A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Pragmatism emerged as a characteristically American response to an inheritance of British empiricism.
Presenting a radical reconception of the nature of experience, pragmatism represents a belief that ideas are not merely to be contemplated but must be put into action, tested and refined through experience. At the same time, the American pragmatists argued for an emphasis on human community that would offset the deep-seated American bias in favor of individualism. Far from being a relic of the past, pragmatism offers a dynamic and substantive approach to questions of human conduct, social values, scientific inquiry, religious belief, and aesthetic experience that lie at the center of contemporary life. This volume is an invaluable introduction to a school of thought that remains vital, instructive, and provocative.
Volume 1 of “The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898” is entitled “Early Essays and Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, 1882–1888.” Included here are all Dewey’s earliest writings, from his first published article through his book on Leibniz.
The materials in this volume provide a chronological record of Dewey’s early development—beginning with the article he sent to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1881 while he was a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and closing with his widely-acclaimed work on Leibniz in the Grigg’s Series of German Philosophical Classics, written when he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. During these years between 1882 and 1888, Dewey’s life course was established: he decided to follow a career in philosophy, completed doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, became an Instructor at the University of Michigan, was promoted to Assistant Professor, and accepted a position as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. With the publication of Psychology, he became well known among scholars in this country; a series of articles in the British journal Mind brought him prominence in British philosophical circles. His articles were abstracted in the Revue philosophique.
None of the articles collected in this volume was reprinted during the author’s lifetime. For the first time, it is now possible for Dewey scholars to study consecutively in one publication all the essays which originally appeared in many periodicals.
Psychology, John Dewey’s first book, is an appropriate choice for the first volume in the Southern Illinois University series “The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898.” With an original publication date of 1887, Psychology is volume 2 of “The Early Works.” It appears first in the series to introduce scholars and general readers to the use of modern textual criticism in a work outside the literary field. Designed as a scholar’s reading edition, the volume presents the text of Dewey’s work as the author intended, clear of editorial footnotes. All apparatus is conveniently arranged in appendix form. As evidence of its wide adoption and use as a college textbook, Psychology had a publishing history of twenty-six printings. For two of the reprintings, Dewey made extensive revisions in content to incorporate developments in the field of psychology as well as in his own thinking. The textual appendices include a thorough tabulation of these changes.
In recognition of the high quality and scholarly standards of the textual criticism, this edition of Psychology is the first nonliterary work awarded the Seal of the Modern Language Association Center for Editions of American Authors. By applying to the work of a philosopher the procedures used in modern textual editions of American writers such as Hawthorne, the Southern Illinois University Dewey project is establishing a pattern for future collected writing of philosophers.
This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey’s early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris’s death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey’s returning to fill that post after a year’s stay at Minnesota.
Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey’s earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. Dewey’s marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article “The Present Position of Logical Theory,” recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections.
The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, “A Note on Applied Psychology,” documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey’s and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey’s conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing.
Volume 4 of’ “The Early Works” series covers the period of Dewey’s last year and one-half at the University of Michigan and his first half-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to sixteen articles the present volume contains Dewey’s reviews of six books and three articles, verbatim reports of three oral statements made by Dewey, and a full-length book, The Study of Ethics.
Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and Wayne A. R. Leys, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, has written an Introduction discussing the relationship between Dewey’s writings of this period and his later work. That Dewey’s scholarship and writing was at an especially high level during 1893 and 1894 may be considered an index to the significance of this two-year period.
This fifth and concluding volume of “The Early Works of John Dewey” is the only one of the series made up entirely of essays. The appearance during the four-year period, 1895–98, of thirty-eight items amply indicates that Dewey continued to maintain a high level of published output. These were the years of Dewey’s most extensive work and involvement at the University of Chicago.
Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and William P. McKenzie, Professor of Philosophy and Education at Southern Illinois University, has written an introduction identifying the thread connecting the apparently diffuse material in the many articles of this volume—Dewey’s attempt to unite philosophy with psychology and sociology and with education.
