Myers, William T.

Myers, William T. "John Dewey (1859-1952)." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. II. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008. 388-399.

Abstract

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20th, 1859. At the age of fifteen he graduated from high school and entered the University of Vermont. He received his bachelor's degree in 1879, and for several years he taught Latin and algebra at public high schools in Vermont and Pennsylvania. While still teaching high school (1882), Dewey began his extraordinarily prolific philosophical writing career, publishing two articles in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Having caught the philosophy bug, he entered the just founded Johns Hopkins Graduate School. During his tenure there, Dewey took courses with Charles Peirce and Charles Morris, among others. In 1884 he received his Ph.D. with a thesis titled "The Psychology of Kant." Upon graduation, Dewey accompanied Morris to the University of Michigan where he taught for ten years, with the exception of a one year hiatus at the University of Minnesota (1890). Dewey left Michigan in 1894 when he accepted the position as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the recently founded University of Chicago where he taught for ten years. It was during this period that Dewey's international reputation and fame as a philosopher of education was established. In 1904, over disputes regarding the management of his Laboratory School, Dewey resigned his position and became Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he remained until his retirement from teaching in 1929. Though he was no longer in the classroom, Dewey remained in residence as a professor emeritus for nine more years. Though Dewey is often thought of as the quintessential American thinker, he was without doubt one of the most widely traveled philosophers. Dewey took sabbatical leave for the 1918-1919 academic year. The first half of that leave was spent lecturing at the University of California. From there he went to Tokyo Imperial University and delivered the lectures that were to become Reconstruction in Philosophy. While lecturing in Japan, he was visited by some former students from China, who subsequently arranged for Dewey to lecture in China for a year. After securing a leave of absence from Columbia, Dewey sailed to China where his one year engagement ended up being extended to two. Subsequent trips took him to Turkey (1924), Mexico (1926), and Russia (1928), each of which involved educational lectures and consultations. In 1929, he delivered the Gifford lectures (The Quest for Certainty) in Edinburgh. In 1937 he returned to Mexico where he chaired the commission that inquired into charges made against Leon Trotsky. Dewey's philosophical growth can be divided into three phases. His work with Charles Morris at Johns Hopkins left a distinctive Hegelian mark on his thinking, which at first was dominated by Hegelian and neo-Kantian idealism. Dewey's work during this time period is perhaps most accurately viewed as a slow extrication from his idealistic training. By the time Studies in Logical Theory came out in 1903, Dewey had left his idealism behind and began a period of thought largely devoted to the development of his instrumentalist methodology. During this middle period, Dewey turned his back on most of the concerns of traditional philosophy, especially metaphysics and epistemology, though was still writing extensively on ethics. His primary concern during this period was to work out a method of intelligence. In 1925, Dewey returned to a more traditional mode of philosophy with the publication of Experience and Nature, his great work in process metaphysics. This book marks the beginning of Dewey's third phase, during which, in addition to his book on metaphysics, he wrote extensively on, among other things, epistemology (The Quest for Certainty), aesthetics (Art as Experience), logic (Logic: The Theory of Inquiry), philosophy of religion (A Common Faith), value theory (Ethics), and political and social philosophy (The Public and Its Problems). Dewey's last phase was by far his most productive, seeing the publication of all his great books. He continued writing right up until his death in 1952.