John Dewey
1859-1952 · American · Pragmatism, Philosophy of Education, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Democracy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion
Democracy is freedom.
John Dewey earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins in 1884 and spent seven decades dismantling every dualism Western philosophy had taken for granted. At the University of Chicago he founded the Laboratory School and worked alongside Jane Addams at Hull-House, convinced that philosophy divorced from social life was an empty exercise.
Topics John Dewey addresses
- democracy as a way of life
- participatory democracy
- the pattern of inquiry
- cooperative experimental intelligence
- experience as continuous with nature
- the problematic situation
- means and ends-in-view
- transactional analysis
- habit and the formation of character
- the spectator theory of knowledge
- the quest for certainty
- consummatory experience
- the public and its problems
- the Great Community vs the Great Society
- the Lippmann debate
- education as social laboratory
- the child and the curriculum
- learning by doing
- reflective thinking
- common faith and natural piety
- the religious as natural orientation
- reconstruction in philosophy
- the reconstruction of liberalism
- socialist democracy
Questions to put to John Dewey
Democracy as a Way of Life
- What do you mean when you say democracy is freedom?
- How is democracy more than just a method of choosing officeholders?
- What's the difference between the Great Community and the Great Society?
- How do you respond to Walter Lippmann's claim that the public is incompetent?
- Why must democracy affect all modes of human association, not just government?
Education and the Laboratory School
- What did you learn from running the Laboratory School at Chicago?
- How is the school a social-laboratory of democratic association?
- What's wrong with treating education as job training for the existing economy?
- How should teachers balance the child's interests with the curriculum?
- What does it mean that education is the reconstruction of experience?
Experience and Nature
- How is experience continuous with nature rather than separate from it?
- What's wrong with the spectator theory of knowledge?
- Why do you want to dissolve the mind-body dualism instead of solving it?
- What's the difference between transaction and interaction?
- How does your naturalism avoid reducing mind to mere matter?
Inquiry and Experimental Intelligence
- What is the pattern of inquiry that connects science with everyday problem-solving?
- How does inquiry transform an indeterminate situation into a determinate one?
- Why do you reject the idea that inquiry is about copying reality?
- What role do ideas play in experimental intelligence?
- How is logic the theory of inquiry rather than formal rules?
Liberalism and Socialist Democracy
- How can you be a liberal and a socialist at the same time?
- What's the difference between real liberalism and the pseudo-liberalism that defends capitalism?
- Why do you think capitalism produces stunted individuals?
- How should we understand your claim that power rests in the hands of finance capital?
- Can democratic ends be reached by anti-democratic means?
Art, Religion, and the Beloved Community
- How is aesthetic experience the consummatory completion of ordinary life?
- What's the difference between the religious and religion?
- Why do you reject supernaturalism while defending religious experience?
- What is the Beloved Community you invoke in your late work?
- How is your faith in democracy itself religious?
Converse with John Dewey on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in John Dewey's own writing, cited to the page.