Dewey, John [addendum]

John Dewey has undergone an extraordinary renaissance of scholarly and public concern with his thought. Dewey (1859–1952) was encyclopedic in both his interests and achievements. The full and startling range of his written reflections is now apparent with the completed publication of his Works in a critical edition of thirty-seven volumes. Commentaries and critical interpretations have followed apace.

In the mediated public mind, prior discussion of Dewey's thought for the most part was devoted to his work on education, both in theory and practice. Unfortunately, these discussions of Dewey's approach to pedagogy and to schooling as an institution in a democratic society were often disconnected from his metaphysics, aesthetics, and social and political philosophy. This interpretive mishap is now being rectified with the appearance of many perceptive studies of Dewey's thought, including his previously neglected thoughts on religion and logic.

Fundamentally, John Dewey is an unregenerate philosophical naturalist, one for whom the human journey is constitutive of its own meaning and is not to be rescued by any transcendent explanations, principles of accountability, or posthumous salvation. Obviously, this position is both liberating and baleful, in that it throws us back on our own human resources, for better and for worse. In effect, we are responsible for our actions, for the course of human history, and we are called upon to navigate between the shoals of supine obeisance and arrogant usurpation. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey warns of the danger to human solidarity when we do not accept this responsibility. "Weak natures take to reverie as a refuge as strong ones do to fanaticism. Those who dissent are mourned over by the first class and converted through the use of force by the second."

Leaving no philosophical stone unturned, Dewey addresses the pitfalls and possibilities of the human condition from a wide array of vantage points. His central text is Experience and Nature, in which he probes the transactions of the human organism with the affairs of nature. These transactions are to be understood and diagnosed as experiential oscillations between the "precarious" and the "stable." The settings for this trenchant discussion include communication, mind, art, and value. In retrospect, Dewey offered that he should have titled this work Culture and Nature, an appropriate reconsideration, for it is helpful to read Dewey as a philosopher of culture, with an eye toward his grasp of human institutions, social, political, and educational.

Since the 1980s the focus of commentaries on the work of Dewey has been directed to his social and political philosophy, particularly his writings between 1927 and 1935, namely, The Public and Its Problems, Individualism Old and New, and Liberalism and Social Action. Although Dewey's thought was indigenous to American culture, it is nonetheless remarkable that themes found in Marxist and existentialist traditions are present in these writings, cast differently but equally telling. Of special note is the renewed admiration for Dewey's philosophy of community and his deep grasp of the complex relationships of individuals in communities. For Dewey the irreducible trait of human life is found in the activity of face-to-face communities. Their quality is the sign of how we are faring, humanly. At the end of Human Nature and Conduct, he writes a message for his time and for our time as well.

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. The life of the community in which we live and have our being is the fit symbol of this relationship. The acts in which we express our perception of the ties which bind us to others are its only rites and ceremonies.

Existentialism; Feminism and Pragmatism; Marxist Philosophy; Social and Political Philosophy.

Works of John Dewey. Edited by J. A. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1990. Divided into Early Works (5 vols.), Middle Works (15 vols.), and Later Works (17 vols.). This is a critical edition.

The Correspondence of John Dewey, 1871–1952. Edited by Larry A. Hickman. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Corporation, 1999–2005. Vol. 1 (1871–1918), 1999. Rev. ed. 2001, 2005; Vol. 2 (1919–1939), 2001. Rev. ed. 2005; Vol. 3 (1940–1952), 2005.

The Essential Dewey. 2 vols. Edited by Larry A. Hickman and Thomas Alexander. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

The Philosophy of John Dewey. Edited by J. J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Complete selections from Dewey's major writings.

Campbell, J. Understanding John Dewey. Chicago: Open Court, 1995. The most intelligent and accurate interpretation of Dewey's thought overall.

Hickman, L. A. John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Hickman, L. A., ed. Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Martin, Jay. The Education of John Dewey—A Biography. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Rockefeller, S. C. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Schilpp, P. A., and L. E. Hahn, eds. The Philosophy of John Dewey, 3rd ed. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989. Contains a bibliography of Dewey's publications with entries and corrections until 1989.

Shook, John R. Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000.

Sleeper, R. S. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. An insightful presentation of the relationship between Dewey's thought and major currents in contemporary philosophy.

Welchman, J. Dewey's Ethical Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Westbrook, R. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. A synoptic and especially perceptive book on Dewey's social thought.

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