John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher, political activist, and public intellectual. After earning a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, Dewey secured teaching positions at the University of Michigan (1884–1894) and the University of Chicago (1894–1904) before moving to Columbia University in 1905, where he remained for the remainder of his career.

Widely recognized as one of the three founders of pragmatism, John Dewey formulated a more systematic version of pragmatism than can be found in his pragmatist predecessors, Charles Peirce and William James. At its heart is Dewey’s Darwinian conception of experience. Unlike sensationalistic forms of empiricism, Dewey’s pragmatism begins with an organic conception of experience according to which experience is the continual doing and undergoing performed by each living creature within its physical and social environment. This conception allows Dewey to bring empiricism into line with what he regarded as the most important scientiic advance of our time – Darwinian biology – while also eschewing many of the philosophical problems occasioned by traditional empiricism, including skepticism and mind–body dualism.

The centerpiece of Dewey’s philosophy is the conception of inquiry that emerges out of his empiricism. According to Dewey, inquiry is fundamentally aimed at problem-solving rather than accurately representing facts or states of affairs. Dewey thought that inquiry is the directed attempt to address experimentally the problematic factors within an environment. Dewey held that scientific method was simply a more explicit and precisely designed version of inquiry in general.