Except for Democracy and Education, the 53 items in Volume 10 include all of Dewey’s writings from 1916–1917, the years when he moved into politics and began to write about topics of general public interest. The best known of Dewey’s writings in this volume is the essay from Creative Intelligence, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy.” Here Dewey asserts that “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a de­vice for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method for dealing with the problems of men.” Dewey put that idea into practice, as Lewis E. Hahn points out in his intro­duction. “In 1916–1917 [Dewey] com­mented on quite a range of issues from compulsory universal military training to the Wilson-Hughes presidential cam­paign, from conscription of thought to the future of pacifism, from what Amer­ica will fight for to appropriate peace terms . . . and from American educa­tion and culture to contemporary issues in education, with the war casting a shadow over most of the items.”

By 1907, the first of the three years em­braced by Volume 4, Dewey had aban­doned thoughts of a possible career in the administration of higher education and was firmly established as a leading member of the Department of Phi­losophy at Columbia. As Lewis Hahn points out in his Introduction, these were “very productive years for Dewey. In addition to numerous lectures and speaking engagements and participa­tion in professional meetings, he pub­lished fifteen or so substantial articles, almost as many shorter things, a syl­labus on The Pragmatic Movement of Contemporary Thought, a monograph on Moral Principles in Education, and, with J. H. Tufts, the first edition of a very popular textbook, Ethics.”