John Dewey’s Experience and Nature has been considered the fullest expression of his mature philosophy since its eagerly awaited publication in 1925.Irwin Edman wrote at that time that “with monumental care, detail and completeness, Professor Dewey has in this volume revealed the metaphysical heart that beats its unvarying alert tempo through all his writings, whatever their explicit themes.” In his introduction to this volume, Sidney Hook points out that “Dewey’s Experience and Nature is both the most suggestive and most difficult of his writings.”
The meticulously edited text published here as the first volume in the series The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953spans that entire period in Dewey’s thought by including two important and previously unpublished documents from the book’s history: Dewey’s unfinished new introduction written between 1947and 1949,edited by the late Joseph Ratner, and Dewey’s unedited final draft of that introduction written the year before his death. In the intervening years Dewey realized the impossibility of making his use of the word “experience” understood. He wrote in his 1951draft for a new introduction: “Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and Nature and the treatment of specific subject-matters would be correspondingly modified. I would abandon the term ‘experience’ because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of ‘experience’ are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable. I would substitute the term ‘culture’ because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully and freely carry my philosophy of experience.”
Art as Experience evolved from John Dewey’s Willam James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University from February to May 1931.
In his Introduction, Abraham Kaplan places Dewey’s philosophy of art within the context of his pragmatism. Kaplan demonstrates in Dewey’s esthetic theory his traditional “movement from a dualism to a monism” and discusses whether Dewey’s viewpoint is that of the artist, the respondent, or the critic.
This volume includes ninety-two items from 1935, 1936, and 1937, including Dewey’s 1935 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, published as Liberalism and Social Action.
In essay after essay Dewey analyzed, criticized, and reevaluated liberalism. When his controversial Liberalism and Social Action appeared, asking whether it was still possible to be a liberal, Horace M. Kallen wrote that Dewey “restates in the language and under the conditions of his times what Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence affirmed in the language and under the conditions of his.”
The diverse nature of the writings belies their underlying unity: some are technical philosophy; other philosophical articles shade into social and political themes; social and political issues permeate the educational articles, which in turn involve Dewey’s philosophical ideas.
Heralded as “the crowning work of a great career,” Logic: The Theory of Inquiry was widely reviewed. To Evander Bradley McGilvary, the work assured Dewey “a place among the world’s great logicians.”
William Gruen thought “No treatise on logic ever written has had as direct and vital an impact on social life as Dewey’s will have.”
Paul Weiss called it “the source and inspiration of a new and powerful movement.”
Irwin Edman said of it, “Most philosophers write postscripts; Dewey has made a program. His Logic is a new charter for liberal intelligence.”
Ernest Nagel called the Logic an impressive work. Its unique virtue is to bring fresh illumination to its subject by stressing the roles logical principles and concepts have in achieving the objectives of scientific inquiry.”
This volume includes all Dewey’s writings for 1938 except for Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Volume 12 of The Later Works), as well as his 1939 Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation, and two items from Intelligence in the Modern World.
Freedom and Culture presents, as Steven M. Cahn points out, “the essence of his philosophical position: a commitment to a free society, critical intelligence, and the education required for their advance.”
This volume republishes forty-four essays, reviews, and miscellaneous pieces from 1939, 1940, and 1941.
In his Introduction, R. W. Sleeper characterizes the contents of this volume as “vintage Dewey. Ranging widely over problems of theory and practice, they reveal him commencing his ninth decade at the peak of his intellectual powers.”
“Nature in Experience,” Dewey’s reply to Morris R. Cohen and William Ernest Hocking, “is a model of clarity and responsiveness,” writes Sleeper, “perhaps his clearest statement of why it is that metaphysics does not play the fundamental role for him that it had regularly played for his predecessors.”
This volume republishes sixty-two of Dewey’s writings from the years 1942 to 1948; four other items are published here for the first time.
