).

Wherever Dewey lectured he had an enormous influence. From 1919 to 1921, he lectured at Tokyo, Beijing, and Nanjing, and his most popular book, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920), is based on his lectures at the Imperial University of Japan. He also conducted educational surveys of Turkey, Mexico, and Russia. Although he retired from Columbia in 1930, he remained active and wrote prolifically until his death. In 1937, when Dewey was seventy-eight, he traveled to Mexico to head the commission investigating the charges made against Leon Trotsky, during the Moscow trials. After a careful investigation, the commission published its report, Not Guilty (New York, 1937). In 1941 Dewey championed the cause of academic freedom when Bertrand Russell—his arch philosophical adversary—had been denied permission to teach at the City College of New York, Dewey collaborated in editing a book of essays protesting the decision.

Although constantly concerned with social and political issues, Dewey continued to work on his more technical philosophical studies. M. H. Thomas's bibliography of his writings comprises more than 150 pages. Dewey's influence extended not only to his colleagues but to leaders in almost every field. The wide effects of his teaching did not depend upon the superficial aspects of its presentation, for Dewey was not a brilliant lecturer or essayist, although he could be extremely eloquent. His writings are frequently turgid, obscure, and lacking in stylistic brilliance. But more than any other American of his time, Dewey expressed the deepest hopes and aspirations of his fellow man. Whether dealing with a technical philosophical issue or with some concrete injustice, he displayed a rare combination of acuteness, good sense, imagination, and wit.

Experience and Nature

The key concept in Dewey's philosophy is experience. Although there is a development from an idealistic to a naturalistic analysis of experience and different emphases in his many discussions of the concept, a nevertheless coherent view of experience does emerge. In his early philosophy Dewey was sympathetic to the theory of experience developed by the Hegelians and the nineteenth-century idealists. He thought of experience as a single, dynamic, unified whole in which everything is ultimately interrelated. There are no rigid dichotomies or breaks in experience and nature. All distinctions are functional and play a role in a complex organic system. Dewey also shared the idealists' antipathy to the atomist and subjectivist tendencies in the concept of experience elaborated by the British empiricists. But as Dewey drifted away from his early Hegelian orientation he indicated three major respects in which he rejected the idealistic concept of experience.

First, he charged that the idealists, in their preoccupation with knowledge and knowing, distorted the character of experience. Idealists, Dewey claimed, neglected the noncognitive and nonreflective experiences of doing, suffering, and enjoying that set the context for all knowing and inquiry. Philosophy, especially modern philosophy, had been so concerned with epistemological issues that it mistook all experience as a form of knowing. Such bias inevitably distorts the character of both man's experience and his knowing. Man is primarily a being who acts, suffers, and enjoys. Most of his life consists of experiences that are not primarily reflective. If we are to understand the nature of thought, reflection, inquiry, and their role in human life, we must appreciate their emergence from, and conditioning by, the context of nonreflective experience. There is more to experience, Dewey believed, than is to be found in the writings of the idealists and, indeed, in the writings of most epistemologists.

The second major departure from his early idealism is to be found in Dewey's rejection of the idea of a single unified whole in which everything is ultimately interrelated. In this respect, he displayed an increasing sympathy with the pluralism of the British empiricists. He insisted that life consists of a series of overlapping and interpenetrating experiences, situations, or contexts, each of which has its internal qualitative integrity. The individual experience is the primary unit of life.

The third shift is reflected in Dewey's increasingly naturalistic bias. The Hegelians and the nineteenth-century idealists did have important insights into the organic nature of experience, but they had overgeneralized them into a false cosmic projection. Dewey discovered in the new developing human sciences, especially in what he called the anthropological-biological orientation, a more careful, detailed, scientific articulation of the organic character of experience.

