John Dewey (USA)

John Dewey (/ˈduːi/; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology. He was a major representative of progressive education and liberalism.

Although Dewey is known best for his publications concerning education, he also wrote about many other topics, including experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry, democracy, and ethics.

In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—as being major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.

Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of modest means. Like his older brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, from which he graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1879. A significant professor of Dewey's at the University of Vermont was Henry A. P. Torrey, the son-in-law and nephew of former University of Vermont president Joseph Torrey. Dewey studied privately with Torrey between his graduation from Vermont and his enrollment at Johns Hopkins University.

After two years as a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania and one teaching elementary school in the small town of Charlotte, Vermont, Dewey decided that he was unsuited for employment in primary or secondary education. After studying with George Sylvester Morris, Charles Sanders Peirce, Herbert Baxter Adams, and G. Stanley Hall, Dewey received his Ph.D. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. In 1884, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan (1884–88 and 1889–94) with the help of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled "The Psychology of Kant."

In 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago (1894–1904) where he developed his belief in an empirically based theory of knowledge, becoming associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter, which was published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in Logical Theory (1903). During that time Dewey also initiated the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to actualize the pedagogical beliefs that provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Social Progress (1899). Disagreements with the administration ultimately caused his resignation from the University, and soon thereafter he relocated near the East Coast. In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association. From 1904 until his retirement in 1930 he was professor of philosophy at both Columbia University and Columbia University's Teachers College. In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was a longtime member of the American Federation of Teachers.

Along with the historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, and the economist Thorstein Veblen, Dewey is one of the founders of The New School. Dewey's most significant writings were "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896), a critique of a standard psychological concept and the basis of all his further work; Democracy and Education (1916), his celebrated work on progressive education; Human Nature and Conduct (1922), a study of the function of habit in human behavior; The Public and its Problems (1927), a defense of democracy written in response to Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public (1925); Experience and Nature (1925), Dewey's most "metaphysical" statement; Art as Experience (1934), Dewey's major work on aesthetics; A Common Faith (1934), a humanistic study of religion originally delivered as the Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), a statement of Dewey's unusual conception of logic; Freedom and Culture (1939), a political work examining the roots of fascism; and Knowing and the Known (1949), a book written in conjunction with Arthur F. Bentley that systematically outlines the concept of trans-action, which is central to his other works. While each of these works focuses on one particular philosophical theme, Dewey included his major themes in most of what he published. He published more than 700 articles in 140 journals, and approximately 40 books.

Reflecting his immense influence on 20th-century thought, Hilda Neatby, in 1953, wrote "Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later middle ages, not a philosopher, but the philosopher."

Dewey was first married to Alice Chipman. They had six children. His second wife was Roberta Lowitz Grant.

The United States Postal Service honored Dewey with a Prominent Americans series 30¢ postage stamp.

In 1919, while traveling in Japan on sabbatical leave, Dewey was invited by Peking University to visit China, probably at the behest of his former students, Hu Shi and Chiang Monlin. Dewey and his wife, Alice, arrived in Shanghai on May 1, 1919, just days before student demonstrators took to the streets of Peking to protest the decision of the Allies in Paris to cede the German held territories in Shandong province to Japan. Their demonstrations on May Fourth excited and energized Dewey, and he ended up staying in China for two years, leaving in July 1921. 

In these two years Dewey gave nearly two hundred lectures to Chinese audiences and wrote nearly monthly articles for Americans in The New Republic and other magazines. Well aware of both Japanese expansionism into China and the attraction of Bolshevism to some Chinese, Dewey advocated that Americans support China's transformation and that Chinese base this transformation in education and social reforms, not revolution. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people attended the lectures, which were interpreted by Hu Shi. For these audiences, Dewey represented "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science," the two personifications which they thought of representing modern values and replacing "Mr. Confucius," the representative of failed traditional culture. Perhaps Dewey's biggest impact, however, was on the forces for progressive education in China, such as Hu Shi and Chiang Monlin, who had studied with him, and Tao Xingzhi, who had studied at Columbia School of Education.

Their letters from China and Japan describing their experiences to their family were published in 1920, edited by their daughter Evelyn.

Publications:
Besides publishing prolifically himself, Dewey also sat on the boards of scientific publications such as Sociometry (advisory board, 1942) and Journal of Social Psychology (editorial board, 1942), as well as having posts at other publications such as New Leader (contributing editor, 1949).

"The New Psychology" Andover Review, 2, 278-289 (1884)
Psychology (1887)
Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888)
"The Ego as Cause" Philosophical Review, 3,337-341. (1894)
"The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896)
"My Pedagogic Creed" (1897)
The School and Society (1900)
The Child and the Curriculum (1902)
"The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism" (1905)
Moral Principles in Education (1909) 
How We Think (1910)
German Philosophy and Politics (1915)
Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education (1916)
Reconstruction in Philosophy (1919)
Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology
Experience and Nature (1925)
The Public and its Problems (1927)
The Quest for Certainty (1929)
The Sources of a Science of Education (1929) The Kappa Delta Pi Lecture Series
Individualism Old and New (1930)
Philosophy and Civilization (1931)
Ethics, second edition (with James Hayden Tufts) (1932)
Art as Experience (1934)
A Common Faith (1934)
Liberalism and Social Action (1935)
Experience and Education (1938)
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)
Freedom and Culture (1939)
Theory of Valuation (1939). ISBN 0-226-57594-2
Knowing and the Known (1949)

See also
The Essential Dewey: Volumes 1 and 2. Edited by Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander (1998). Indiana University Press
The Philosophy of John Dewey Edited by John J. McDermott (1981). University of Chicago Press

Dewey's Complete Writings is available in 3 multi-volume sets (37 volumes in all) from Southern Illinois University Press:
The Early Works: 1892-1898 (5 volumes)
The Middle Works: 1899-1924 (15 volumes)
The Later Works: 1925-1953 (17 volumes)
Posthumous Works: 1956-2009

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey