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

Converse with John Dewey on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in John Dewey's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.