John Dewey · Philosophy

Habit and Character: The Stuff of the Self

Dewey’s social psychology of the self: habits are not mere repetitions but active dispositions that do our perceiving and thinking, character is the interpenetration of all our habits, and the self is remade when impulse and intelligence reconstruct habit.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that Dewey treated habits as active predispositions that do our perceiving, judging, and reasoning, defined character as ‘the interpenetration of habits,’ held that impulse is secondary to habit and gets its meaning from habit, and argued that the self is reconstructed when intelligence redirec…

Leads to William James.

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