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John DeweyAmerican philosopher
Date of Birth: 20.10.1859
Country:  USA |
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Biography of John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educator, and one of the leading representatives of pragmatism who had a strong influence on American pedagogical thought. He was born near Burlington, Vermont, on October 20, 1859. Little is known about his ancestors, but it is known that one of his forefathers had three sons, one of whom was John Dewey, another was Governor Thomas Dewey, and the third was Admiral George Dewey, who gained fame for his victory in the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Three generations of the Dewey family were farmers, and his father was involved in trade. Dewey received his education in Burlington's high school, graduated from the University of Vermont, and then taught for two years at a school in Pennsylvania. He spent a year as a rural school teacher in his home state. In 1882, he entered Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Here, he was influenced by George Sylvester Morris, a visiting professor from the University of Michigan and a representative of American neo-Hegelianism. In 1884, Dewey obtained his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, presenting a dissertation that was dedicated to one aspect of Kant's psychological theory.
In the same year, Dewey began teaching philosophy at the University of Michigan, and remained there (except for a brief period of teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1888-1889) until 1894 when he was offered a position as a professor and dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the University of Chicago. It was in Chicago that Dewey shifted his focus from abstract traditional problems of metaphysics and epistemology to more practical and specific problems of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy. By 1903, the so-called Chicago School of instrumentalism was thriving, and the educational experiments initiated by Dewey in his founded "laboratory schools" in 1896 were having a noticeable impact on educational theory and practice in the United States. From 1904, Dewey taught at Columbia University and remained there until his retirement in 1930. He then held the position of honorary professor at the university. During this period, he wrote numerous works on logic, theory of knowledge, psychology, pedagogy, social philosophy, art theory, and religion. As a well-known philosopher and educator, he was invited to China, Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and the USSR. Dewey took an active social position and participated in numerous liberal-oriented committees and movements. He passed away in New York on June 1, 1952.
Early Work
Dewey's first works were published when he was working at Johns Hopkins University. These were two articles in the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy," which was published in St. Louis, Missouri, under the editorship of W.T. Harris and devoted to the study and dissemination of Hegelian ideas. Dewey was never an orthodox Hegelian, but he considered Hegel to be an outstanding thinker. However, his departure from Hegelianism began when he realized that Hegel's system was formal and "extremely artificial." Nevertheless, he continued to believe that "Hegel had more thought content and penetrating insight into the essence of things than any other systematic philosopher," including Plato.
Democracy and Education
Dewey never stopped dealing with the topic of democracy. In 1888, the University of Michigan published his work "The Ethics of Democracy." In 1946, in the "Introduction" to his book "Problems of Men," he openly talked about his belief in the democratic way of life, finding new meanings in the concept of democracy and new ways to convince readers of the need for scientific study of man in a social environment, similar to the study of nature by natural sciences. For Dewey, democracy was not "sovereignty chopped into pieces," but a partnership in super-individual activity and will. It was not just - and not primarily - a form of government, but a rational, realistic cooperation aimed at shaping full-fledged personalities. It is not surprising that, as he admitted himself, his philosophy was most fully represented in his work "Democracy and Education" (1916). Dewey considered democracy and "education in the interests of democracy" to be the most important problems, in the study of which other questions - cosmological, moral, logical - naturally find application. He called Emerson a "philosopher of democracy," but this description is more applicable to Dewey himself, as well as his words that Emerson was a "prophet and proclaimer of any system that democracy will build and implement in the future."
Philosophy of Experience
The "essence" of Dewey's philosophy can be considered as "experience." "Experience" is one of the most ambiguous words in the human language, Dewey noted. It is usually said that a person is "closer to reality the further away from any experience they have ever had." In contrast to this orthodox concept, Dewey put forward a "heretical" thesis: "Experience is not a curtain hiding nature from man... In experience, it is not experience that is perceived, but nature - stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity, etc.," including "devotion, piety, love, beauty, and mystery." In other words, "experience" encompasses everything in the world, literally everything. The intellectual reverence for this "everything," its conscious and constant exploration to achieve facts and values, light and guidance, support and renewal, are, according to Dewey, the prerequisites for the intellectual, moral, and religious integrity of a person. The errors of philosophers and people, in general, arise "from a lack of trust in the guiding forces that are inherently present in experience, which can only be followed by bold and courageous individuals."
