A graduate of the University of Vermont, John Dewey (1859–1952) taught high school in Pennsylvania and Vermont before beginning graduate school in philosophy and psychology at Johns Hopkins University. There he became attracted to neo-Hegelian philosophy because of its organic conception of the universe, including human society. Ten years as a professor at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota were followed by ten years at the University of Chicago, where he taught philosophy and psychology and established the Laboratory School. His growing recognition of the success of science in solving problems by beginning with ordinary human experience led to his rejection of any sort of Hegelian reliance on an Absolute to guarantee the validity of ideas. Dewey's pragmatism envisioned the role of thought as experimentally determining the consequences of proposed actions for the purpose of evaluation, instead of discerning fixed principles of action.

In 1904 Dewey became professor of philosophy at Columbia University and remained there until retirement in 1930. His major works of this period were How We Think (1910, revised 1933), Democracy and Education (1916), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920, revised 1948), Human Nature and Conduct (1922, revised 1930), Experience and Nature (1925, revised 1929), The Public and Its Problems (1927), and The Quest for Certainty (1929).