Dewey thought of himself as part of a general movement that was developing a new empiricism based on a new concept of experience, one that combined the strong naturalistic bias of the Greek philosophers with a sensitive appreciation for experimental method as practiced by the sciences. He was sympathetic with what he took to be the Greek view of experience, which considers it as consisting of a fund of social knowledge and skills and as being the means by which man comes into direct contact with a qualitatively rich and variegated nature. But Dewey was just as forceful in pointing out that this view of experience had to be reconstructed in light of the experimental method of the sciences. One of his earliest and clearest discussions of the nature of experience as an organic coordination is to be found in "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (Psychological Review, Vol. 3, 1896).

Dewey's interest in developing a new theory of experience led many critics to question the exact status of experience within nature, and some objectors charged him with excessive anthropomorphism. Sensitive to this type of criticism, Dewey, particularly in Experience and Nature (Chicago, 1925; 2nd ed., New York, 1929), attempted to deal with this criticism and to sketch a metaphysics, "the descriptive study of the generic traits of existence."

Nature, according to Dewey, consists of a variety of transactions that can be grouped into three evolutionary plateaus, or levels. Transaction is the technical term that Dewey used to designate the type of action in which the components and elements involved in the action both condition and are conditioned by the entire coordination. The elements of a transaction play a functional role in the developing coordination. The three plateaus of natural transactions are the physicochemical, the psychophysical, and the level of human experience. There are no sharp breaks or discontinuities within nature. But there are distinctive characteristics of the different levels of natural transactions that are reflected in their patterns of behavior and in their consequences. From this perspective, human experience consists of one type of natural transaction, a type that has been the latest to evolve. The distinguishing characteristics of this level of natural transaction are to be located in the type of language, communication, and social living that humans have developed. Experience is all-inclusive in the sense that man is involved in continuous transactions with the whole of nature, and through systematic inquiry he can come to understand the essential characteristics of nature. Some of the more specific areas of Dewey's philosophy can be investigated against this panoramic view of experience and nature.

Art and Experience

The ideas contained in Dewey's Art as Experience (New York, 1934) provided a surprise for many readers. Popular versions of his philosophy had so exaggerated the role of the practical and the instrumental that art and aesthetic experience seemed to have no place in his philosophical outlook. More perceptive commentators realized that Dewey was making explicit a dimension of his view of experience that had always been implicit and essential to an understanding of his philosophy. The meaning and role of art and aesthetic quality are crucial for understanding Dewey's views on logic, education, democracy, ethics, social philosophy, and even technology.

Dewey had persistently claimed that knowing, or more specifically, inquiry, is an art requiring active experimental manipulation and testing. Knowing does not consist of the contemplation of eternal forms, essences, or universals. Dewey argued that the "spectator theory of knowledge," which had plagued philosophy from its beginnings, is mistaken. He also objected to the sharp division between the theoretical sciences and the practical arts that had its explicit source in Aristotle and had influenced so much later philosophy. Dewey maintained that Aristotle's analysis of the practical disciplines is more fruitful for developing an adequate theory of inquiry than is his description of the theoretical sciences of knowing. Not only is inquiry an art, but all life is, or can be, artistic. The so-called fine arts differ in degree, not in kind, from the rest of life.

Dewey also gave a prominent place to what he called immediacy, pervasive quality, or aesthetic quality. This immediacy is not restricted to a special type of experience but is a distinctive feature of anything that is properly called "an experience." The primary unit of life, we have mentioned, is an experience, a natural transaction of acting, suffering, enjoying, knowing. It has both temporal development and spatial dimension and can undergo internal change and reconstruction.

But what is it that enables us to speak of an individual experience? Or, by virtue of what does an experience, situation, or context have a unity that enables us to distinguish it from other experiences? Dewey's answer is that everything that is an experience has immediacy or pervasive quality that binds together the complex constituents of the experience. This immediacy or pervasive quality can be directly felt or had. But this qualitative dimension of experience is not to be confused with a subjective feeling that is somehow locked up in the mind of the experiencer. Nor is it to be thought of as something that exists independently of any experiencer. These qualities that pervade natural transactions are properly predicated of the experience or situation as a whole. Within an experiential transaction we can institute distinctions between what is subjective and what is objective. But such distinctions are relative to, and dependent on, the context in which they are made. An experience or a situation is a whole in virtue of its immediate pervasive qualities, and each occurrence of these qualities is unique. As examples of such pervasive qualities, Dewey mentions the qualities of distress or cheer that mark existent situations, qualities that are unique in their occurrence and inexpressible in words but capable of being directly experienced. Thus, when one directly experiences a frightening situation, it is the situation that is frightening and not merely the experience.