According to Dewey, experience is a complex interweaving of events, each of which has its nature and history. Some of these events occur according to a certain regularity, while others are a game of chance; some are beneficial to humans, while others harm them. The most important task of a person is to learn how to manage them, and for this purpose, we conduct experiments to find the causes of events. The complex interweaving of events in which a person is involved allows them to combine realism and idealism, to unite inevitable pragmatism with cherished ideals. From Dewey's perspective, there is only one reliable way to achieve this goal - "intellect," open and unprejudiced experimental thinking. Unlike the procedures of pure reason, where the main role is played by the feeling of their rational correctness, the work of the intellect can be observed from the outside and compared with the demands of the situation that prompted it into action. For example, when a problem arises, a guess about how to solve it is first expressed. This hypothesis is then tested and found to be either true or false. In the former case, the act of thinking can be considered complete, and in the latter case, it remains incomplete, and the problem is either abandoned or attempted to be solved again; then thinking starts anew. The essential difference between reason and intellect is that in the former case, "the mind seizes objects or comprehends them, as it were, outside the world of things, physical and social," while in the latter case, it takes the position of "a participant interacting with other things and knowing them in accordance with certain rules." Different procedures lead to different results. Thanks to reason, a person achieves theoretically reliable knowledge of the unchanging reality; thanks to intellect, they are able to control the constantly changing reality consisting of various events. Throughout his creative path, Dewey adhered to the principle that he formulated in the chapter he wrote for the collection "Creative Intelligence" (1917) and which his colleagues had to remember, even if they were unable to follow it: "Philosophy is reborn when it ceases to be a means of solving philosophers' problems and becomes a method... for solving humanity's problems."
Dewey was always committed to science but repeatedly warned that "science itself is still in its infancy" and many correctable flaws of reality are the result of "unbalanced, one-sided application of research and verification methods that have the right to be called science." He believed that the human being is a combination of a developing organism and the processes of the natural and social environment that affect it. For Dewey, logic is the theory of inquiry, not the theory of proof. In this inquiry, symbols and things are used to reconstruct the world of the researcher. He proposed replacing faith in religion, which "always means a corpus of beliefs and ceremonies with a kind of institutional organization," with a religious attitude towards all manifestations of life and faith in the forces of nature and society that "give birth to and sustain the idea of the good as the goal of our aspirations." Dewey himself preferred to call his philosophy experimentalism or even instrumentalism, rather than pragmatism, as is customary in philosophy textbooks. In "Reconstruction in Philosophy," he wrote: "When we put into action an intention or plan, it guides us in a true or false way, leads us to our goal or takes us away from it. The most important thing in it is its effective, dynamic function, and its truth or falsity lies in the character of the activity it generates. A hypothesis that 'works' is true; 'truth' is an abstract noun denoting a set of cases that are real, predicted, and desired, which are confirmed by the fact of their discovery and its consequences." The needs and desires served by the truth, however, have a character that is not personal and emotional (as in James), but "of general significance." Although Dewey emphasizes the functional purpose of judgments and laws (and even sensations, facts, and objects) and calls them means, tools, instruments, or operations for transforming an indefinite situation into a definite one in the process of inquiry, he does not deny that judgments and laws also play a cognitive role. He asserts that the "essence of pragmatic instrumentalism lies in interpreting both knowledge and practice as means for producing things useful for life." Nonetheless, the process of knowledge for Dewey is experimentation: causal judgments acquire a projective, heuristic, and teleological, rather than retrospective, frank, or ontological meaning. Laws, if certain actions are performed, become for Dewey predictions of future events.
Among Dewey's major works are "Leibniz" (1888); "Education, The School and Society" (1899); "Experience and Education" (1938); as well as "Psychology" (1886); "Studies in Logical Theory" (1903); "How We Think" (1910); "Essays in Experimental Logic" (1916); "Reconstruction in Philosophy" (1920); "Human Nature and Conduct" (1922); "Experience and Nature" (1925); "The Quest for Certainty" (1929); "A Common Faith" (1934); "Art as Experience" (1934); "Logic, The Theory of Inquiry" (1938); "Freedom and Culture" (1939).
