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.

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.”