John dewey biography philosopher

Before he published his groundbreaking essay, Dewey had to test his half-formed ideas in a real school, thus he and his wife ran the Lab School at the University of Chicago from to Classes were small and select. The Dewey school was distinctly middle class, with motivated students and supportive parents. In these schools, students visited fire stations, post offices, and city halls.

They grew their own gardens, cooked, cobbled shoes, and tutored younger students. They staged plays dramatizing historical events. Pretending to be the heroes of the Trojan War, they held battles at recess with wooden swords and barrel-cover shields. Photo caption In the John Dewey School in Denver ineighth graders create mosaic murals to decorate school corridors and offices.

He remained there untilteaching, lecturing in schools and community centers, traveling abroad to advise foreign educators, and writing articles for learned journals and popular magazines like the New Republic. His goal: democracy, not only in politics and the economy but also as an ethical ideal, as a way of life. As an activist and public intellectual, Dewey made a stunning series of contributions.

In response to feelings of guilt he harbored about his support for World War I, Dewey led a crusade that culminated in the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an influential though controversial treaty outlawing war. He traveled with Alice to Japan inwhere he criticized the emperor cult, and lived in China for more than two years, giving two hundred lectures.

Dewey went on to travel to Turkey, South Africa, and Mexico, advising governments on how to improve their educational systems. Today, in eleven countries, ranging from Italy to Argentina, that traditionally educate their students with lectures, memorization, and exams, there are Dewey centers that look to humanize education and consider the wider aspects of his philosophy.

He had received numerous honorary degrees, declarations from foreign nations, and a portrait bust by the famous sculptor Jacob Epstein. From his days at the Experimental School in Chicago until his death inhe was the object of sharp criticism. Some parents in Chicago claimed that after a morning of chaotic play in the Dewey school, they had to teach their children how to read and write.

Immigrants in New York City violently protested against manual training in They wanted a classical education so that their children could go to college and become professionals. The controversy surrounding Dewey continued after his death. Analytic philosophers have little use for a sage who was not interested in arcane disputes over language.

The champion of cultural literacy, E. Hirsch, insists that the education-school professors who lionize Dewey instruct future teachers to eschew facts, completion, testing, and lectures. InHuman Events, a conservative weekly, listed Democracy and Education among the most dangerous books published in the past two hundred years. Defenders detect profundity beneath obscurity and argue that Dewey deliberately adopted an antirhetorical writing style.

Critics demand clarity and example, maybe some rhythm and grace—missing in a philosopher who had no ear for music. I have met many contemporary teachers who have heard of John Dewey. I have not met one who has john dewey biography philosopher his works, except reluctantly. Of course, any philosopher who becomes famous can expect critiques and may become attractive to followers who will distort his or her message.

The distortion will be magnified when the philosopher writes a lot, especially in an abstract and imprecise style. The assaults can be expanded to include social ills as well as educational shortcomings: communism, creeping socialism, juvenile delinquency, declining patriotism, a weakened military, and a less productive economy. As his interest grew, John decided to take some time off from teaching in order to john dewey biography philosopher on studying philosophy and psychology at John Hopkins.

He was mostly influenced by George Morris and Stanley Hall. After receiving his doctorate inhe got a job as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan where he met Harriet Chipman. The two got married in and went on to have six children and adopted a seventh. At this university, he became a professor of philosophy. After one year, he left this position and returned to the University of Michigan where he remained for five years.

Inhe was made head of the philosophy department at the University of Chicago. He remained here until when he left to join the Ivy League. He became a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and also worked at a teachers college. Inhe left Columbia and retired from his teaching career. He rejected the more rigid ideas of Transcendentalism.

Slink away? He decried traditional systems which, in their pursuit of rational access to truth and reality, create an invidious distinction by casting emotion as confused thought, distraction, or bodily interference which needs to be suppressed, controlled, or bracketed. Emotion is intertwined, psychologically, both in the individual in reasoning and actingand in the wider culture with social forms of meaning creation.

Attempts to balkanize emotion are motivated in part, he argued, by the desire to segregate leisure from labor, men from women; on this reading, the traditional rationalistic bent is, in effect, a power-play that deserves intellectual and moral critique. Sentiency As with other psychic phenomena, sentience emerges through the transactions of organisms in natural environments.

Methods successful in the past, pre-organized responses, sometimes fail. In such cases, we become ambivalent—divided against ourselves about what to do next.

