Philosophy

John Dewey

1859 to 1952, Burlington, Vermont, USA

Learning by doing, democracy as a shared way of life, and philosophy remade to serve the problems of men.

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Lessons

Learning by Doing: The School as a Miniature Society

Dewey’s attack on the ‘pouring-in’ model of schooling and his alternative: education is not preparation for a distant life but living itself, and the school should be a working miniature community where children learn t…

Reflective Thinking: How We Inquire

Dewey’s analysis of what genuine thinking is: not idle mental drift but a disciplined process that begins in a felt difficulty, forms and tests hypotheses, and ends by resolving the trouble - thought as experimental con…

Democracy as a Way of Life

Dewey’s enlargement of democracy from a form of government into a whole way of living together: not merely voting and majority rule, but a mode of associated life rich in shared interests and open, free communication ac…

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 impuls…

Philosophy Reconstructed: The Problems of Men

Dewey’s program for philosophy itself: to abandon the ‘spectator’ quest for certain knowledge of an ultimate reality and become instead a method of intelligence for clarifying and resolving the real conflicts of human l…

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