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John Dewey in Search of Himself

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

Up to this writing, the late John Dewey remains by all odds our most influential American philosopher of education, and it is a long time since any other individual of any nation has had so much influence on educational theory and practice at home and abroad. He is also one of our most influential philosophers in general, and this in spite of the fact that young men are not now espousing his philosophy. An obvious fact about him is that he is characteristically American: he is a meliorist and reformer, an experimentalist, energetic and resourceful, and, as it were, a born pioneer and frontiersman. He is impatient, always in a hurry, wanting to get a lot of things done, sure that to change things is to better them, and committed to change as integral to being if not its very core. “To be,” he said, “is to be in process, in change.” In all these matters central to Dewey, his thought is remarkably conventional. We are like Dewey in many of these things, or Dewey is like us.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1957

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References

1 In his work on Hobbes, A. E. Taylor said that Hobbes is the only consistent materialist in the history of thought.

2 Gotshalk, D. W., “The Paradox of Naturalism,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 43 (1946), 152–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “A Suggestion for Naturalists,” ibid., Vol. 45 (1948), 5–12.

3 Dewey, John, Human Nature and Conduct (New York, 1922), pp. 10, 12, 13.Google Scholar

4 Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920), p. 186.Google Scholar

5 The biography of Dewey by his daughters in The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. by Schilpp, (Evanston, 1939)Google Scholar says his religious training was evangelic “rather than puritanic.”