A focal point of this volume is Dewey’s introduction to his collective volume Problems of Men. Exchanges in the Journal of Philosophy with Donald C. Mackay, Philip Blair Rice, and with Alexander Meiklejohn in Fortune appear here, along with Dewey’s letters to editors of various publications and his forewords to colleagues’ books. Because 1942 was the centenary of the birth of William James, four articles about James are also included in this volume.
Typescripts, essays, and an authoritative edition of Knowing and the Known, Dewey’s collaborative work with Arthur F. Bentley.
In an illuminating Introduction T. Z. Lavine defines the collaboration's three goals—the "construction of a new language for behavioral inquiry," "a critique of formal logicians, in defense of Dewey’s Logic," and "a critique of logical positivism." In Dewey’s words: "Largely due to Bentley, I’ve finally got the nerve inside of me to do what I should have done years ago."
"What Is It to Be a Linguistic Sign or Name?" and "Values, Valuations, and Social Facts,’ both written in 1945, are published here for the first time.
This is the final textual volume in The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953, published in 3 series comprising 37 volumes: The Early Works, 1882–1898 (5 vols.); The Middle Works, 1899–1924 (15 vols.); The Later Works, 1925–1953 (17 vols.).
Volume 17 contains Dewey’s writings discovered after publication of the appropriate volume of The Collected Works and spans most of Dewey’s publishing life. There are 83 items in this volume, 24 of which have not been previously published.
Among works highlighted in this volume are 10 “Educational Lectures before Brigham Young Academy,” early essays “War’s Social Results” and “The Problem of Secondary Education after the War,” and the previously unpublished “The Russian School System.”
With the exception of Experience and Nature, (Volume 1 of the Later Works), this volume contains all of Dewey’s writings for 1925 and 1926, as well as his 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems. A Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
The first essay in this volume, “The Development of American Pragmatism,” is perhaps Dewey’s best-known article of these years, emphasizing the uniquely American origins of his own philosophical innovations. Other essays focus on Dewey’s continuing investigation of the “nature of intelligent conduct,” as, for example, his debate with David Wight Prall on the underpinnings of value, his study of sense-perception, and his support for outlawing of war. Also appearing here are Dewey’s final articles on the culture of the developing world, written for the New Republic after his travels to China, Turkey, and Mexico.
All of Dewey’s writings for 1927 and 1928 with the exception of The Public and Its Problems, which appears in Volume 2, A Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
These essays are, as Sidorsky says in his Introduction, “framed, in great measure, by those two poles of his philosophical interest: looking backward, in a sense, to the defense of naturalistic metaphysics and moving forward to the justification and to the implications for practice of an empirical theory.”
Dewey’s five essays on education are evidence of his continued interest in that field. Among them is the frequently quoted “Why I Am a Member of the Teachers Union,” which is still used by the American Federation of Teachers in its recruiting efforts. Other highlights of this volume include the famous exchange between George Santayana and Dewey on Experience and Nature; an impassioned condemnation of the miscarriage of justice Dewey saw in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial; and a series of six articles on the Soviet Union based on Dewey’s trip to that country in 1928.
With the exception of The Quest for Certainty (Volume 4) this fifth volume brings together Dewey’s writings for the 1929–1930 period.
During this time Dewey published 4 books and 50 articles on philosophical, educational, political, and social issues. His philosophical essays include “What Humanism Means to Me” and “What I Believe,” both of which express Dewey’s faith in man’s potentialities and intelligence, and a lively Journal of Philosophy exchange with Ernest Nagel, William Ernest Hocking, C. I. Lewis, and F. J. E. Woodbridge. Educational writings include The Sources of a Science of Education. The contents of this volume reflect Dewey’s increasing involvement in social and political problems.
Except for Dewey’s and James H. Tufts’ 1932 Ethics (Volume 7 of The Later Works), this volume brings together Dewey’s writings for 1931–1932.
The Great Depression presented John Dewey and the American people with a series of economic, political, and social crises in 1931 and 1932 that are reflected in most of the 86 items in this volume, even in philosophical essays such as “Human Nature.” As Sidney Ratner points out in his Introduction, Dewey’s interest in international peace is featured in the writings in this volume.
