John Dewey

Brief Version

By Moris Polanco

Burlington, Vt., 20 Oct. 1859 – New York, 1 June 1952. The most influential American philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century, Dewey developed a career that spanned three generations. He elaborated a comprehensive philosophical vision in which the key points are: a) the view of human thinking as an instrument for ameliorating experience; b) the view of education as a matter of giving children problem-solving skills; c) the view of democracy as a moral ideal and as a way of life; d) the view of different ways of understanding the world (science, religion, art) as complementary to, rather than competitive with, each other. Following his death in 1952, Dewey’s influence fell rapidly with the ascendance of analytical philosophers. But the last two decades have witnessed a renewed interest in his philosophy, carried on by former analytical philosophers, like Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam.

Dewey’s theory of knowledge is the result of his effort to find a middle way between realism and idealism. Influenced by Darwin and William James, Dewey considered realism and idealism as different forms of intellectualism, the view that separates our thoughts, feelings and actions from the natural world. The “ontological preeminence”, according to Dewey, must be given to human experience, not to the mind or to the world, which are only concepts, i.e., artifacts constructed by our intelligence in order adjust ourselves to our environment and our environment to ourselves. Successful cognition is not, consequently, a matter of mind “corresponding” to reality (realism), or mind “constituting” reality (idealism), but a resolution of a problematic situation resulting in a reconstructed experience or consummation.

Children must be given the tools for solving problematic situations in an ever-changing world. This was essentially Dewey’s conception of education, which he developed as a middle position between two conflicting schools of pedagogy: the “curriculum centered view”, developed by W. T. Harris, and the “child centered view”, advanced by G. S. Hall. For Dewey, education, pace Harris, is not a matter of conveying information but of developing critical methods of thought, so children can reconstruct their own experience. But in order to reconstruct their experience, children need also to look back to the past, not as a monument to be valued for its own sake, but as a guide for future activity. Schools, according to Dewey, should not pretend to reproduce but to reconstruct the existing social order. The ideal social order for Dewey is a structure that allows maximum self-development of all individuals.

As Larry Hickman has pointed out, “Dewey was a philosopher individualism, but he held that individual growth can only be the product of common effort”. Common effort is what better defines democracy as a way of life. It implies that no one is left out in the free exchange of ideas, in the resolution of actual or potentially problematic situations. It also implies that policies are decided in a manner that acknowledges each person’s capacity to participate in and to contribute to the direction of social life (C. F. Delaney). Democracy, for Dewey, is “necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals”. Granting that mind and language are social constructs (something that we all share in and contribute to), it is easy to see that the more people get involved in the process of constructing mind and language, the better the instrument for shaping the world that shapes us (Ch. Lowney).

Dewey was also against the view of “superior ways of knowledge”, as sometimes people tend to think of science. In this view, Dewey recognized the effect of the noxious dichotomies forged by Modern philosophy: facts and values, means and ends, subjective and objective, social and individual, the knower and the world. For Dewey, the only difference between ordinary and scientific forms of knowledge is the precision of the methods for controlling data of the latter, and the refinement of its hypotheses. Science is not a “value-free” activity, as opposed to the arts and to religion. Values are absolutely ubiquitous: scientific activity presupposes values like coherence, elegance and beauty; so the distinction between facts and values collapses. Philosophers like Hilary Putnam draw heavily in Dewey’s attack to dichotomies to defend a pluralism that does not falls into relativism.

For Further Reading

Audi, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. s.v. “Dewey,” by C. F. Delaney.

Boisvert, Raymond D. John Dewey. Rethinking Our Time. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Lowney, Charles. “Dewey’s Criticisms of Traditional Philosophy: Towards Pragmatic Conception of Philosophy.” 1998. http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Amer/AmerLown.htm (22 Aug 2000)

The Collected Works of John Dewey. 37 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1987.

The Essential Dewey. Edited by Larry Hickman. 2 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Works About John Dewey. 1886-1995. Compiled and Edited by Barbara Levine. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.