These pervasive, or "tertiary," qualities are what Dewey calls aesthetic qualities. Aesthetic quality is thus an essential characteristic of all experiences. Within an experience, the pervasive quality can guide the development of the experience, and it can also be transformed and enriched as the experience is reconstructed. Aesthetic quality can be funded with new meaning, ideas, and emotions. A situation that is originally indeterminate, slack, or inchoate can be transformed into one that is determinate, harmonious, and funded with meaning; this type of reconstructed experience Dewey called a consummation. Such experiences are reconstructed by the use of intelligence. For example, when one is confronted with a specific problematic situation that demands resolution, one can reconstruct the situation by locating its problematic features and initiating a course of action that will resolve the situation. Consummations are characteristic of the most mundane practical tasks as well as the most speculative inquiries. The enemies of the aesthetic, Dewey claimed, are not the practical or the intellectual but the diffuse and slack at one extreme and the excessively rigid and fixed at the other. The type of experience that philosophers normally single out as aesthetic is a heightened consummation in which aesthetic qualities dominate.

Dewey viewed human life as a rhythmic movement from experiences qualified by conflict, doubt, and indeterminateness toward experiences qualified by their integrity, harmony, and funded aesthetic quality. We are constantly confronted with problematic and indeterminate situations, and insofar as we use our intelligence to reconstruct these situations successfully we achieve consummations. He was concerned both with delineating the methods by which we could most intelligently resolve the conflicting situations in which we inevitably find ourselves and with advocating the social reforms required so that life for all men would become funded with enriched meaning and increased aesthetic quality.

Logic and Inquiry

Early in his career, Dewey started developing a new theory of inquiry, which he called instrumental or experimental logic. Dewey claimed that philosophers had lost touch with the actual methods of inquiry practiced by the experimental sciences. The function of instrumental logic is to study the methods by which we most successfully gain and warrant our knowledge. On the basis of this investigation, instrumental logic could specify regulative principles for the conduct of further inquiry.

The central themes of Dewey's conception of logic were outlined in Studies in Logical Theory (Chicago, 1903), applied to education in How We Think (Boston, 1910), and further refined in Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago, 1916). Dewey also wrote numerous articles on various aspects of logic, but his most systematic and detailed presentation is in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938), in which he defines inquiry as "the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole " (p. 104). By itself, this definition is not sufficient to grasp what Dewey intends. But his meaning can be understood when the definition is interpreted against the background of what we have said about the individual experience or situation and the way in which it is pervaded by a unifying quality.

We find ourselves in situations that are qualified by their indeterminateness or internal conflict. From the perspective of the experiencer or inquirer, we can say that he experiences a "felt difficulty." This is the antecedent condition of inquiry. Insofar as the situation demands some resolution, we must attempt to articulate the problem or problems that are to be solved. Formulating the problems may be a process of successive refinement in the course of the inquiry. The next logical stage is that of suggestion or hypothesis, in which we imaginatively formulate various relevant hypotheses for solving the problem. In some complex inquiries we may have to engage in hypothetico-deductive reasoning in order to refine our hypotheses and to ascertain the logical consequences of the hypothesis or set of hypotheses. Finally, there is the stage of experimental testing in which we seek to confirm or disconfirm the suggested hypotheses. If our inquiry is successful, the original indeterminate situation is transformed into a unified whole. Knowledge may be defined as the objective of inquiry. Knowledge is that which is warranted by the careful use of the norms and methods of inquiry. When "knowledge" is taken as an abstract term related to inquiry in the abstract, it means warranted assertibility. Furthermore, the knowledge gained in a specific inquiry is funded in our experience and serves as the background for further inquiry. By reflecting on this general pattern of inquiry, which can be exhibited in commonsense inquiry as well as the most advanced scientific inquiry, we can bring into focus the distinctive features of Dewey's logic.