Introduction by Abraham Edel and Elizabeth Flower
This seventh volume provides an authoritative edition of Dewey and James H. Tufts’ 1932 Ethics.
Dewey and Tufts state that the book’s aim is: “To induce a habit of thoughtful consideration, of envisaging the full meaning and consequences of individual conduct and social policies,” insisting throughout that ethics must be constantly concerned with the changing problems of daily life.
This ninth volume in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925—1953, brings together sixty items from 1933 and 1934, including Dewey’s Terry Lectures at Yale University, published as A Common Faith.
In his introduction, Milton R. Konvitz concludes that A Common Faith remains a provocative book, an intellectual ‘teaser,’ an essay at religious philosophy which no philosopher can wholly bypass.”
Dewey concentrated much of his writing in 1933 and 1934 on issues arising from the economic crises of the Great Depression. In the early 1930s Communist activity in the New York Teachers Union increased. The Report of the Special Grievance Committee of the Teachers Union is published in this volume, as is Dewey’s impromptu address, “On the Grievance Committee’s Report,” made when he presented that report. Rounding out the volume are eighteen articles from the People’s Lobby Bulletin.
Includes the complete text of The School and Society and The Educational Situation.
Volume 11 brings together all of Dewey’s writings for 1918 and 1919. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
Dewey’s dominant theme in these pages is war and its aftermath. In the Introduction, Oscar and Lilian Handlin discuss his philosophy within the historical context: “The First World War slowly ground to its costly conclusion; and the immensely more difficult task of making peace got painfully under way. The armistice that some expected would permit a return to normalcy opened instead upon a period of turbulence that agitated further a society already unsettled by preparations for battle and by debilitating conflict overseas.”
After spending the first half of 1918–19 on sabbatical from Columbia at the University of California, Dewey traveled to Japan and China, where he lectured, toured, and assessed in his essays the relationship between the two nations. From Peking he reported the student revolt known as the May Fourth Movement. The forty items in this volume also include an analysis of Thomas Hobbe’s philosophy; an affectionate commemorative tribute to Theodore Roosevelt, “our Teddy”; the syllabus for Dewey’s lectures at the Imperial University in Tokyo, which were later revised and published as Reconstruction in Philosophy; an exchange with former disciple Randolph Bourne about F. Matthias Alexander’s Man’sSupreme Inheritance; and, central to Dewey’s creed, “Philosophy and Democracy.” His involvement in a study of the Polish-American community in Philadelphia—resulting in an article, two memoranda, and a lengthy report—is discussed in detail in the Introduction and in the Note on the “Confidential Report of Conditions among the Poles in the United States.”
A collection of all of Dewey’s writings for 1920 with the exception of Letters from China and Japan. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
The nineteen items collected here, including his major work, Reconstruction in Philosophy, evolved in the main from Dewey’s travel, touring, lecturing, and teaching in Japan and China. Ralph Ross notes in his Introduction to this volume that Reconstruction in Philosophy is “a radical book . . . a pugnacious book by a gentle man.” It is in this book that Dewey summarizes his version of pragmatism, then called Instrumentalism. For Dewey, the pragmatist, it was people acting on the strength of intelligence modeled on science who could find true ideas, ones “we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify.” Optimism pervades Reconstruction of Philosophy; in keeping with Dewey’s world of open possibilities, the book recognizes that the observation and thought of human striving can make the difference between despair and affirmation of life.
The seven essays on Chinese politics and social tradition that Dewey sent back from the Orient exhibit both the liveliness and the sensitive power of an insightful mind. Set against a backdrop of Japanese hegemony in China, the last days of Manchu imperialism, Europe’s carving of China into concessions, and China’s subsequent refusal to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the essays were startlingly relevant in this time of Eastern turbulence and change.
At the National University of Peking, Dewey delivered a series of lectures on “Three Contemporary Philosophers: William James, Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russell.” The James and Bergson lectures are published for the first time in this volume. Dewey chose these philosophers, according to Ralph Ross, because he was trying to show “his oriental audience what he believed and hoped about man and society and was talking about those fellow philosophers who shared the same beliefs and hopes.”
