Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Dewey in just one hour.In early twentieth-century America John Dewey was regarded as the foremost philosopher of his age – no mean feat when his colleagues included the likes of Russell, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Dewey produced a distinctly American philosophy, essentially different from that of his European contemporaries – his pragmatic theory of ‘instrumentalism’ or ‘experimentalism’, relying on modern experimental methods to prove truth and reality. Dewey saw the ultimate reality as being nothing more or less than that which we encounter in everyday life – there is no mystery hidden within.Here is a concise, expert account of Dewey’s life and philosophical ideas, entertainingly written and easy to understand. Also included are selections from Dewey’s work, suggested further reading and chronologies that place Dewey in the context of the broader scheme of philosophy.
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Paul Strathern. Dewey: Philosophy in an Hour
Dewey. PHILOSOPHY IN AN HOUR. Paul Strathern
Contents
Dewey’s Life and Works
Afterword
Further Information. From Dewey’s Writings
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
Chronology of Dewey’s Life and Times
Recommended Reading
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
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Cover
Title Page
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At the age of fifty-two, Peirce retired to a remote farm on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, where he lived in near destitution for the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He referred to himself as a ‘bucolic logician’ and would not have survived but for the generosity of William James, who recognised Peirce for the universal genius he was. (Among Peirce’s lesser achievements during this period was a pioneer design for an electric circuit-switching prototype computer, which can be found sketched out in one of his letters.) Two centuries earlier, when Newton had been asked how he had managed to make such great mathematical and scientific discoveries, he had modestly replied: ‘by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Peirce was the philosophical giant on whose shoulders Dewey would one day stand.
But all this lay far in the future. Dewey proved to be a slow developer: his originality only gradually emerged in all its multifaceted intellectual form. In 1894 Dewey left Johns Hopkins with his Ph.D. and became an instructor in philosophy and psychology at the University of Michigan. There he further developed his neo-Hegelian ideas while at the same time pursuing his own research in the very latest experimental psychology. (This subject had been founded as a separate field of study only a decade or so earlier in Leipzig by the German ‘father of experimental psychology’, Wilhelm Wundt.)