First, this pattern of inquiry is intended to be a general schema for all inquiry. But the specific procedures, testing methods, type of evidence, and so on, will vary with different types of inquiry and different kinds of subject matter. Second, a specific inquiry cannot be completely isolated from the context of other inquiries. The rules, procedures, and evidence required for the conduct of any inquiry are derived from other successful inquiries. By studying the types of inquiry that have been most successful in achieving warranted conclusions, we can abstract norms, rules, and procedures for directing further inquiry. These norms may themselves be modified in the course of further inquiry. Third, all inquiry presupposes a social or public context that is the medium for funding the warranted conclusions and norms for further inquiry. In this respect, Dewey agrees with Peirce's emphasis on the community of inquirers. Inquiry both requires such a community and helps to further the development of this community. Dewey attempted to relate this idea of a community of inquirers to his view of democracy. The essential principle of democracy is that of community; an effective democracy requires the existence of a community of free, courageous, and open-minded inquirers. Fourth, inquiry is essentially a self-corrective process. To conduct a specific inquiry, some knowledge claims, norms, and rules must be taken as fixed, but no knowledge claim, norm, or rule is absolutely fixed; it may be criticized, revised, or abandoned in light of subsequent inquiry and experience.

Dewey's theory of inquiry as an ongoing self-corrective process and his view of knowledge as that which is warranted through inquiry both differ radically from many traditional theories of inquiry and knowledge. Dewey thought of this theory as an alternative to the views of those philosophers who have claimed that there is an epistemological given that is indubitable and known with certainty. According to this epistemological model, some truths are considered to be absolutely certain, indubitable, or incorrigible. They may be considered self-evident, known by rational insight, or directly grasped by the senses. On the basis of this foundation, we then construct the rest of our knowledge. From Dewey's perspective, this general model that has informed many classical theories of knowledge is confused and mistaken. There are no absolute first truths that are given or known with certainty. Furthermore, knowledge neither has nor requires such a foundation in order to be rational. Inquiry and its objective, knowledge, are rational because inquiry is a self-corrective process by which we gradually become clearer about the epistemological status of both our starting points and conclusions. We must continually submit our knowledge claims to the public test of a community of inquirers in order to clarify, refine, and justify them.

Democracy and Education

Dewey is probably best known for his philosophy of education. This is not a special branch of his philosophy, however, for he claimed that all philosophy can be conceived of as the philosophy of education. And it is certainly true that all the concepts we have discussed inform his thinking about education. He returned again and again to the subject of education, but the essential elements of his position can be found in My Pedagogic Creed (New York, 1897), The School and Society (Chicago, 1900), The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago, 1902), and especially in his comprehensive statement in Democracy and Education (New York, 1916).

It is essential to appreciate the dialectical context in which Dewey developed his educational ideas. He was critical of the excessively rigid and formal approach to education that dominated the practice of most American schools in the latter part of the nineteenth century. He argued that such an approach was based upon a faulty psychology in which the child was thought of as a passive creature upon whom information and knowledge had to be imposed. But Dewey was equally critical of the "new education," which was based on a sentimental idealization of the child. This child-oriented approach advocated that the child himself should pick and choose what he wanted to study. It also was based on a mistaken psychology, which neglected the immaturity of the child's experience. Education is, or ought to be, a continuous reconstruction of experience in which there is a development of immature experience toward experience funded with the skills and habits of intelligence. The slogan "Learn by Doing" was not intended as a credo for anti-intellectualism but, on the contrary, was meant to call attention to the fact that the child is naturally an active, curious, and exploring creature. A properly designed education must be sensitive to this active dimension of life and must guide the child, so that through his participation in different types of experience his creativity and autonomy will be cultivated rather than stifled.