Volume 13 in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, series brings together Dewey’s writings for 1921 and 1922,with the exception of Human Nature and Conduct. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
Ralph Ross notes in his Introduction that the 53 items constituting this volume “defend Dewey’s beliefs at 63 and look forward to what he was yet to write.” The essays to which Dewey responded, as well as abstracts of articles that have been published only in Japanese, appear as appendixes.
The article “Valuation and Experimental Knowledge” treats a favorite Dewey theme: “Most of the important crises of life are cases where tastes are the only things worth discussing, and where, if the life of reason is to exist and prevail, judgment must be performed with regard for its logical implications.” The philosophical articles stress Dewey’s view that, as Ross remarks, “philosophies are not timeless and universal, but speak to times, places and conditions.”
Volume 14 of The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, series provides an authoritative edition of Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
Human Nature and Conduct evolved from the West Memorial Foundation lectures at Stanford University. The lectures were extensively rewritten and expanded into one of Dewey’s best-known works. As Murray G. Murphey says in his Introduction, “It was a work in which Dewey sought to make explicit the social character of his psychology and philosophy—something which had long been evident but never so clearly spelled out.”
Subtitled “An Introduction to Social Psychology,” Human Nature and Conduct sets forth Dewey’s view that habits are social functions, and that social phenomena, such as habit and custom and scientific methods of inquiry are moral and natural. Dewey concludes, “Within the flickering inconsequential acts of separate selves dwells a sense of the whole which claims and dignifies them. In its presence we put off mortality and live in the universal.”
Volume 15 in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, series brings together Dewey’s writings for the period 1923–1924. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.
Volume 15 completes the republication of Dewey’s extensive writings for the 25-year period included in the Middle Works series. Many facets of Dewey’s interests—politics, philosophy, education, and social concerns—are illuminated by the 40 items from 1923 and 1924.
Inspired by his own convictions and those of his friend Salmon O. Levinson, founder of the American Committee for the Outlawry of War, Dewey’s articles became the keystone of the committee’s campaign to outlaw war. His essay, “Logical Method and Law,” is perhaps the most enduring of Dewey’s writings in this volume. Dewey’s philosophical discussions with Daniel Sommer Robinson, David Wight Prall, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, and Sterling Power Lamprecht are represented here, as is Dewey’s assessment of the Turkish educational system.
Includes the complete text of Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory and The Child and the Curriculum.
Thisfifth volume of the Middle Works contains Ethics by John Dewey and his former colleague at the University of Michigan, James H. Tufts, which appeared as one of the last in the Holt American Science series of textbooks. Within some six months after publication, Ethics was adopted as a textbook by thirty colleges. The book continued to be extremely popular and widely used, and was reprinted twenty-five times before both authors completely revised their respective parts for the new 1932edition.
Up to the time Ethics was published, Dewey’s approach to ethics was known primarily from two short publications that were developed for use by his classes at the University of Michigan: Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891)and The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus (1894). Charles Stevenson notes in his Introduction to the present edition that Ethics afforded Dewey an opportunity to preserve and enrich the content of those earlier works and at the same time to expound his position in a more systematic manner.
William James, remarking in 1909 on the differences among the three leading spokesmen for pragmatism—himself, F. C. S. Schiller, and John Dewey—said that Schiller’s views were essentially “psychological,” his own, “epistemological,” whereas Dewey’s “panorama is the widest of the three.”
The two main subjects of Dewey’s essays at this time are also two of the most fundamental and persistent philosophical questions: the nature of knowledge and the meaning of truth. Dewey’s distinctive analysis is concentrated chiefly in seven essays, in a long, significant, and previously almost unknown work entitled “The Problem of Truth,” and in his book How We Think. As a whole, the 1910–11 writings illustrate especially well that which the Thayers identify in their Introduction as Dewey’s “deepening concentration on questions of logic and epistemology as contrasted with the more pronounced psychological and pedagogical treatment in earlier writings.”