John dewey biography philosopher: John Dewey was an

In other words, inhibition creates ambivalence, and ambivalence makes possible new ways of considering alternatives; crude, physical situations take on qualitatively new complexities of meaning. Thus, Dewey wrote, sentiency or feeling is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction.

EN, LW1: At this stage, the new relationships are not yet known; they do, however, provide the conditions for knowing. Symbolization, language, is the next step in liberating these noticed relationships using intellectual tools including abstraction, memory, and imagination EN, LW1: Mind Dewey rejected both traditional accounts of mind-as-substance or container and more contemporary schemes reducing mind to brain states EN, LW1: — Rather, mind is activity, a range of dynamic processes of interaction between organism and world.

Consider the range connoted by mind: as memory I am reminded of X ; attention I keep her in mind, I mind my manners ; purpose I have an aim in mind ; care or solicitude I mind the child ; paying heed I mind the traffic stop. It is primarily a verb…[that] denotes every mode and variety of interest in, and concern for, things: practical, intellectual, and emotional.

It never denotes anything self-contained, isolated from the world of persons and things, but is always used with respect to situations, events, objects, persons and groups. AE, LW —68 As Wittgenstein entry on Wittgenstein, section on rule-following and private language pointed out 30 years later, no private language see entry on private language is possible given this account of meaning.

While meanings might be privately entertained, they are not privately invented; meanings are social and emerge from symbol systems arising through collective communication and action EN, LW1: Active, complex animals are sentient due to the variety of distinctive connections they have with their environment. With language, creatures can identify and differentiate feelings as feelings, objects as objects, etc.

Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially and proleptically. With language they are discriminated and identified. No longer our spark of divinity, as some ancients held, it is also rescued from merely being a ghost in a machine. Mind becomes vital, investigating and addressing problems, and inventing new tools, aims, and ideals.

Consciousness Like mind, consciousness is also a verb—the brisk transitioning of felt, qualitative events. In the end, however, Dewey did not believe a fully adequate account of consciousness could be captured in words. Dewey, then, did not define consciousness, but evoked it using contrasts and instances. Consider these johns dewey biography philosopher in Experience and Nature, EN, LW1: Mind is A whole system of meanings as embodied in organic life Awareness or perception of meanings of actual events in their meaning Contextual and persistent: a constant background Focal and transitive Structural and substantial: a constant foreground A punctuated series of heres and nows Enduring luminosity Intermittent flashes of varying intensities A continuous transmission of messages The occasional interception and singling out of a message that makes it audible Given the processual, active nature of our psychology, Dewey was forced to depict consciousness with a dynamic, organismic vocabulary.

John dewey biography philosopher: John Dewey was an

Consciousness is thinking-in-motion, an ever-reconfiguring event series that is qualitatively felt as experience transforms. Consciousness is drama; mind is the indispensable back story. This back story is not radically subjective; it is social, constituted by communities past and present. Dewey also tried to get at consciousness performatively, so to speak; he provoked the reader to consider the nature of consciousness while reading.

Experience and Metaphysics 3. Initially, it contributed to his idealism and psychology. Dewey advanced this in the Carus Lectures, revised and expanded in his metaphysical magnum opus, Experience and Naturerevised edition, ; EN, LW1. Keep three influences in mind. Second, recall that Dewey took from James a radically empirical approach to philosophy—the insistence that perspectival experience, including that called personal, emotional, or temperamental, was philosophically relevant and worth factoring into abstract and logical theories.

Finally, recall that Dewey accepted from Hegel experience as manifested in particular social, historical, and cultural modes. Not only is the self constituted through experiential transactions with the community, but this recognition vitiates the Cartesian model of the simple, atomic self and methods based upon that presumption. Philosophy may start where we start, personally — with complex, symbolic, and cultural forms—and then articulate further emergences from them.

More than just another node in a system, experience also amounted to a metaphilosophical john dewey biography philosopher, a way of doing philosophy. Within this Weltanschauung, philosophy was not a rational bridge to transcend life, but was equipment for living. Thus, clarifying what experience meant assumed the greatest importance, insofar as this was vital to philosophy earning back its status as a wisdom which might aid survival, growth, and flourishing.

Dewey recognized this and commented about it toward the end of his life. It was typical for many philosophers to construe experience narrowly, as the private contents of consciousness. These contents might be perceptions sensingor reflections calculating, associating, imagining done by the subjective mind. Some, such as Plato and Descartes, denigrated experience as a flux which confused or diverted rational inquiry.