The child is not completely malleable, nor is his natural endowment completely fixed and determinate. Like Aristotle, Dewey believed that the function of education is to encourage those habits and dispositions that constitute intelligence. Dewey placed great stress on creating the proper type of environmental conditions for eliciting and nurturing these habits. His conception of the educational process is therefore closely tied to the prominent role that he assigned to habit in human life. (For a detailed statement of the nature and function of habit, see Human Nature and Conduct, New York, 1922.) Education as the continuous reconstruction and growth of experience also develops the moral character of the child. Virtue is taught not by imposing values upon the child but by cultivating fair-mindedness, objectivity, imagination, openness to new experiences, and the courage to change one's mind in the light of further experience.

Dewey also thought of the school as a miniature society; it should not simply mirror the larger society but should be representative of the essential institutions of this society. The school as an ideal society is the chief means for social reform. In the controlled social environment of the school it is possible to encourage the development of creative individuals who will be able to work effectively to eliminate existing evils and institute reasonable goods. The school, therefore, is the medium for developing the set of habits required for systematic and open inquiry and for reconstructing experience that is funded with greater harmony and aesthetic quality.

Dewey perceived acutely the threat posed by unplanned technological, economic, and political development to the future of democracy. The natural direction of these forces is to increase human alienation and to undermine the shared experience that is so vital for the democratic community. For this reason, Dewey placed so much importance on the function of the school in the democratic community. The school is the most important medium for strengthening and developing a genuine democratic community, and the task of democracy is forever the creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and participate.

Ethics and Social Philosophy

In order to understand Dewey's moral philosophy, we must again focus on his concept of the situation. Man is a creature who by nature has values. There are things, states of affairs, and activities that he directly enjoys, prizes, or values. Moral choices and decisions arise only in those situations in which there are competing desires or a conflict of values. The problem that a man then confronts is to decide what he really wants and what course of action he ought to pursue. He cannot appeal to his immediate values to resolve the situation; he must evaluate or appraise the situation and the different courses of action open to him. This process of deliberation that culminates in a decision to act is what Dewey calls "valuation." But how do we engage in this process of valuation? We must analyze the situation as carefully as we can, imaginatively project possible courses of action, and scrutinize the consequences of these actions. Those ends or goods that we choose relative to a concrete situation after careful deliberation are reasonable or desirable goods. Our choices are reasonable to the extent that they reflect our developed habits of intelligence. Choices will be perverse or irrational if they are made on the basis of prejudice and ignorance. Dewey is fully aware that there are always practical limitations to our deliberations, but a person trained to deliberate intelligently will be prepared to act intelligently even in those situations that do not permit extended deliberation. When we confront new situations we must imagine and strive for new goals. As long as there is human life, there will always be situations in which there are internal conflicts that demand judgment, decision, and action. In this sense, the moral life of man is never completed, and the ends achieved become the means for attaining further ends. But lest we think that man is always striving for something that is to be achieved in the remote future, or never, Dewey emphasized that there are consummations—experiences in which the ends that we strive for are concretely realized.

It should be clear that such a view of man's moral life places a great deal of emphasis on intelligence. Dewey readily admitted his "faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is a projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization." It should also be clear that ethics conceived of in this manner blends into social philosophy. Valuation, like all inquiry, presupposes a community of shared experience in which there are common norms and procedures, and intelligent valuation is also a means for making such a community a concrete reality. Here, too, ends and norms are clarified, tested, and modified in light of the cumulative experience of the community. Furthermore, it is the objective of social philosophy to point the way to the development of those conditions that will foster the effective exercise of practical intelligence. The spirit that pervades Dewey's entire philosophy and finds its perfect expression in his social philosophy is that of the reformer or reconstructor, not the revolutionary. Dewey was always skeptical of panaceas and grand solutions for eliminating existing evils and injustices. But he firmly believed that with a realistic scientific knowledge of existing conditions and with a cultivated imagination, men could ameliorate the human condition. To allow ourselves to drift in the course of events or to fail to assume our responsibility for continuous reconstruction of experience inevitably leads to the dehumanization of man.

