5 Lessons from John Dewey

John Dewey (1859-1952) was the foremost American philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century. He developed the school of American Pragmatism in the wake of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910). Born when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Dewey articulated a philosophy deeply influenced by the Darwinian emphasis on continuity and process in nature as opposed to fixed, archetypal species. Dewey also overturned the traditional Western view of knowledge by emphasizing the experimental method of science as the model for the emergence of knowledge in our intelligent, intentional interactions with nature. Dewey proposed a model of knowledge that did not depend on correspondence to a fixed, antecedent reality but that created knowledge based on the desirable consequences produced by an imaginative experimental method that encompassed all fields of human inquiry. Dewey applied the experimental method in his influential educational research and celebrated education as a means of expanding authentic democracy as a way of life based on the free and open exchange and revision of ideas. This book discusses 5 lessons from the prestigious 1928-1929 Gifford Lectures given by Dewey at the University of Edinburgh. The lectures were published in 1929 as The Quest for Certainty. The lectures focus on Dewey's theory of knowledge (epistemology) based on the experimental scientific method.