Others, such as Hume and Locke, thought that experience as atomic sensations provided the mind at least some resources for knowing, albeit with reduced ambitions. Both general philosophical approaches agreed that percepts and concepts were different and in tension; they agreed that sensation was perspectival and context-relative; they also agreed that this relativity problematized the assumed mission of philosophy—to know with certainty—and differed only about the degree of the problem.

Dewey disputed the shared empiricist conviction that sensations are categorically separable contents of consciousness. Regarding the phenomenon of mental privacy, Dewey argued that while we have episodes of what might be called mental interiority, it is a later human development. Regarding sensorial atomicity, discussed previously in the section on psychologyDewey explained sensation as embedded in a larger sensori-motor circuit, a transaction which should not be quarantined to any single phase—nor to consciousness.

Dewey levied similar criticisms against traditional accounts of reflective thought. Mind is neither static nor a substance which stands, somehow, apart from the body—or from history, from culture. Rather, reasoning is always permeated with both feelings and practical exigencies. First, experience exhibits a fundamentally experimental character.

This was impressed upon Dewey in a variety of his educational roles. Dewey calls such experience direct, primary, or had. Known experience abstracts away from had or direct experience in purposeful and selective ways; knowing isolates certain relations or connections. Some take place with only a minimum of regulation, with little foresight, preparation and intent.

Others occur because, in part, of the prior occurrence of intelligent action. Both kinds are had; they are undergone, enjoyed or suffered. The first are not known; they are not understood; they are dispensations of fortune or providence. The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that present the funded outcome of operations that substitute definite continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the fragmentary quality due to isolation.

Much in experience is unknown to us without being illusory or merely apparent; we are not trapped in a cave full of illusions with only rational dialectic to yank us upwards. Rather, we engage and cope with a world which is not completely meaningful. We strive to make the world more meaningful, but while some of the meanings devised assist in prediction and control of circumstances, others are simply enjoyed—but that does not make them less real.

This requires some unpacking. Philosophy, too, is a form of activity—which means that we need to do philosophy differently; we need pay attention to where and how we start; in this sense, experience is a method. Is that not experience, too? As we live our lives, we confront problems which invoke the need for inquiry and, often, there is a need to devise a tool of explanation and amelioration.

Theory is that tool, generated by these encounters; it does not come first. As did James and Peirce before him, Dewey challenged not only the theories of previous philosophers, but the assumptions informing their methods. In his philosophical work, Dewey criticized any number of these presuppositions, but here his point is metaphilosophical—how these conceptions enter into the practice of philosophy as presuppositions.

Too often philosophy puts the theoretical cart before the practical horse. We simply cannot know—and should not assume—which terms and theories are necessary for an analysis of a novel situation. Nevertheless, much philosophy has assumed such necessities. It has produced endless dialectical exchanges; it has caricatured and hollowed out johns dewey biography philosopher complex and changeable subject matters.

Intellectual products come, then, from earlier inquiries, which possessed their own parameters and purposes. Whatever theory is eventually devised for a new situation—and Dewey is not against theory, to be very clear—it must be checked against ordinary experience EN, LW1: EN, LW1: —76 Such a method is truly critical, because it forces inquirers to check previous interpretations and judgments against their live encounters in a new situation EN, LW1: This entails that philosophy as a practice impose upon itself a much more radical and dynamic model of theorizing, one pressed into much closer transactions with existing practices and problems.

From the beginning, Dewey sought to critique and reconstruct metaphysical concepts e. Like his fellow pragmatists Peirce, James, and Mead, Dewey sought to transform not eradicate metaphysics. His dormant interest in metaphysics was revivified at Columbia by his colleague F. Unlike other metaphysics, Dewey explicitly said that metaphysics served something further—criticism.

EN looks to existing characteristics of human culture, anthropologically, to see what they reveal, more generally, about nature.

John dewey biography philosopher: John Dewey originated the experimentalism

While this entry lacks space for even a bare summary, it is worth noting that EN begins with an extensive discussion of method and experience as a new starting point for philosophy. An extensive presentation of the generic traits follows, which, in due course, evokes and informs discussions regarding science, technology, body, mind, language, art, and value.

EN, LW1: Dewey raises the issue, prophylactically: As a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differentiation into physical and mental, [metaphysics] seems to have nothing to do with criticism and choice, with an effective love of wisdom. The activity of metaphysical map-making fits in with the more engaged role Dewey envisioned for philosophers.