During the three years embraced by Volume 7, Dewey published twenty articles and reviews, one of the articles of monograph-length, “The Psychology of Social Behavior,” one small book, Interest and Effort in Education, and seventy encyclopedia articles.
A salient and arresting feature of the essays is the continuing polemic between Dewey and some of his critics. Ralph Ross, whose perceptive Introduction to the volume provides a broad perspective of the various philosophical controversies in which Dewey was engaged, comments that “when Dewey was pitting himself against important adversaries, his talents as a critic were fully evident.”
Volume 8 comprises all Dewey’s published writings for the year 1915—and only for 1915, a year of typically elevated productivity, which saw publication of fifteen articles and miscellaneous pieces and three books, two of which are reprinted here: German Philosophy and Politics and Schools of Tomorrow.
Professor Hook says that the publications in this volume reveal John Dewey at the height of his philosophical powers. Even though his greatest works were still to come—Democracy and Education, Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry—“the themes elaborated therein were already sounded and developed with incisive brevity in the articles and books of this banner year.”
This edition combines in one book the two volumes previously published separately. Volume 1, "The Structure of Experience," contains essays on metaphysics, the logic of inquiry, the problem of knowledge, and value theory. In volume 2, "The Lived Experience," Dewey's writings on pedagogy, ethics, the aesthetics of the "live creature," politics, and the philosophy of culture are presented. McDermott has prefaced each essay with a helpful explanatory note and has written an excellent general introduction to the anthology.
A literary discovery of considerable magnitude, these 98 previously unpublished poems by John Dewey, written principally in the 1910–18 period, illuminate an emotive aspect in his intellectual life often not manifest in the prose works.
Rumors of the existence of the poems have circulated among students of Dewey’s life and writings since 1957,when Mrs. Roberta Dewey gained possession of them from the Columbia University Columbiana collection. But except for the few persons who saw copies made by the French scholar Deladelle five years after Dewey’s death, the poems have remained inaccessible until now.
None of the poems has hitherto been published. Mrs. Roberta Dewey and Dewey’s children from his first marriage seem not to have known of Dewey’s experiments in verse during his lifetime. And, as evidence presented here now shows, only two or three acquaintances knew of actual poems written by Dewey, one of them the Polish-American novelist Anzia Yezierska, who had a brief emotional involvement with Dewey in the 1917–18 period. The factual, rather than inferential, evidence of Dewey’s relationship with Anzia Yezierska appears in the poems, which, taken as a whole, provide revealing insights into Dewey’s feelings and illuminate not only aspects of his emotions but of his thought as well.
The fact that Dewey did not publish the poetry himself, together with the circumstances of its discovery and unusual history, has led to the exceptionally careful editorial treatment of the poems given here. Scholars will find all the evidence for the authorship of the manuscripts clearly presented and all the changes and alterations carefully recorded. This edition has received the Modern Language Association of America Center for Editions of American Authors Seal as an “approved text.”
More than six decades after John Dewey’s death, his political philosophy is undergoing a revival. With renewed interest in pragmatism and its implications for democracy in an age of mass communication, bureaucracy, and ever-increasing social complexities, Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, first published in 1927, remains vital to any discussion of today’s political issues.
This edition of The Public and Its Problems, meticulously annotated and interpreted with fresh insight by Melvin L. Rogers, radically updates the previous version published by Swallow Press. Rogers’s introduction locates Dewey’s work within its philosophical and historical context and explains its key ideas for a contemporary readership. Biographical information and a detailed bibliography round out this definitive edition, which will be essential to students and scholars both.
This edition brings Dewey's educational theory into sharp focus, framing his two classic works by frank assessments, past and present, of the practical applications of Dewey's ideas. In addition to a substantial introduction in which Philip W. Jackson explains why more of Dewey's ideas haven't been put into practice, this edition restores a "lost" chapter, dropped from the book by Dewey in 1915.
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In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modern philosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers at the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work.
In Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Dewey argues that modern philosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment.
Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic.
More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy.
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