His mother changed his first name to Sidney when he enrolled in public school at age five. Hook earned his B.S. at the City College of New York, where he studied principally under the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, in 1923 and began teaching in the New York public school system. He married Carrie Katz on 31 March 1924; they had one child, John Bertrand.
Hook received his M.A. in 1926 and his Ph.D. in 1927 at Columbia University under the tutelage of Dewey. His dissertation was published in 1927 as The Metaphysics of Pragmatism. He was appointed an instructor in the philosophy department of Washington Square College of New York University in 1927 but continued to teach in the public schools for another year. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1928-1929. In 1932 he was promoted to assistant professor.
Much of Hook's earliest work focused on technical philosophical issues stemming from the pragmatic naturalism and instrumentalism he learned from Dewey. The fundamental pragmatist thesis that ideas are fundamentally instruments and plans for action holds important implications for all of the standard areas of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and value theory. Although The Metaphysics of Pragmatism is an important contribution to the literature on the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of pragmatism, Hook found his own distinctive philosophical voice in value theory, especially in social and political philosophy.
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