But later 'progress' may consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching. Even though they go on studying books of pedagogy, reading teachers' journals, attending teachers' institutes, etc. Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he cannot grow as a teacher, an inspirer and director of soul-life" Dewey,p.

For Dewey, teacher education should focus not on producing persons who know how to teach as soon as they leave the program; rather, teacher education should be concerned with producing professional students of education who have the propensity to inquire about the subjects they teach, the methods used, and the activity of the mind as it gives and receives knowledge.

According to Dewey, such a student is not superficially engaging with these materials, rather, the professional student of education has a genuine passion to inquire about the subjects of education, knowing that doing so ultimately leads to acquisitions of the skills related to teaching. Such students of education aspire for the intellectual growth within the profession that can only be achieved by immersing oneself in the lifelong pursuit of the intelligence, skills and character Dewey linked to the profession.

As Dewey notes, other professional fields, such as law and medicine cultivate a professional spirit in their fields to constantly study their work, their methods of their work, and a perpetual need for intellectual growth and concern for issues related to their profession. As Dewey notes, "An intellectual responsibility has got to be distributed to every human being who is concerned in carrying out the work in question, and to attempt to concentrate intellectual responsibility for a work that has to be done, with their brains and their hearts, by hundreds or thousands of people in a dozen or so at the top, no matter how wise and skillful they are, is not to concentrate responsibility—it is to diffuse irresponsibility" Dewey, PST,p.

For Dewey, the professional spirit of teacher education requires of its students a constant study of school room work, constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various adaptations to pupils. Such study will lead to professional enlightenment with regard to the daily operations of classroom teaching. As well as his very active and direct involvement in setting up educational institutions such as the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and The New School for Social Researchmany of Dewey's ideas influenced the founding of Bennington College and Goddard College in Vermont, where he served on the board of trustees.

Dewey's works and philosophy also held great influence in the creation of the short-lived Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental college focused on interdisciplinary study, and whose faculty included Buckminster FullerWillem de KooningCharles OlsonFranz KlineRobert DuncanRobert Creeleyand Paul Goodmanamong others.

Journalism Main article: The Public and its Problems Dewey's definition of "public," as described in The Public and its Problemshas profound implications for the significance of journalism in society. As suggested by the title of the book, his concern was of the transactional relationship between publics and problems. Also implicit in its name, public journalism seeks to orient communication away from elite, corporate hegemony toward a civic public sphere.

Publics are spontaneous groups of citizens who share the indirect effects of a particular action. Anyone affected by the indirect consequences of a specific action will automatically share a common interest in controlling those consequences, i. In The Public and its Problems, Dewey presents a rebuttal to Walter Lippmann 's treatise on the role of journalism in democracy.

Lippmann's model was a basic transmission model in which journalists took information given to them by experts and elites, repackaged that information in simple terms, and transmitted the information to the public, whose role was to react emotionally to the news. In his model, Lippmann supposed that the public was incapable of thought or action, and that all thought and action should be left to the experts and elites.

Dewey refutes this model by assuming that politics is the john dewey biography philosopher and duty of each individual in the course of his daily routine. The knowledge needed to be involved in politics, in this model, was to be generated by the interaction of citizens, johns dewey biography philosopher, experts, through the mediation and facilitation of journalism.

In this model, not just the government is accountable, but the citizens, experts, and other actors as well. Journalism would not just produce a static product that told what had already happened, but the news would be in a constant state of evolution as the public added value by generating knowledge. The "audience" would end, to be replaced by citizens and collaborators who would essentially be users, doing more with the news than simply reading it.

Communication can alone create a great community" Dewey, p. Dewey believed that communication creates a great community, and citizens who participate actively with public life contribute to that community. This Great Community can only occur with "free and full intercommunication. Logic and method [ edit ] Dewey sees paradox in contemporary logical theory.

Proximate subject matter garners general agreement and advancement, while the ultimate subject matter of logic generates unremitting controversy.

John dewey biography philosopher: John Dewey was an American

In other words, he challenges confident logicians to answer the question of the truth of logical operators. Do they function merely as abstractions e. About the movement he wrote that it "eschews the use of 'propositions' and 'terms', substituting 'sentences' and 'words'. Concerning traditional logic, he states there: Aristotelian logic, which still passes current nominally, is a logic based upon the idea that qualitative objects are existential in the fullest sense.