John Dewey

Author Code: AJDX

Educated at the University of Vermont, Dewey taught high school for two years before returning to study at Johns Hopkins University. He received his doctorate in 1884 and for the next ten years taught at the University of Michigan. In 1887, he published his first book, Psychology and in 1888 his second, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, appeared. Dewey became good friends with James Hayden Tufts, with whom he would later collaborate, and in 1894 when Tufts moved to the new University of Chicago, Dewey followed. Dewey established a laboratory school at the University where his pedagogical ideas could be developed. In 1899, he published his first work on education, The School and Society. He resigned in 1904 after disagreements with the administration and joined the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he would spend the remainder of his career. A number of Dewey's articles and essays on education and metaphysics at Columbia were collected and published in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (1910). In 1916, he published Essays in Experimental Logic and in 1920 followed with Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey's reputation as a leading philosopher and educationalist was firmly established by the 1920's and he was highly sought after on the lecture tour and by leading popular magazines such as The New Republic. From 1919 to 1921 he toured Japan and China and also visited Turkey in 1924 and the Soviet Union in 1928. Dewey retired from teaching in 1930, but continued to write and contribute to philosophical issues until his death at the age of ninety-two. His other works include How We Think (1910), Democracy and Education (1916), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature (1925), The Public and Its Problems (1927), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Art as Experience (1934), A Common Faith (1934), Logic: The Theory of Enquiry (1938), Freedom and Culture (1939), Theory of Valuation (1939) and Knowing and the Known (1949).