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 wher…

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 experiment…

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 communicat…

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…

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 co…

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