Philosophy and Civilization

Dewey presented a comprehensive and synoptic image of man and the universe. The entire universe consists of a multifarious variety of natural transactions. Man is at once continuous with the rest of nature and exhibits distinctive patterns of behavior that distinguish him from the rest of nature. His experience is also pervaded with qualities that are not reducible to less complex natural transactions. Thus, Dewey attempted to place man within the context of the whole of nature. In addition, Dewey was sensitive to the varieties of human experience. He sought to delineate the distinctive features of different aspects of experience, ranging from mundane practical experience to the religious dimension of experience. Within the tradition of philosophy Dewey may be characterized as a robust naturalist or a humanistic naturalist. His philosophy is both realistic and optimistic. There will always be conflicts, problems, and competing values within our experience, but with the continuous development of "creative intelligence" men can strive for and realize new ends and goals.

This synoptic view of man and the universe is closely related to Dewey's conception of the role of philosophy in civilization. Philosophy is dependent on, but should attempt to transcend, the specific culture from which it emerges. The function of philosophy is to effect a junction of the new and the old, to articulate the basic principles and values of a culture, and to reconstruct these into a more coherent and imaginative vision. Philosophy is therefore essentially critical and, as such, will always have work to do. For as the complex of traditions, values, accomplishments, and aspirations that constitute a culture changes, so must philosophy change. Indeed, in pointing the way to new ideals and in showing how these may be effectively realized, philosophy is one of the means for changing a culture. Philosophy is continually faced with the challenge of understanding the meaning of evolving cultures and civilizations and of articulating new projected ideals. The motif of reconstruction that runs throughout Dewey's investigations dominates his conception of the role of philosophy in civilization. He epitomized the spirit of his entire philosophical endeavor in his "plea for casting off of that intellectual timidity which hampers the wings of imagination, a plea for speculative audacity, for more faith in ideas, sloughing off a cowardly reliance upon those partial ideas to which we are wont to give the name facts." He fully realized that he was giving philosophy a more modest function than had been given by those who claimed that philosophy reveals an eternal reality. But such modesty is not incompatible with boldness in the maintenance of this function. As Dewey declared, "a combination of such modesty and courage affords the only way I know of in which the philosopher can look his fellow man in the face with frankness and humanity" (Philosophy and Civilization, p. 12).

See also Aesthetic Experience; Aesthetic Qualities; Aristotle; Experience; Harris, William Torrey; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Hegelianism; Huxley, Thomas Henry; Idealism; James, William; Kant, Immanuel; Mead, George Herbert; Naturalism; Peirce, Charles Sanders; Philosophy of Education, History of; Pragmatism; Value and Valuation; Woodbridge, Frederick James Eugene.

Bibliography

The most exhaustive bibliography of John Dewey's writings is M. H. Thomas's John Dewey: A Centennial Bibliography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). This excellent guide includes a comprehensive listing of Dewey's writings, translations and reviews of his works, and a bibliography of books, articles, and dissertations about Dewey.

A less comprehensive bibliography of Dewey's writings can also be found in The Philosophy of John Dewey, edited by P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1939).

The following secondary sources are helpful as general introductions to Dewey's life and philosophy. Richard J. Bernstein, John Dewey (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966) focuses on the concept of experience and nature. George R. Geiger, John Dewey in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958) stresses the role of aesthetic experience as the key to Dewey's philosophy. Sidney Hook, John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Day, 1939) captures both the spirit and letter of Dewey as a man, social reformer, and philosopher. Robert J. Roth, S.J., John Dewey and Self-Realization (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962) shows the importance and meaning of religious experience for Dewey.

Richard J. Bernstein (1967)